Hangry Brands Makes Cleveland Dining a Divisive, Instagrammable Experience

Steak, the eponymous restaurant in Tremont, is filled to the brim with red heart balloons and couples making googly eyes at each other under dim lights hanging from what appear to be giant meat hooks. It’s Friday, Feb. 13, the night before Valentine’s Day. Trent Petit and Alicia Ciraci are enjoying a Cheating Death, a $14 margarita that keeps them coming back here, when their waiter stops by with a black lacquer box and opens it before them ceremoniously. Ciraci does a little shake of her head, playfully deciding which one to pick, before she pulls out a small butcher’s cleaver. A couple of tables over, a woman snaps a few photos of her boyfriend posing with his cleaver. 

A cleaver isn’t actually the easiest way to cut a steak. Some guests eventually ask for another knife. But who wants to take a photo with a regular old steak knife?

Steak is a part of Hangry Brands, the local hospitality group that has quickly grown its Northeast Ohio footprint to 10 restaurants, with four more slated to open in 2026.

At a Hangry restaurant, it’s important that your meal is tasty, and your drinks are delicious, but it’s just as important that guests are somehow thrilled, that you take some photos and post them online, and then you go tell your friends that you ate a gold-wrapped steak with a cleaver and ice cream out of a Ferris wheel.

“The age of the chef is done,” Hangry Brands CEO Jason Beudert says. “That love affair with the Food Network chefs has faded, and it’s about the branding. It’s about the experience.”

Hangry Brands was co-founded by Beudert and Chelsea Rice when they opened The Yard in 2022, a seasonal food truck park in Willoughby. The company’s growth since then can only be described as exponential. Its portfolio fuses original concepts with the acquisition of some of Cleveland’s most beloved establishments.

Early in 2023, Hangry took over a coffee shop on the corner of East Fourth Street and Euclid Avenue and turned it into Lionheart Coffee. It opened Geraci’s Slice Shop on Prospect Avenue a few months later. Steak opened its doors in the summer of 2024. In 2025, Hangry acquired Society Lounge on East Fourth Street in the spring, opened Jolene’s Honky Tonk across the street that summer, took over both Edison’s and Danny’s in Tremont in the fall, and transformed the latter into Danny’s Breakroom.

This year, the company is slated to open The Dugout on East Fourth Street, Hidden Tiki above Edison’s Pub, and Paper Tiger, a Chinese-American restaurant in Tremont. It recently acquired The Corner Alley on East Fourth Street, are opening another Lionheart Coffee at Playhouse Square and a second Steak is coming to Chagrin Falls.

Beudert and Rice now oversee some 300 hospitality professionals across their growing restaurant empire. Beudert’s official title these days is CEO and founder; while Rice is president and co-founder. The company has added Julia Licastro as vice president of operations and Xiao Lin as CFO to the management team. Beudert and Rice made them partners in the business, too.

“We create a pathway for people to gain ownership of what they put their blood, sweat and tears into,” says
Licastro, who joined Hangry Brands a few years ago as an operating manager and worked her way up. “Hopefully not too much blood and tears.” 

You may notice that Beudert is badly outnumbered by the women on the management team. He does his best to put the spotlight on his female colleagues. The first thing he tells me when we sit down for an interview is how proud he is that Hangry Brands is the “largest women-owned restaurant group in the state of Ohio.”

“We have a saying that the future of restaurant ownership is female,” Beudert says, “and it’s hangry.”

But as an industry veteran, he has the most name recognition, and he’s the most talkative of the bunch, so he’s often the face of the business. He’s also the ideas guy. His weakness is operations, but his strength is throwing ideas at the wall and seeing what starts glowing neon.

There are certain tell-tale signs that you’re in a Hangry Brands establishment. They all have different themes but share the same campy sensibility. At Steak, the door handle is a giant meat cleaver, and the inside is decked out in stained glass windows of bulls and punny neon lights that say “love is rare” and “meat your maker.” Jolene’s has tractors and rocking horses you can sit on, AstroTurf stairs and a giant mural of Dolly Parton as a saint. Guests at Danny’s Breakroom can punch in and out of “work” on a punch clock and set their drink down over a copy machine. At Society, you can choose to sit at a bathtub table filled with fake bubbles, or a sink table. Drinks that contain rubber duckies, are served in unusual barware like small grills or bathtubs, or are somehow flaming, is de rigueur at Hangry bars and restaurants.

As Beudert puts it, Hangry’s places are “a little bit more themed, a little bit more fun.”

Beudert used to work in food management at Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom, and he “can’t lose that showmanship.” Instead of Mickey Mouse, though, you get a drink with a fake $100 bill that’s set on fire at Society.

But besides the ubiquitous neon, ample puns and unexpected drinkware, Hangry establishments are bound by their location. The group got its start in Willoughby, but has focused heavily on Cleveland’s core.

“We have, like, an invisible geo fence around East Fourth, Tremont, West 25th Street, Playhouse Square,” Beudert says. “These are, in our opinion, the most high-profile areas in the region. So they deserve the best, and we feel like we can put out some of the best stuff that the city has to offer.”

Clustering establishments geographically while varying them thematically is prudent, says Thomas Stevenson, an associate professor at Ohio University who specializes in the hospitality industry.

“They’re trying to be their own competition,” he says. “To create a restaurant hub, you need to have multiple concepts in that area that can support that, because not everybody wants to eat the same food every single day.”

You feel like steak one night, Chinese food another night, and then a burger the next night? You can find all of that in Tremont, and they’ll all be Hangry Brands restaurants.

These restaurant clusters also make it possible for Hangry Brands operating partners to be in their restaurants constantly, which they insist on.

That Friday, I followed Licastro as she bounced between Hangry Brands properties, troubleshooting a night’s worth of typical service industry problems. She made sure burnt-out neon lights were replaced and TVs were turned on at Jolene’s Honky Tonk, checked that guests were having a good night at Steak and resolved interpersonal conflicts and paycheck concerns with employees at Society. Along the way, she greeted employees by name and knew exactly what special occasions guests were celebrating.

“All the leaders are cross-trained. The person who can run the coffee shop could run the honky-tonk, could run the steakhouse,” Beudert says. Managers, and even chefs and bartenders, can float between locations. “Part of the secret sauce is that we’re able to take more on because we have that economy to scale, and we have that infrastructure of people and resources.”

However, with success comes critics. Hangry’s Google and Yelp reviews are largely positive, and its restaurants have been well-received by local media. 

Still, not everyone is on board with the Hangry way of doing things. One Reddit user went so far as to say Hangry is just “going around ruining great places” and called it “obnoxious and gimmicky.” Some employees told Cleveland Scene in March that they felt overworked to keep up with the expansion.

Like so many of us in the digital age, Licastro cannot resist reading the hate.

“We’re trying to build places for everybody to come and enjoy, and if the people that are, for lack of a better term, a little bit more snobby, aren’t really enjoying what we’re doing, then there are plenty of places for them to keep going to,” Licastro says. “And I hope that they do keep going to those places. There’s room for all of us.” 

Then, there’s Society, perhaps the most controversial of the Hangry Brand acquisitions. 

The speakeasy opened in 2013 and quickly became a local favorite on East Fourth Street, due in no small part to bartender and part-owner Joey Fredrickson’s mixology skills. By 2024, Fredrickson was tired of talking about whiskey mash bills and missed his family, so he moved back to Cincinnati to pursue a career in software development. The following year, the management at Society struck a deal with Hangry Brands.

It had intended to keep all the staff in place, but something went wrong. Neither the folks at Hangry Brands nor Fredrickson wanted to give any credence to rumors, but the point is that all the staff quit. Beudert says they learned from that experience and, moving forward, have managed to hold on to the bulk of the staff during acquisitions.

For his part, Fredrickson thinks the takeover deal was “fair on both sides.” He’s been back to the bar several times and has hung out with the new manager. He likens the experience to sending your kid off to college; “you have to let them grow.”

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“Sometimes industry people can be judgy,” he says. “They can naysay things, but at the end of the day, it’s what the guests want, it’s what the guests like, even if it is a little schticky or over the top. Seeing something you wouldn’t see in your day-to-day life is fun.”

Plenty of people appear to be into the Hangry version of fun. Beudert says a small investment group allowed them to get off the ground, but strong openings are the reason the company is debt-free and ever-expanding. He likes to say the city’s sports, music and comedy venues are the steak, and its restaurants are the potatoes. They are where you go before and after the show.

But some people really like potatoes. That is to say, some people go Downtown to hear country music at Jolene’s or cleaver away at Steak. The team is aware that it can’t keep growing at this pace.

“It’s not an endless pool of money,” Licastro says. “We’ve had a lot of luck in our first couple of years of striking gold with concepts and being able to make those funds to keep growing, but at a certain point, you have to be responsible because we have to take care of the places that are open.”

Hospitality is a notoriously volatile industry. For every restaurant or bar that comes to them hoping to make a deal, and for every Willy Wonka idea they come up with, there are 10 more opportunities they have to turn down.

Hangry might slow its growth at some point, but it doesn’t seem like that will happen in 2026.

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