We took your question to the chief operating officer of Dotty’s parent company, Nevada Restaurant Services. Mike Ide told us that "Dotty is a name that the owner of the company [Richard Esty] came up with" in the mid-1990s. He did a study of his demographic target base – women aged 35 and older – to find out what names resonated best with them. "Betty" ranked second and "Dorothy" came in tops. Shorten "Dorothy" to "Dotty" and – shazam! – a strip-mall gambling franchise was born.
Dotty’s was founded in Oregon in 1991 and debuted in 1995 in Nevada, where it now has 120 locations statewide and was recently approved to buy the Hacienda casino-hotel just outside Boulder City. It will be Nevada Restaurant Services’ first venture into the full-service casino business, when the renamed and remodeled Hoover Dam Lodge debuts, after a brief shutdown, just prior to New Year's (if all goes according to schedule).
As for those St. Rose locations, they’re not exactly new. Ide says they’ve been in the Dotty’s family for three years each.
