ABout us

Leveraging more than 50 years of experience to help you delight guests and drive revenue.

If you can name it, we’ve done it—from planting and harvesting tomatoes to manning the deep fryer and dish pit to greeting guests and running a dining room. More important, as former owners and operators, we’ve built an extraordinary network of like-hearted collaborators who share a mastery of the business and can lend their expertise to any project. 

Life’s too short not to eat well, build meaningful relationships and leave the world better than we found it. We’d be honored to partner with you.

Our approach

Helping you work
“Smart from the Start”

We’ve operated, invested in and consulted with dozens of food-related businesses over the past two decades (more than 100, at last count). We’ve seen things work out brilliantly—and sometimes less so—but we celebrate the trials and errors.

Smart from the Start is based on these hard-won insights. It’s an approach that builds better ideas and stronger businesses, designed to save you time, money and stress along the way.

It revolves around three core principles.

These principles not only bring discipline to our practice areas—they remind us to stay true to what matters. Success hinges less on spending gobs of money than it does on asking how we might be more creative, more compassionate, more efficient, more memorable, more delightful at every step.

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A passion for purpose

The best food businesses have a point of view and stand for something meaningful—sublime ingredients, sustainable sourcing, building community, generous hospitality, or something even more noble. We embrace the values and ideas at the center of your project and build out from there.

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The importance of resilience

Projects reach their goals through a combination of discipline and adaptability—a plan for the blocking-and-tackling of daily operations, a process for staying flexible enough to handle inevitable curveballs. We create a strong foundation to foster a nimble, creative problem-solving culture.

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The power of good people

Relationships are paramount. Collaborate early and often with your partners, hire great people, empower your teams, talk to your vendors and engage your customers to build a culture of curiosity, trust and respect. We believe your enterprise is your people.