The specialists a project needs alongside a chef.

Sommelier & Wine

Victor Almeida

Head Sommelier & Beverage Consultant

Almeida builds wine programmes that sell rather than impress. His usual finding is the same one: a list of 400 references where 30 do 80% of the volume, capital tied up in stock nobody orders, and a floor team who can't confidently recommend anything above the third line. He rebuilds the list, the pricing ladder and the training together, because fixing one without the others does nothing.

Results

• Beverage cost reduced from 34% to 26% across a four-outlet hotel
• Wine list cut from 410 to 140 references; revenue up 11%
• Trained 180 floor staff across 9 sites to recommendation standard

Bar & Beverage

Marcus Lindberg

Bar Consultant

Fourteen years behind and then designing bars, including two that made the World's 50 Best Bars list. Lindberg's hotel work is unglamorous and lucrative: batching, prep discipline and a menu engineered so that a bar with two people on a Friday can still serve 300 drinks without the quality collapsing after ten.

Results

• Bar labour per drink cut 31% through batching and prep redesign
• Two projects placed in World's 50 Best Bars
• Hotel bar revenue up 24% year on year after menu and layout rebuild

Revenue & Cost

Ivan Petrov

F&B Revenue & Cost Analyst

Petrov came up through hotel kitchens and then through finance, which is a rarer combination than it should be. He reads a P&L the way a chef reads a section, and his audits tend to find the same three things: purchasing that has drifted, a payroll model built for covers the hotel no longer does, and a menu mix nobody has looked at in two years.

Results

• Average 3.8 points of food cost recovered across 22 audits
• Payroll ratio brought from 34% to 28% at a 400-room resort
• Menu engineering added €410k annualised gross profit at one group

Kitchen Design

Sofia Costa

Commercial Kitchen Designer

Costa is a chef who became a designer, which means her drawings account for the fact that someone has to work an eight-hour service inside them. She is usually brought in either very early — before the shell is fixed and the cost of a good decision is nearly zero — or very late, when a kitchen that looked fine on paper cannot produce the covers the business plan assumed.

Results

• 34 kitchens designed or remediated across hotels, resorts and standalone sites
• Average 22% reduction in kitchen footprint without losing capacity
• Energy consumption cut 18% through equipment and extraction specification

Hospitality Training

Zanele Nkosi

Hospitality Trainer

Nkosi designs training that survives the week after the trainer leaves. Her programmes are built around observable standards and a supervisor who has been taught to hold them, rather than a two-day workshop and a certificate. She works most often on openings and on properties with turnover problems that are usually management problems.

Results

• Staff turnover reduced from 71% to 34% at a 260-room property in 14 months
• Trained 1,400+ hospitality staff across 6 countries
• Opening teams delivered to soft-opening standard on schedule in 11 of 11 projects

Concept Development

Omar Diallo

Restaurant Concept Developer

Diallo works on the question investors ask last and should ask first: who is this for, what will they spend, and how many of them are there within twenty minutes. His feasibility work has killed as many projects as it has launched, which he regards as the point. When a concept does proceed, he takes it through to brand, menu architecture and opening business plan.

Results

• 29 concepts developed; 21 opened, 19 still trading after three years
• Average opening-year revenue within 8% of feasibility forecast
• Advised on €140m of F&B investment across the GCC