Opening a new restaurant concept for an established group

Outside their playbook

An established hospitality group wanted to open something different: a relaxed but refined room in an up-and-coming neighbourhood, built around a wine and cocktail program unlike anything else in their portfolio. They had the instincts and strong back-of-house leadership. The concept just sat outside the playbook that had worked for their other rooms.

Nobody had validated it against the local market. There was no roadmap tying buildout, hiring, sourcing and marketing to one timeline. The beverage program, the whole point of the place, hadn’t been curated yet. The floor plan was being drawn for how it looked rather than how service would move through it on a packed Saturday. And the group’s people were fully committed to the existing venues, so there was no slack for improvising on opening day.

What we did

The buildout date was fixed, so we worked backwards from opening night and sorted decisions by whether something physical depended on them. Floor layout and beverage sourcing had hard deadlines. Marketing didn’t.

Validation. Demographic analysis, competitive mapping, and focus groups and surveys on cuisine and service style, used to shape the offer rather than rubber-stamp it. That fed a positioning brief covering brand, pricing and the experience.

The beverage program. We curated a wine list built on smaller producers with real by-the-glass depth, which is what made it defensible rather than just good, developed a cocktail list that fit the kitchen’s identity, and trained the front-of-house team on pairing, storytelling and the gentle art of the upsell.

Operations and launch. We reworked the floor plan for seat efficiency and to remove the service collisions in the original, built SOPs for reservations, table turns, the bar queue and shift transitions, and set up KPI tracking for guest satisfaction, wait times and spend per head. In the run-up we managed hiring, soft openings and systems testing, wrote the opening-week playbooks, and ran a staff and guest feedback loop through the first few weeks so the team could adjust while it still mattered.

Rebuilt artifact

1. 01Market validation
2. 02Positioning brief
3. 03Wine and cocktail program
4. 04Floor layout and SOPs
5. 05Opening-week playbooks

Where it landed

• Year-one revenue came in 24% above target, with strong weeknights as well as weekends.
• Opened on the date, with the team ramped on written SOPs and service scripts before the doors opened.