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.
Jared Lewis
CEO, Founding Partner
After bartending his way through college at the Philadelphia institution Smokey Joe’s, Jared began his career working for Chef Georges Perrier of Le Bec Fin and Brasserie Perrier. He spent the next 20 years in diverse senior management roles with New York’s top restaurant operators, as well as co-owning and investing in many successful food and beverage ventures.
Jared has advised clients ranging from first-time operators to institutional investors, combining his ground-up experience with a management consultant’s eye for creating sustainable and scalable businesses. He holds a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania and a Masters in Hospitality Industry Studies from New York University. He lives in Westchester with his wife two children and enjoys fly fishing, ski touring, and road cycling.
Christophe Hille
COO, Founding Partner
During college, Christophe worked on a vegetable farm in northern Virginia, a job that changed the direction of his life. For the next 20 years, he worked in diverse roles across the food industry—line cook, executive chef, restaurant owner, retail meat company manager and food systems consultant. Christophe has been a managing partner in two restaurants and one nose-to-tail butchery.
Christophe advises restaurant, retail and wholesale businesses in the local foods landscape, with a particular focus on feasibility analysis, concept development and talent recruiting. He earned his B.A. from Wesleyan University, an Associate’s Degree in Culinary Arts from the New England Culinary Institute and a M.S. in Food and Nutrition from New York University. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Maplewood, New Jersey, where he bakes a lot of bread and keeps the birds fed.
Our approach
“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.
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.
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.
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.