A business already open, drifting from what it was meant to be. The firm brings the margins and the brand back to the concept while the operator keeps running the floor.
Hotel groups and investment partners bringing a new concept into a property or portfolio. The principal takes a seat at the table and ownership of the outcome.
A feeling a guest walks into, and an instrument held to tolerances. Both are drawn on the same sheet.
Discipline is what lets a room improvise.
Fig. 01 — The room, drawn. Six marks, one structure.Select a mark to follow the decision
The next eighteen months will redraw the economics of the industry.
AI forecasting. Automated labor and inventory. Dynamic pricing. Integrated stacks across POS, payroll, and the floor.
What that actually is
None of it is a software purchase. Each one moves a line on the P&L by changing how the room runs, which makes it an architecture decision arriving disguised as a vendor decision.
Rooms that treat it as procurement will spend the next eighteen months paying for tools that fight the operation.
Every stack answers to the room it runs in.
The room after the second pour. Where the concept either holds or it doesn’t.
Held to spec.
Every discipline that survives has tolerances. The band inside which the thing works, and outside which it does not. Kitchens are no different. The bands get drawn before the doors open. Diagnosis after the fact is the expensive version.
Tolerance bands · prime cost and its partsSheet 01 · Illustrative · MMXXVI
One division = 20% of revenueIllustrative
Prime cost
+14 pts
55–60%
Labor
+7 pts
30–33%
Food & bev COGS
+7 pts
25–27%
020406080%
In tolerance
A room out of spec
Percent of revenue
Bands are working industry ranges and move by format, market, and model. This sheet is illustrative and describes no single engagement. The pin is a room out of spec. The distance between the pin and the band is the whole business.
Most rooms hire a specialist for each of these. They rarely speak to each other. The firm works across all of them, fluent enough in each to sit beside the people already doing the work.
One thesis
Brand & Identity
What the room is for, and what it promises
The concept begins here. What a room is for is a brand question before it is any other kind, and a brand only reads as one intention when one hand sets the whole of it.
Concept
Positioning
Identity
Art direction
Operations
How it keeps the promise
The standard service is held to, so a Tuesday performs like opening night. The programs live here. Culinary and beverage are operating systems before they are menus, and the stack lives here too, because technology is how operations reads the room before the P&L does.
Service & training
Culinary
Beverage
Labor & stack
Economics
Whether it survives
Read for operating truth rather than for reporting. What comes out is the baseline every later decision gets measured against.
Pro forma
Prime cost
Menu engineering
Baseline
Four workstreams. One cycle.
The disciplines are not run as separate engagements. One method moves through all of them: four workstreams, repeated in cycle.
I
Origin Audit
The Excavation
The concept thesis, defended in one sentence.
II
Foundation Stack
The Blueprint
The architecture rendered whole.
III
Performance Matrix
The Instrument Panel
Revenue, prime cost, and reputation on a single panel. The instruments read on cadence.
IV
Intelligence Layer
The Early Warning System
The signal surfaced before the P&L confirms it. A live instrument, built for the concept, placed in the principal’s hand.
∞The Operating Cycle™The Long Discipline
Steps one through four, repeated. The work that keeps the work honest, year over year.
Inside Operations. The culinary layer.
Some concepts are built on the food. Those engagements are carried by the firm's culinary lead, who works the program the way the rest of the firm works a room: for what it does on a Tuesday, not only on a plate.
Culinary Lead
Ed McDevitt
Food programs that perform operationally as well as they do on the plate. Johnson & Wales. Chef Tournant at The Ritz-Carlton under Chef Terance Furey. Seven years as Executive Chef at Rosa Mexicano, Upper East Side.
National menu development across the Apicii portfolio.
How the firm builds.
Most consultants hand you a deck and leave. The firm builds the technology into the operating architecture itself, chosen for the concept and run by the team that lives in it.
AI forecasting, automated labor and inventory, dynamic pricing, integrated stacks across POS, payroll, and the floor. The real question is who the technology is built around. Hospitality is a human discipline, and a stack that does not serve the people running the room will quietly work against them.
The method is one thing. The shape it takes in your room is decided together.
Engagements · The Work, Structured
How the work begins.
It begins with a conversation. The right shape of the work is decided together, never before.
Founders carry the vision. Operators carry the room. Capital carries the timeline. What no one carries, by default, is the integration of all three.
The firm designs that integration as an instrument the principal can hold.
Trust is built in sequence.
The relationship is the work. It starts with a conversation, earns a closer look, and becomes a seat at the table. The firm directs the build. The founder directs the vision. Both have to be true.
First
An introductory call
Thirty minutes with the principal. What the room is doing now, and what it was built to do. Bring the part that is not working. Nothing prepared in advance.
Then
The Operator Diagnostic
A defined, paid read of the room. From the books outward and from the floor back, including the systems already running. It ends in a written diagnosis and a recommended depth, and it stands on its own whether or not the work goes further.
The Work
A seat at the table
An ongoing engagement, carried as a retainer or taken on as a defined build. The firm fixes margins, design, training, and brand while the operator runs the business. The depth is decided together.
Three tiers. One standard.
The work runs at one of three depths. Tier III is not a better Tier I. The right depth answers the question in front of you. Every tier is a retainer carried over a defined term, measured in months and not in weeks, and none of them is an hourly relationship. Which one the work runs at is decided together, after the Diagnostic.
The named workstreams below belong to the firm's method. An Origin Audit defends the concept thesis in one sentence. Each tier above it adds another instrument, up to the full Operating Cycle. Read the method →
Datum
I
Repair
Where is the business losing structural integrity?
For operating restaurants and bars bleeding margin, softening in brand, or carrying labor that no longer fits the model. Tightens the operation back to the concept it was meant to be. Anchored in the Origin Audit.
II
Rebuild
What does the concept need to become, and how does it run?
For existing operations ready to re-architect. Multi-location groups installing discipline, single rooms returning to relevance, brands that have outgrown the operation underneath them. Adds the Foundation Stack and the Performance Matrix.
III
Fractional Executive
Who carries the room when the work is the long arc?
For founders building from the ground up, and for groups, hotel partners, and capital commissioning work at scale. A defined build, or an ongoing principal-level seat. The Operating Cycle™ in full.
The work, briefly.
01
Multi-Unit Coastal Hospitality Group
Full operational and brand leadership
New brand and identity, operations, economics, and the systems beneath them, rebuilt as one object. Combined same-store net sales grew 11.7% year over year, flagship 12.7% and second unit 8.6%. Beverage cost of goods held at 18.3% of net beverage sales. Flagship net margin moved from −19.8% to sustained positive within five reporting periods. A zero-based reset removed roughly $2.2M of annualized overhead. The three-market Florida pipeline held its schedule through a leadership crisis: two units opened on time, the third reached a signed general-contractor agreement. Anonymized while the engagement matures into a public reference.
02
Apicii Hospitality
Beverage architecture at portfolio scale
Seventeen properties. Five named programs: Breva, Masa & Agave, Clifton’s Republic, Bar Cima, Alder & Ash. Institutional hotel groups and capital partners, where the beverage program carries a hotel’s name.
03
Independent Practice
A decade of openings, repositions, and recoveries
Engagements with founders, operators, and hospitality groups across openings, repositions, and recoveries.
What the work earns.
Tony’s ability to combine strategic thinking with true hospitality leadership is rare. He leads from the front, earns the respect of his teams, and never asks anyone to do something he wouldn’t do himself. His passion for hospitality, attention to detail, and relentless pursuit of excellence had a major impact on our growth trajectory.
Which tier the work runs at is the second conversation. The first one is thirty minutes.
The Principal
Tony Edgerton.
Formation inside the rooms that defined modern American hospitality. Twenty years carrying the discipline forward, into the firm built to deliver it as the work changes shape.
The formation-era work happened inside the rooms that defined the modern New York bar. Under Sasha Petraske, whose discipline at Milk & Honey set the standard for the craft cocktail movement, and Frank Caiafa, who authored the modern American bar book.
One inheritance. Everything below is built on what those rooms taught.
Inside Apicii. The work, at scale.
Two years as Corporate Beverage Director at Apicii Hospitality. Seventeen properties. The beverage program for institutional hotel groups and capital partners who could not afford to get it wrong.
Five named concepts: Breva. Masa & Agave. Clifton’s Republic. Bar Cima. Alder & Ash. Each one a program with its own identity, menu, service doctrine, and economics, built to hold long after the opening.
The training was in scale. Building a beverage program that could be opened, taught, costed, and held inside the operational systems already in place.
Ten years before the firm.
A decade of independent practice. Engagements with founders, operators, and hospitality groups across openings, repositions, and recoveries. Consulting at Lucky Rooster, Festival, Secret Summer Festival, Lunasea, Upright Gastropub in the Village, and Posta in Canada.
The most recent engagement, full operational and brand leadership at a multi-unit coastal hospitality group, grew revenue while pulling cost of goods and labor down. The group is anonymized while the engagement matures into a public reference.
Why the firm exists.
The work is the only thing the firm answers to. Twenty years inside the rooms that defined modern American hospitality produced a method for building hospitality that holds.
The rare thing the firm offers: one principal who has sat in every seat, and can see how they connect.
Contact
Begin a conversation.
For founders, operators, capital partners, and introductions.
Thirty minutes with the principal. Your business, the room, and the question that brought you here. No deck, no pitch. A read on whether the firm is the right partner for the work ahead.
