A business already open, drifting from what it was meant to be. The margins and the brand come 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 firm 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.
DesignBanquette depth sets the cover count. Cover count sets the check average the room has to hold.
CocktailFour fresh ingredients in a build means a prep shift someone has to work. That shift hits the labor line long before the pour cost.
Fig. 01 · The room, drawn. Six marks, one structure.Select a mark to follow the decision
Technology belongs inside the operating architecture. Chosen for the concept, run by the team that lives in it.
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.
Rooms that treat it as procurement pay for tools that fight the operation, and go on paying for them long after the contract is signed.
The room after the second pour. Where the concept either holds or it doesn’t.
Held to spec.
Every discipline that survives has tolerances. Kitchens are no different. Draw the bands 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 for a full-service room with a bar-led mix, and they move by format, market, and model. This sheet is illustrative and describes no single engagement. The distance between pin and band is the whole business.
They rarely speak to each other. One principal works across all three, 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. That is a brand question before it is any other kind. A brand only reads as one intention when one hand sets all 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. Culinary and beverage are operating systems before they are menus. The stack lives here too, because technology reads the room before the P&L does.
Service & training
Culinary
Beverage
Labor & stack
Economics
Whether it survives
Read the numbers for what the room is actually doing. What comes out is the baseline every later decision is measured against.
Pro forma
Prime cost
Menu engineering
Baseline
Four workstreams, run in cycle.
One method runs through brand, operations, and economics together.
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 live or die on the food. The culinary principal carries those engagements, and judges a program by what it does on a Tuesday.
Culinary Principal
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 work gets built.
What a deck recommends, the room still has to install. The firm stays until it runs.
The method is one thing. What it becomes in your room is yours.
Engagements · The Work, Structured
How the work begins.
It begins with a conversation. The shape of the work comes after, never before.
Every partner at the table carries part of the work.
Tony Edgerton carries the whole of it.
Trust is built in sequence.
One hand directs the build. The founder directs the vision. Both have to be true.
First
An introductory call
Thirty minutes with Tony. What the room is doing now, and what it was built to do. Bring what you have, and nothing needs preparing in advance.
Then
The Operator Diagnostic
Two to three weeks. On site and in the books, including the systems already running. It ends in a written diagnosis: the concept thesis as the room currently reads it, the distance between prime cost and its bands, and a recommended depth. Fixed fee, quoted after the call. 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. Margins, design, training, and brand come back into spec while the operator runs the business.
The work runs at three depths.
Every tier runs over a defined term, measured in months rather than weeks. Most run as a retainer. A bounded build can be taken at a fixed fee. Which one the work runs at is settled after the Diagnostic. Read the method →
Relative depth of engagement
I
Repair
Where is the business losing structural integrity?
For restaurants and bars bleeding margin, softening in brand, or carrying labor that no longer fits the model. Tightens the operation back to the concept. 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 record, in brief.
Two decades of work, each entry carried in the capacity named on it. Engagements are not published while they run.
01
Multi-Unit Coastal Hospitality Group
Carried as President and Chief Brand Officer
New brand and identity, operations, economics, and the systems beneath them, rebuilt as one object.
+11.7%Combined same-store net sales, Q1 2026 against Q1 2025. Flagship 12.7%, second unit 8.6%.
≈18.3%Beverage cost of goods, held. Percent of net beverage sales.
−19.8%Flagship net margin at intake. Sustained positive within five reporting periods.
≈$2.2MAnnualized overhead removed across the group, in a zero-based reset.
Three openings kept on schedule through a leadership crisis.
Anonymized while the engagement matures into a public reference.
02
Apicii Hospitality
Carried as Corporate Beverage Director · Two years
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
Carried through Bespoke Solutions Consulting · 2017–2024
Engagements with founders, operators, and hospitality groups. Lucky Rooster, Festival, Secret Summer Festival, Lunasea, Upright Gastropub, and Posta in Canada.
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 is thirty minutes.
The Principal
Tony Edgerton.
Formation inside the rooms that defined the modern New York bar. Twenty years carrying the discipline forward, into the firm founded in 2026 to hold 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 wrote The Waldorf Astoria Bar Book.
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 programs: Breva. Masa & Agave. Clifton’s Republic. Bar Cima. Alder & Ash. Each with its own menu, service doctrine, and cost model, built to hold long after opening.
The training was in scale. A beverage program that could be opened, taught, costed, and held inside systems already running.
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 for now.
Why the firm exists.
Most companies have the vision. Fewer have someone to carry it into the room and build a team that gets better at holding it every day.
Table & Theory was built on people, on performing with integrity, and on systems that hold. Rarely does one person carry all of it.
Contact
Begin a conversation.
For founders, operators, capital partners, and introductions. Come early rather than late.
Thirty minutes with Tony. Your business, the room, and the question that brought you here. No deck, no pitch. An honest read on whether the firm is right for the work ahead.
