How to Rebuild a Struggling Restaurant Region with the VP of Operations of Emmy Squared Pizza

There's a split happening across hospitality right now that doesn't get talked about enough. Restaurant groups that opened after Covid built their operations for a world we're actually in: leaner teams, faster decisions, tighter margins, all from day one. Groups that existed before Covid and survived it are often still running on assumptions from a different era. Surviving the pandemic and surviving what came after are two very different problems. Topher Bertone-Ledford, VP of Operations at Emmy Squared Pizza, has spent the last two years living inside exactly that gap. He took over the group's New York region in a challenging state and rebuilt it from the ground up. Today, New York is the group's top-performing region on profitability. In this conversation with Conor, Topher walks through the operational reality of a post-Covid rebuild: why the middle of hospitality has disappeared, why "cleanliness is respect" is the foundation of everything, the labour acquisition speed problem no one has solved yet, the 12 Steps of Service campaign Emmy Squared rolled out in a three-month sprint, and the total-experience math the guest is actually doing at the end of every meal. Plus a frank closing take: the hospitality industry needs to stop pretending it's like any other industry.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

- The middle of hospitality has disappeared. Fast casual has streamlined; fine dining has doubled down on opulence. The mom-and-pop with linens and a $35 pork chop no longer works. Operators have to run to the edges to be successful.

- Cleanliness is the foundation, not a nice-to-have. Topher's Emmy Squared turnaround started with one question walked through every restaurant: "Are we seeing the same restaurant?" Leaders who couldn't moved on.

- Labour acquisition is a speed problem, not a salary problem. The talent pool has shifted post-Covid. The operators who move fastest on decisions and communicate vision fastest win the "diamonds in the rough."

- Data has to be real-time to be useful. Running the business off a two-week-old P&L means being two weeks behind the bell curve.

- Guest experience is total math, not dish math. The guest never knows the numbers. They do a split-second equation at the end: does this total match the experience I just had?