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Earlier than there have been strains out the door, Alexandra Lourdes and Steve Jerome had been simply making an attempt to unravel totally different issues.
Lourdes, then a Ph.D. pupil at UNLV, had began collaborating on campus occasions together with her pal Lin Smith Jerome, who was married to Jerome and would quickly develop into her closest inventive associate.
On the time, Jerome was working a high-end steakhouse and wanted to spice up foot traffic. He requested Lourdes and Smith Jerome to arrange a contented hour on the restaurant. The occasion packed the patio, and it lit a spark for a brand new enterprise.
The blissful hour labored so properly that the restaurant needed extra — weekly occasions, full-on advertising and marketing help, an actual partnership. There was only one concern: Lourdes and Smith Jerome did not technically have an organization. So that they made one. That night time, Smith Jerome filed the LLC paperwork. Lourdes mocked up a brand on the eating room desk. All of a sudden, they had been within the restaurant marketing world, prioritizing storytelling, neighborhood and in-person power over conventional advertisements. What began as a one-off collaboration rapidly turned The Refined Agency — and finally, the muse for Refined Hospitality Group.
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Bouncing from espresso store to espresso store with their laptops, Lourdes and Smith Jerome finally thought, Why not simply create one we really like working in? They introduced Jerome in as a associate, and their concept turned Café Lola: half inventive hub, half espresso store and the primary idea the three of them constructed collectively.
Constructing on that momentum, they launched Saint Honoré — a boutique doughnut store tucked right into a hard-to-find car parking zone, the place they embellished pastries by hand and hoped somebody would are available in.
“We had been throwing extra doughnuts away than we had been promoting,” Jerome says. “One buyer would trickle in. That was it.”
Lourdes determined to doc what life regarded like as a small business owner. “I ended up doing a day-in-the-life , and I simply began filming all the things I used to be doing, adorning doughnuts, and that video blew as much as like 1,000,000 views,” she says. “Swiftly, I turned a storyteller.”
Lourdes has since grown her viewers to greater than 1,000,000 followers on Instagram and a pair of.5 million on TikTok.
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Constructed totally different, constructed collectively
Jerome would be the first to inform you he is not on social media. He prefers to let the meals and hospitality converse for themselves. However he additionally is aware of the facility of what Lourdes does with a cellphone and a story.
“She brings folks in. I attempt to maintain them coming again,” he says.
That line is not only a catchphrase. It is how Refined Restaurant Group works. Lourdes leads content material and neighborhood, drawing audiences by way of genuine storytelling. Jerome handles operations, high quality and visitor expertise. They do not compete for a similar function. They complement one another in each one.
That readability has allowed them to remain small, quick and deeply linked to their visitors. Refined would not want company approval to pivot. If a menu merchandise is not resonating or a buyer remark surfaces one thing new, they’ll regulate the identical day. New concepts come from employees, followers and typically their very own children. The hole between concept and execution is commonly simply 24 hours.
The staff’s agility exhibits within the ideas they’ve constructed: 5 Café Lola places, two Saint Honoré outlets (additionally residence to their pizza spinoff, Pizza Nameless), the fried rooster model 3 Little Chicks, and two full-service eating places, Sorellina and Emilio’s, every a tribute to their households. What ties all of it collectively is not a delicacies. It is a viewpoint.
They care about high quality. They care about velocity. And so they care concerning the folks on each side of the counter.
What began as a contented hour experiment and a quiet doughnut store has develop into a mannequin for construct one thing larger with out dropping your voice. They did not simply develop a restaurant group. They constructed belief, one story at a time.
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Earlier than there have been strains out the door, Alexandra Lourdes and Steve Jerome had been simply making an attempt to unravel totally different issues.
Lourdes, then a Ph.D. pupil at UNLV, had began collaborating on campus occasions together with her pal Lin Smith Jerome, who was married to Jerome and would quickly develop into her closest inventive associate.
On the time, Jerome was working a high-end steakhouse and wanted to spice up foot traffic. He requested Lourdes and Smith Jerome to arrange a contented hour on the restaurant. The occasion packed the patio, and it lit a spark for a brand new enterprise.
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