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When Eddy Massaad’s original Swiss Butter restaurant was destroyed by the Beirut blast tragedy in August 2020, resilience and a community rebuild saw the steakhouse open again 30 days later.
“We're used to different challenges, especially when we're coming out from Lebanon,” says Massaad. “We got used to being pragmatic and problem solvers, going through any crisis and coming out positively.”
Swiss Butter started its expansion in late 2021, opening 10 restaurants within a year, including its first London location. Now turning over a healthy eight figures, CEO and founder Massaad is aiming for 100 locations within five years of his viral restaurant brand and steak frites sauce dining experience.
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Massaad had turned to the industry out of necessity. Needing to pay for college tuition to study biochemistry, he began to learn about restaurant management, became a store manager and then started in services as a freelancer.
In 2010, he launched his own hospitality management services company. “The first couple of years were very difficult just to prove myself at the market,” he recalls. “I landed contracts but there were always insecurities in the service business. If I lost one client, I had to scale down my team.”
Massaad drafted a three-pronged strategy — to expand to the Gulf area, find a master franchise for one of his clients and build his own brand. The first two failed, the third saw him set up Swiss Butter.
“If I failed doing that, and this is what I'm supposed to be an expert in, then that would be the end of the road and I would lose credibility in the restaurant business,” he admits today.
In 2017, Swiss Butter had launched in Beirut next door to where Massaad attended school. “We imagined the customer experience and planned it backwards and reverse engineered the whole process," he says of the business plan.
With it came their "secret" sauce – which has 33 ingredients, including herbs, spices and butter paste – created by Massaad’s chef brother and has become the restaurant’s hallmark.
“He had his personal challenge to crack that sauce that is over 100 years old. And once he achieved the result, we used to taste it together, tune and adjust it,” says Massaad.
By 2015, Massaad took the recipe on instead of his brother selling and the pair later became restaurant holding partners.
“I was on a mission to remodel one of my client's restaurant model to fit the UK market," adds Massaad, "and I learned a lot about what is required as part of the concept DNA to make it in a big city like London or New York.