Vice President,
Restaurants, Bars & Events

The seat has been difficult to fill for a reason worth respecting. Aparium is, by design, the anti-formula. The identity of each hotel is birthed through the work and the name comes last; the process is, in Aparium’s telling, inefficient by design, because that is the only way to a result that truly belongs to its place. A portfolio F&B leader can read, to the field, like the opposite of that belief — a corporate office that flattens local character into sameness. That is the version worth resisting, and it is part of why the role keeps getting drawn and set down again.

This is the other version. Aparium already says the goal out loud: celebrate independence, create one-of-ones, and still scale with discipline. The role is simply that sentence applied to F&B — discipline beneath the venues, character on top of them — and it makes the next opening and the next contract easier than the last.

Every venue stays singular. The role supplies the backbone beneath them — shared standards, shared buying power, a repeatable opening playbook, a real path for talent, and one honest set of numbers — so being local never has to mean being on your own.

The posting frames it the same way: more than twenty singular venues, unified by a common commitment to quality, culture, and care, and led by Aparium’s three principles.

Take Aparium’s own framing seriously — the ground floor given to the neighborhood, the restaurant as the hotel’s front door — and food and beverage is not an amenity; it is the product. Build a bar and a restaurant the locals claim as their own and they become, in Aparium’s framing, a built-in reservation system and a marketing channel no budget can buy. F&B is where the translocal promise is kept or broken.

Aparium has also named what holds that promise back: across independent hotels, what is missing is rarely ambition — it is proper, locally relevant execution of F&B, delivered consistently. That gap is the job. Every one of these hotels carries an important F&B component; a portfolio F&B leader exists to make consistent, local, well-run execution the rule rather than the exception — the spine beneath the venues.

What the venues share is not a menu — it is a spine: the standards, buying power, talent pipeline, and numbers beneath the floor. Aparium took its name from the apiary, the beehive: highly productive, deeply collaborative, a kind of organized chaos orchestrated on the ground floor. This role orchestrates that same hive across F&B — keeping the buzz, removing the waste. It owns the spine and nothing that belongs to a General Manager or a chef. The identity stays local; the floor gets stronger.

F&B lives inside the product Aparium sells, and underwrites the owner’s confidence in the partnership — which is why uneven F&B is a portfolio priority, not a property footnote. The strengths and the room to grow are uneven by nature: one-of-ones at different ages, in different markets, run by different teams. The work is to read that landscape and put shared support where it compounds fastest.

• Developing outlet leaders. The strongest lever in the portfolio is the people already in it. Where an outlet leader has real ownership of their P&L, the right tools, and a clear path upward, results follow. Building that ownership — and a development path beneath it — lifts every property and is the surest investment available.
• Building bench strength. When a team loses a leader, the portfolio leans on coverage borrowed from sister properties. That generosity between hotels is a strength worth protecting; a deeper, mobile bench and real succession planning protect it — easing the strain on the teams who lend their people, steadying a property through transition, and keeping with Aparium’s belief that the strongest growth comes from developing people from within.
• Buying and sourcing as one. The Craftable and consolidated-purchasing work already underway points the way. Carried across the portfolio, it gives every venue better, more consistent sourcing — and quietly steadies the economics without asking a guest to pay more.
• Setting openings and Banquets & Catering up to win. New and ramping properties face the most demanding moment in a venue’s life, and an opening has to deliver on brand DNA, guest experience, and quality from day one. Banquets & Catering, often the highest-margin opportunity in the building, needs the same: a repeatable model, dedicated attention, and a real partnership with Sales to convert — not improvisation.
• Scaling what already works. The systems built at Crossroads already lift three opposite formats under one roof — a food-led fine-dining room, a beverage-led café, and a beverage-led rooftop. Much of this role is carrying what works to the teams who would welcome it.

One System, Every Format

At Crossroads the same operating system runs three opposite concepts: Lazia, a food-led fine-dining room (about 71% food); XR, a beverage-led all-day café (about 72% beverage); and Percheron, a beverage-led rooftop (about 84% beverage). Year to date, Lazia’s food revenue is running roughly 42% ahead of budget and Percheron’s beverage about 42% ahead; F&B revenue is up double digits over last year; and May set a record $1M F&B month at about 35% margin.

The tell is the contrast inside one house: where Crossroads runs a channel without that dedicated attention — Banquets & Catering, still with no leadership of its own — it trails plan. The result tracks the attention, not the concept. A system that lifts a dining room, a café, and a rooftop alike is not concept-specific; it is portfolio-ready.

The role’s first contribution is the shared, comparative view of F&B and B&C performance the portfolio doesn’t yet have — built from the group roll-up and property statements — so support is sequenced by evidence and offered where it helps most.

None of this is theoretical. The operating system the role would carry already exists — built at the property level, in production, and proven at Crossroads. These are the practical tools that help operators succeed: systems, standards, and training built to last, designed to do exactly what scale must do in Aparium’s own telling — add accountability without dimming the entrepreneurial spirit. Good tools don’t script the floor — they free the team to deliver the intuitive, read-the-room service Aparium is known for, because the numbers and the prep are already handled.

• Demand and labor planning. A cover-and-PPA forecasting model so each property plans labor against real demand — the largest controllable line in any F&B P&L — instead of by instinct.
• One shared set of numbers. A single F&B dashboard — daily flash, sales, labor, forecast, events, reputation — so a property and HQ open the same numbers on the same morning, and time goes to the work rather than to reconciling reports.
• Floor habits that lift the guest experience. A service scorecard that makes beverage attachment, tip percentage, reviews, and voids visible by server — a way to coach toward the intuitive service Aparium prizes, and to celebrate it, not police it.
• Beverage ordering and inventory. A par-and-ordering tool feeding steady inventory reconciliation, so each bar orders to real need and counts accurately — a quiet discipline, repeatable at every bar in the portfolio.
• Beverage knowledge. A structured wine-and-beverage program that builds the team’s confidence and the check average together, and gives the brand a shared language for what it pours.
• And built on top. A Banquets & Catering operating standard, a repeatable opening playbook, and an outlet-leader development path that grows ownership from within.

Already running at Crossroads

F+B Manager Dashboard — the daily performance ledger

One daily read on revenue, labor, forecast, events, and reputation across all three outlets and Banquets & Catering — so a property and HQ open the same numbers on the same morning, instead of reconciling reports.

Server Standings — floor performance, scored

Beverage attachment, reviews, and voids by server, scored from Toast data with a built-in service playbook — turning guest review scores into something the floor competes on, and coaching the service Aparium prizes.

Already built, already in use. Scaling these across the portfolio is a question of leadership and adoption, not a capital line — part of the answer to why this seat has stayed open.

The posted role asks the VP to drive revenue, elevate the guest experience, and ensure operational excellence while protecting each concept’s individuality and sense of place. That resolves to five lines, not a vague mandate.

Aparium was built in 2011 on a clear bet: bring true c-suite service to the distinct, underserved cities the big flags overlook. Fifteen years on, the company is young and growing fast — and every new market repeats the same promise, that its restaurants, bars, and event spaces become community catalysts, neighborhood favorites built to endure. F&B is how that promise is kept, market after market.

Aparium’s first principle in any deal is the partner, and the alignment that makes a partnership work. F&B is how that trust is earned and kept. Aparium wins management contracts on the promise that its restaurants and bars will make a building a destination — today that promise rests on individual operators. A shared, demonstrable F&B operating system makes it repeatable, and turns the promise into proof at the table. At Crossroads that is already concrete: this summer the Percheron rooftop hosts a Visa × Pinnacle FIFA World Cup dinner for blue-chip partners — F&B turning a hotel into the room those guests choose.

That matters most to where the company is going. As the Aparium Collection and Aparium For extend the reach to owners who want a thoughtful operator rather than a logo, the F&B system is the differentiator that wins the mandate and the reason owners stay. The same backbone that strengthens the current portfolio is the strongest pitch for the next one. The role is an operations function and a business-development asset at once.

Aparium enters every market as the interloper — humble, there to learn, never to tell a community what it needs. This role takes the same posture inside the company: beside people, never between them and their venues.

The posting describes the same temperament: trust built through transparency, collaboration, humility, and an ego-free mindset; rapport built quickly and adapted to very different stakeholders; an architect who is also a builder — strategic enough to design the system, hands-on enough to work a Saturday night.

The role only works in the right hands, and the profile is specific. An independent, one-of-one F&B portfolio cannot be led from a chain playbook or from theory. It has to be led by someone with broad, hands-on experience across hotels and independent restaurants — an architect who is also a builder — who has built venues that became part of their neighborhoods and carried both the wins and the losses that come with that work.

Get the profile right and the rest follows. Get it wrong and a portfolio of one-of-ones quietly becomes a portfolio of the same.

I have been building this backbone with the Crossroads F&B team, from the property level and without the title. The reporting and analytics tools the team runs on every day were built in-house, not bought. Crossroads F&B runs three outlets and a Banquets operation, and this spring it posted a record $1M F&B month — revenue ahead of plan and up double digits year over year — and held that line through two manager departures in the weeks since. I am proud of the number, but prouder of how it held: people stepping up, covering for one another, and staying steady because they felt supported. That is the part that never shows up on a P&L, and it is the part I care about most. And the work already reaches past the floor — fielding Asset Management’s F&B questions ahead of the ownership call, sending cross-property brand analysis to our regional and brand leaders, and leading the marquee rooftop events that make a hotel a destination. The multi-unit version of this work is familiar to me — before Crossroads I led operations across sixteen Tupelo Honey restaurants through twelve openings in four years, and ran the bar at Commander’s Palace during its Wine Spectator Grand Award era. I have built on the independent side too: I founded Eudora’s Mississippi Brasserie, and helped lead The Okay, Cool Group to a successful exit, six of its eight concepts sold along with the real estate they anchored. I know what it takes to make an independent venue matter to its neighborhood, and the discipline that separates the ones that endure. The translocal version is what I am living now — and I would be glad to do it for the whole portfolio.