The Growth Engine · The complete program

The operating system for a venue that makes money without you in it

The Growth Engine is the whole of Hospitality University in one program: six modules, sixty-plus micro-lessons, twenty-four tools you open on a Monday, and twelve months in The Campus with the two operators who teach it.

It is not a course about hospitality. It is the way Omar runs three venues and the way Andrea builds their guest engines, written down so you can install it in yours.

Enrol — $997 See what is inside

One payment, or three of $367. Thirty days, no questions asked. The price is on this page and there is no call to sit through — though you can book fifteen minutes if you would rather talk first.

What enrolling gets you

6 Modules — profit, guests, systems, brand, scale, and the monthly guest masterclass

60+ Micro-lessons of one to three minutes, watchable between prep and service

24 Tools in the Vault — calculators, templates and SOPs, not worksheets

12 Months in The Campus, the weekly live call — $1,188 on its own, included here

∞ Lifetime access to the modules and every update we make to them

Founding cohort onboards the week of 22 September 2026. Twenty-five seats.

Built inside Cosi Bar Ristorante Cucinetta Vaporetto Dining Room Stories JW Marriott Saigon

The gap

Nobody ever taught you the business half of your own business.

Not a failing — a gap in how the industry trains people. Restaurants, hotels, bars, cafés, distributors: every operator we interview runs into the same three things, and all three are fixable.

You were trained to cook and to host

That is the craft, and it is the hard part. The business half arrives with the lease — costing, rostering, cash flow — and nobody hands you a manual.

The numbers move, quietly

Supplier prices, labour, covers, average spend. A menu costed once at opening drifts every month, and the P&L only tells you ninety days later.

The standard lives in your head

Until it is written down, every shift needs you on the floor to hold the line — and the venue cannot grow past the hours you can personally work.

What changes

By the end, these six things exist in your venue.

Not feelings about your business. Artefacts — documents, numbers and systems that are either sitting on your desk at the end or they are not.

Every dish costed to the cent

And a costing sheet that stays current when your supplier prices move, instead of one you built at opening and never opened again.

A menu you can defend

Each item placed on the engineering matrix, priced on margin and popularity, with the dogs cut and the stars where the eye lands first.

A Monday number, not a quarterly surprise

Prime cost read weekly off one page, and a thirteen-week cash view, so the busy month stops being the month you cannot pay for.

A guest engine you own

Your listing fixed, reviews arriving on a system rather than on luck, and a database of your own guests you can write to when a Tuesday looks thin.

The standard, written down

SOPs for both sides of the pass and a shift-leader layer that holds them, so the venue keeps its shape on the nights you are not in it.

A straight answer on venue #2

The feasibility model run on your own numbers — which, for a good number of operators, comes back as not yet. That answer is worth the price on its own.

What we will not do is put a number on your margin. We do not know your venue, and anyone who quotes you a percentage before they have seen your P&L is selling you something. What we can promise is that the six artefacts above exist at the end, because building them is the work.

The spine

How to open it. How to run it. How to grow it.

Three questions every operator faces, answered by four engines you install once — the same operating system Omar runs across three venues and Andrea installs for clients worldwide.

Profit

Food cost, menu engineering, prime cost, cash-flow rhythm. Find the margin hiding in your menu.

Guests

Local search, reviews, direct bookings, a database that fills quiet nights — without burning cash on ads.

Systems

SOPs staff actually follow, hiring that sticks, and an AI front desk that books guests in eight languages at 3am.

Scale

Venue #2, capital, partners, investor-readiness — and a business worth something without you in it.

The modules

Six modules. 1–3 minutes per lesson. A tool with every one.

No motivation, no filler. Watch a lesson between prep and service, apply it the same day.

Orientation — The Operator's Scorecard

Benchmark your venue on 12 metrics in lesson one: food cost, labour, prime cost, average spend, review velocity, direct-booking share. This scorecard is your before-and-after.

3 lessons
1 tool

The Profit Engine led by Omar

Read your P&L in 10 minutes a week. Food cost that actually gets done. Menu engineering: stars, plough-horses, dogs. Supplier negotiation, labour-to-revenue rostering, pricing with dignity.

12 lessons
6 tools

The Guest Engine led by Andrea

Positioning that makes you the obvious choice. Google Business Profile domination. The review conversion system. Owning your bookings and cutting platform commissions. Email and SMS that fill Tuesdays.

14 lessons
5 tools

The Systems Engine Omar & Andrea

SOPs for front and back of house. Hiring and keeping good people in a brutal market. The shift-leader layer that gets you off the floor. The multilingual AI front desk, live case study included.

12 lessons
5 tools

The Brand Engine led by Andrea

The Italian-excellence service standard, codified into checklists. The owner as the face: a 15-minute-a-week content system, shorts that sell tables, guests who become your storytellers.

10 lessons
3 tools

The Scale Engine led by Omar

When — and when not — to open venue #2. What changes at two venues, and at five. Partners, investors and raising capital. Building enterprise value: a venue worth something without you.

10 lessons
4 tools

Guest Faculty Masterclasses monthly drops

Operators from the Dining Room Stories network on the business behind their venues — the part the episode does not cover. Giacomo and Donatello Pietrantuono are confirmed for the founding cohort; further guests are named here as they are booked.

Ongoing
included

The Vault

Twenty-four tools. Every one of them opens on a Monday.

Not worksheets. The actual calculators, templates and checklists we run in our own venues, handed over with the lesson that explains them.

Profit · 6 tools

Recipe & plate costing calculator

Menu engineering matrix

Weekly prime cost tracker

One-page P&L, built to be read in ten minutes

Thirteen-week cash flow forecast

Supplier negotiation script pack

Guests · 5 tools

Google Business Profile audit checklist

Review request sequence, table to inbox

Direct booking & commission audit

Fifty-two week email and SMS calendar

Quiet-night offer playbook

Systems · 5 tools

FOH and BOH SOP library

Roster-to-forecast planner

Shift leader handover sheet

Hiring scorecard and trial shift rubric

AI front desk setup guide

Brand · 3 tools

Service standard checklist

The fifteen-minute-a-week content system

Shorts script bank for owners who hate camera

Scale · 4 tools

Second venue feasibility model

Site selection scorecard

Investor and lender one-pager

Enterprise value worksheet

Orientation · 1 tool

The Operator’s Scorecard — twelve metrics, your before-and-after

You fill this one in during lesson one, before you have learned anything. It is the only honest way to know what the program did.

Your teachers

Two operators. Both still on the floor every day.

Omar El Deek

Profit, Operations & Scale · Director, ElPiet Group

Omar teaches the numbers and systems he runs every single week across three Italian venues in Melbourne — costing, rostering, cash flow, scaling. Not a case study he read. The one he lives in.

Cosi Bar Ristorante

Melbourne CBD

Cucinetta

South Yarra

Vaporetto

Hawthorn

Dining Room Stories

Co-host

Andrea Abbondanza

Marketing, AI & Growth

Fifteen years marketing hospitality across three continents. Builder of booking systems, local-search machines and the multilingual AI front desk that answers guests at 3am. Co-host of Dining Room Stories.

SEO For Restaurants

Founder

Abbondanza Marketing

Founder

Dining Room Stories

Co-host

JW Marriott Saigon

Hotel pilot

Guest faculty

Giacomo and Donatello Pietrantuono are confirmed to teach the founding cohort. We invite operators, GMs, chefs and mixologists from the Dining Room Stories seasons, and name each one here once the date is booked — never before.

Our story

We kept being asked the same question.

Two seasons of Dining Room Stories, twenty-six operators in the chair at the Pivotal Conversation studio in Melbourne.

The interviews were meant to be about food. They almost never stayed there. Once the recorder was off, the same questions came out every time — from chefs and owners who were, by any outside measure, doing well.

How do I know what this dish actually costs me? Why is my best month my worst month for cash? How do I get off the floor without the whole thing falling over?

Then the audience started asking them too. Sponsors backed the show, and operators, GMs and chefs watched every episode and wrote in afterwards wanting the same thing: not the story, the method.

Between us we had both halves of the answer — Omar on the numbers and the scaling, Andrea on marketing, AI and automation. So we wrote it down, not as theory and not as a semester, but as the operating system itself.

In their own words

Twenty-six operators, on the record, about the business behind the food.

episodes

1.4M

people reached

Caterina Borsato

The queen of Melbourne Italian hospitality · Ep 1

Giorgio Linguanti

Founder, That's Amore Cheese · Ep 2

Johnny Di Francesco

World-champion pizzaiolo, global brand · Ep 13

Adam D'Sylva

From Cosi to Decca, Melbourne's food scene

Daniel & Nick Russian

Bar Bambi · building a nightlife legacy

Jason Jones

Entrecôte · on living generously

Stefan Di Benedetto

Reinventing limoncello for a new generation · Solbevi

Chef Joey D

A father, a son, and a dream · Ep 5

Kyla Kirkpatrick

From corporate to a champagne empire · Ep 14

Francesco Rota

Bringing Emilia-Romagna's flavours to Melbourne · Ep 11

Frank Ciorciari

The art of hospitality and exceptional service · Ep 10

Fabio & Cinzia

Michelin-star dining in the Melbourne suburbs · Buono

Julia Hume

From law to linguine to PR · a journey of reinvention

Lorenzo Tron

The #1 pizza shop in Australia · SHOP 225

Julia Tink

Building a coffee brand with heart

Frank Bressi & Peter Mastro

Melbourne's salami icons · the panini journey

Watch every episode at diningroomstories.com

Start here

Fifteen minutes, one operator, no pitch deck.

This is coaching, not a curriculum you watch alone. Tell us your covers, your food cost and where the week goes, and we will tell you which engine is leaking and what we would fix first — whether or not you enrol.

01 You send three numbers ahead of the call

02 We benchmark them against the venues we run and film

03 You leave with a written first move, on the call or not

Book your venue audit call

Free, 15 minutes, no obligation. We reply within one working day.

Or enrol directly

One price, published. Twenty-five founding seats.

The founding price exists because you are joining before the testimonial wall does. When the first cohort's results are in, the program is $1,497.

The Hospitality Growth Engine

6 modules, 60+ micro-lessons, lifetime access

included

The Vault — 24 operator tools

Food cost calculator, menu matrix, P&L template, SOP pack, roster planner

included

The Campus — 12 months

Weekly live call with Omar and Andrea, opening with the founding cohort, plus invited guest operators

included

Founding bonus: 1:1 Scorecard Review

A personal review of your Venue Scorecard — founding cohort only

included

Founding cohort · Sept 2026

$997 one payment

Then $1,497 · or three payments of $367

Enrol now — secure your seat Talk to us first

Self-serve checkout. Doors close 21 September, 23:59 CET.

The Espresso Guarantee

Thirty days, no questions asked. If it is not the most practical hospitality training you have taken, one email refunds every cent — and we send a dollar for the espresso.

Read the terms →

The Espresso Guarantee

Thirty days. No questions asked.

Buy it, open it, use it for a month. If it is not the most practical hospitality training you have taken, tell us and we refund every cent.

01 Thirty days from the day you buy, not from the day you get around to starting.

02 No questions asked. No form, no exit call, no proof that you finished a module, no reason required.

03 One email to info@hospitalityuniversity.academy, refunded to the card you paid with.

04 You keep whatever you downloaded, and we send a dollar for the espresso.

We can offer this because the first module is the food costing one. Either it finds margin in your menu in the first fortnight or it does not, and you will know either way well before the thirty days are up.

Fair warning

This program is not for everyone.

Built for you if

You own or run a restaurant, café, bar, hotel or group

You are past survival mode and want margin and options

You will trade twenty minutes a day for a venue that runs without you

You want teachers on the floor this week, not in a studio

Not for you, yet, if

You have never worked in hospitality

You want passive income or a restaurant automation hack

You expect a coach to run your venue for you

You collect courses. We would rather you did not buy this one

Answered straight

Questions we get on every call.

How much time does it take?+

Lessons are one to three minutes with a tool attached. Most founders do one lesson a day between prep and service, plus one thirty-minute block a week to implement. Module 1 alone typically pays for the program in found margin.

I run a hotel, not a restaurant. Is this for me?+

Yes, deliberately. We built this for hospitality, not for restaurants: hotels, bars, cafés and distributors are all in scope. The profit, guest, systems and scale engines apply to rooms as much as tables, and the F&B modules fix the part of most hotels that loses money.

Why trust you over the famous marketing coaches?+

Because our claims have addresses. Omar's three venues trade every day in Melbourne. Andrea's systems run inside real clients' businesses. Walk in, order the tiramisù, judge for yourself.

Is the price really public? What is the catch?+

$997 founding, $1,497 after, three payments of $367 available. No call required, no investment revealed on the phone, no surprise upsell. There is an optional community renewal after your included twelve months, at the published Campus price of $149 a month or $99 billed annually. That is the entire ladder.

What if it is not for me?+

Thirty days, no questions asked. Email info@hospitalityuniversity.academy inside thirty days of buying and we refund every cent to the card you paid with — no form, no exit call, no proof that you finished anything, no reason required. You keep what you downloaded and we send a dollar for the espresso. The full terms are on this page.

When does it start, and how is it delivered?+

The founding cohort onboards the week of 22 September 2026. Everything is on demand, with weekly live clinics and recordings posted in The Campus. English first; the Italian edition follows.

Twenty-five seats · doors close 21 September

Your venue can run without you. We will show you the engine.

Start with fifteen minutes and three numbers. Whether or not you enrol, you will leave the call knowing which engine is leaking — and the next season of Dining Room Stories is recorded with operators from this cohort.

Book a free 15-minute call Enrol — $997