Successful group’s president aims to increase revenue to $30 million by 2010
Michael Kane
Sun
Glowbal president and CEO Emad Yacoub, and vice-president Jack Lamont in their Italian Kitchen restaurant. Photograph by : Bill Keay, Vancouver Sun
Glowbal Restaurant Group has earned countless laurels since its inception in Vancouver in 2002, but president Emad Yacoub has no plans to rest on them.
After opening five successful businesses in five years, he’s predicting the group will increase its annual revenues from $23 million to $30 million by the time Vancouver welcomes the Olympics.
With 320 staff and 11 partners, it’s hard to imagine anything stopping this innovative company with its signature mixture of fascinating food and high-energy atmosphere.
Glowbal is being courted for its culinary expertise by hotel developers in Calgary and there are rumours it will be in on the ground floor when Vancouver‘s expanded convention centre opens next year.
Meanwhile the company is preparing to launch its sixth venture — a trattoria promising casual dining without the fried stuff — at the former Chianti’s on the corner of West 4th and Burrard in Kitsilano.
The trattoria will join a stable that includes Yaletown’s Glowbal Grill & Satay Bar and Afterglow, its celebrity hotspot lounge; the award-winning Coast Restaurant; Granville’s Street’s exotic Sanafir Restaurant and Lounge; and Italian Kitchen, last year’s celebrated addition to the downtown dining scene.
Not bad for three successful restaurateurs from Toronto who were lured to the West Coast after Yacoub married Vancouver‘s Shannon Bosa of the Bosa construction family. She was managing Joe Fortes Seafood and Chop House when Yacoub was brought in as executive chef in the late ’90s.
At first the couple set their sights on Hogtown and opened a couple of restaurants in partnership with Yacoub’s older brother, but Yacoub says his desire “to change the world” clashed with his sibling’s conservative approach to business.
They returned to Vancouver and teamed up with long-time friends and executive chefs Sean Riley and Jack Lamont to launch the Glowbal Grill in 2002, one of the first Yaletown restaurants to ditch the ubiquitous warehouse brick-look in favour of recreating a loud and hip New-York style bar.
“That was the beginning of our company because we established ourselves as completely different from everybody else,” said 43-year-old Yacoub, who immigrated from Turkey in 1984.
“Our clientele were successful executives, all of them making very high disposable incomes, and they don’t like to go to nightclubs and they don’t like to go to a quiet restaurant. They want to feel energy, so this is what we created for them.”
Next came Afterglow, ranked in magazine polls as one of the city’s best bars, and famed as a Hollywood North hangout for the likes of Pamela Anderson, Michael Buble and Robin Williams.
Then, to demonstrate some substance behind their hip image, Yacoub and his partners opened Yaletown’s Coast seafood restaurant which has been put in the same company as the exceptional Bluewater Cafe and C.
Sanafir soon followed, a tapas restaurant with a “Silk Road” menu offering West Coast ingredients with the flavours of North Africa, Asia and the Middle East in an Ali Baba-style setting that speaks to Yacoub’s Egyptian heritage. It features Moroccan-style beds on the second floor where customers can sit and enjoy champagne and finger food.
And then came Italian Kitchen at Alberni and Burrard, described by Yacoub as “an $8 million-plus store on track to become the busiest restaurant in Vancouver after Joe Fortes.”
Along the way they also built on their backgrounds in big hotels and banqueting to open a catering division.
Yacoub credits the solid credentials of each partner for Glowbal’s continuing success, along with a strategy that allows every manager to invest in every new restaurant after working with the company for one year.
“We’re actually making the company grow from within because it creates humongous cash flow,” he said. “Everybody wants to save their money and put it into the business, and every manager is making money for other managers.
“My whole goal is to keep opening restaurants and having my managers own them,” he said.
© The Vancouver Sun 2008