Resilience and community reconstruction made the steakhouse open again in August 2020 when Eddy Massaad’s original Swiss butter restaurant was destroyed by the tragedy of Beirut explosion, 30 days later.
“We are used to different challenges, especially when we come out of Lebanon,” Massaad said. “We are used to being pragmatic and problem-solving people, going through any crisis and showing up positively.”
Swiss Butter began its expansion in late 2021, opening 10 restaurants in a year, including its first London location. Currently, CEO and founder Massaad is now moving a healthy eight-digit number to target 100 locations within five years of his viral restaurant brand and steak cake sauce dining experience.
Read more: People say this is impossible
Massaad turned to the industry out of necessity. He needed to pay college tuition to study biochemistry, he began to learn about restaurant management, became a store manager, and then worked as a freelancer.
In 2010, he established his own hotel management service company. “It was hard to prove myself in the market in the past few years,” he recalls. “I had a contract, but there was always insecurity in the service business. If I lost a client, I had to shrink the team.”
Massaad drafted a three-pronged strategy – expanding into the Bay Area, finding a master franchise for one of his clients and building his own brand. The first two failed, and the third saw him set up Swiss butter.
He admitted: “If I fail, that’s why I should be an expert, that’s the end of the road and I’m going to lose credibility in the restaurant business.”
In 2017, Swiss Butter launched the place where Massaad went to school in Beirut next door. “We imagine the customer experience and reverse it and reverse the whole process,” he said of the business plan.
With it comes their “secret” sauce (including 33 ingredients including herbs, spices and butter paste), created by Massaad's chef brothers and has become a restaurant's icon.
“He faces personal challenges for cracking sauces that have been around for more than 100 years. Once he gets the results, we will taste, tweak and tweak it,” Massaad said.
By 2015, Massaad had obtained the recipe instead of his brother for sale and later became a restaurant Handing Partners.
Massaad added: “My mission is to revamp one of the restaurant models of the customers to fit the UK market.” I learned a lot about what I needed in a big city like London or New York.
