A consultancy, running every week instead of every fiscal quarter.
Couverté was founded by Sagar Sharma, a former F&B director who spent his career inside New York hospitality before deciding the way restaurants buy advice had to change. This is the longer version of that story — where the conviction came from, and what it became.
The path here
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The Plaza years
Plaza HotelI started in operations, not in software. For years I led F&B at Plaza Hotel — a property where the food and beverage program is not a line item but part of the institution's reputation. You learn quickly that a hotel restaurant is judged by a different standard than the room rate. A guest forgives a slow elevator. They do not forgive a flat plate at the price you charged for it. That standard taught me to read a menu the way a P&L reads it — every dish carrying a cost, a margin, a place in the room, and a reason to be there.
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The Equinox years
Equinox HotelsI left to build the food program at Equinox Hotels from a much earlier point — closer to the concept than the kitchen. A new program forces a different discipline than an established one. There is no inherited menu to defend; every item is a decision you have to justify, and every decision is made against a market that does not wait for you. I spent those years doing the work by hand: pulling the numbers, reading the comp set, rewriting descriptions, repricing, watching, adjusting. It worked. It was also slower than the market it was trying to keep up with.
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Founding Couverté
Couverté came out of a frustration I could name precisely. The analysis that made a menu work was not mysterious — it was menu engineering, revenue management, pricing psychology, decades of published research, plus the operator's judgment about whether a dish belonged on the room at all. The mystery was the delivery model. That rigor arrived as an annual consulting engagement, a five-figure binder, a quarterly review at best. The market moved every week. The advice moved once a fiscal year. I started Couverté to close that gap.
The thesis
Hospitality consulting is not wrong. It is rebuilt-able. The frameworks a good consultant uses are credible, cited, and largely stable — what is not stable is your menu, your costs, and your competitors. When the inputs change weekly and the analysis runs annually, the advice is stale before it is read. Couverté's premise is that the consulting engagement itself — the deep first read, the ranked set of decisions, the operator-grade judgment — can be rebuilt as software that runs continuously. Not a dashboard that hands you forty metrics and no decision. A consultant's output: a short, ranked set of actions, in the voice of the kind of restaurant you actually run, refreshed against the market every week.
Why this now
Two things changed. The cost environment stopped being predictable — ingredient prices, labour, and rent now move on a schedule no annual review can track, which means the gap between when a problem appears and when the old model catches it has become expensive. And the analysis that used to require a room full of analysts can now be run by software held to the same standard, with a critic pass before any recommendation ships. The wedge is the menu, because the menu is where the rigor is most provable and the result is fastest to see. But the ambition is the whole engagement — the full F&B consultant, rebuilt to run at the speed the business actually moves. The Verdict is where that starts: the consulting engagement, done in five days, for a price an independent restaurant can say yes to.
Couverté is early, and it is built by one operator and a small amount of software, deliberately. The methodology is versioned and cited because it should be checkable, not taken on trust. If that sounds like the kind of advice you have been missing, the Verdict is the place to start.
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