Swiss Butter rise down to secret steak sauce and Lebanese resilience, says CEO

Yahoo

20-04-2025

When Eddy Massaad's original Swiss Butter restaurant was destroyed by the Beirut blast tragedy in August 2020, resilience and a community rebuild saw the steakhouse open again 30 days later.
'We're used to different challenges, especially when we're coming out from Lebanon,' says Massaad. 'We got used to being pragmatic and problem solvers, going through any crisis and coming out positively.'
Swiss Butter started its expansion in late 2021, opening 10 restaurants within a year, including its first London location. Now turning over a healthy eight figures, CEO and founder Massaad is aiming for 100 locations within five years of his viral restaurant brand and steak frites sauce dining experience.
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Massaad had turned to the industry out of necessity. Needing to pay for college tuition to study biochemistry, he began to learn about restaurant management, became a store manager and then started in services as a freelancer.
In 2010, he launched his own hospitality management services company. 'The first couple of years were very difficult just to prove myself at the market,' he recalls. 'I landed contracts but there were always insecurities in the service business. If I lost one client, I had to scale down my team.'
Massaad drafted a three-pronged strategy — to expand to the Gulf area, find a master franchise for one of his clients and build his own brand. The first two failed, the third saw him set up Swiss Butter.
'If I failed doing that, and this is what I'm supposed to be an expert in, then that would be the end of the road and I would lose credibility in the restaurant business,' he admits today.
In 2017, Swiss Butter had launched in Beirut next door to where Massaad attended school. 'We imagined the customer experience and planned it backwards and reverse engineered the whole process," he says of the business plan.
With it came their "secret" sauce – which has 33 ingredients, including herbs, spices and butter paste – created by Massaad's chef brother and has become the restaurant's hallmark.
'He had his personal challenge to crack that sauce that is over 100 years old. And once he achieved the result, we used to taste it together, tune and adjust it,' says Massaad.
By 2015, Massaad took the recipe on instead of his brother selling and the pair later became restaurant holding partners.
'I was on a mission to remodel one of my client's restaurant model to fit the UK market," adds Massaad, "and I learned a lot about what is required as part of the concept DNA to make it in a big city like London or New York.
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'I did the planning in detail and this is where it hit me. I wanted the quick service restaurant efficiency. I planned Swiss Butter to combine both the highest efficiency with the full experience and the value of a full-service restaurant.'
Swiss Butter has three mains as its menu: steak, chicken or salmon, with fries and its signature sauce, along with two dessert options. Its success so far highlights a growing consumer shift towards "single-item, high-quality concepts".
'We removed all the anxiety that the customer might encounter during the experience and the journey,' says Massaad. 'The big menu is one of the anxieties that anyone can get when walking into a restaurant. It's like watching Netflix (NFLX) and you took the same amount of time trying to find which movie to start.'
The Lebanese entrepreneur says a ''no franchising, no shortcuts' outlook has maintained the restaurant quality and brand experience, while consumer-generated content has been its best form of marketing, with the restaurant garnering high visibility across social media platforms.
Maintaining consistency, adds Massaad, is also a daily battle for Swiss Butter and admits entering new markets has also been challenging.
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'The UK start point wasn't easy. Setting up the business, that was the easy part. Finding a location was difficult as landlords will not accept a new brand coming in from outside.'
By hook or by crook, Massaad has overcome the hurdles. Perhaps it's down to a 'pragmatic analytical approach' from his biochemistry days to maintain industry standards.
Swiss Butter currently has around 570 employees globally, with its Swiss Butter Academy for food safety standards and succession programme marking Massaad's approach to longevity in the industry.
'That's the big vision,' he says. 'To spread our experience to every major city in the world.'
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