Who is Brian Fantoni?
on his approach…
“We want start-ups of all sizes to know they have some expert hands to help and some knowing shoulders to lean on.”
Brian Fantoni is an award winning chef with 20 years-experience having won the national final of ‘LeTaittinger‘ in 2004 and as a finalist at the international event. ‘Le Taittinger’ award’s mission is to celebrate and promote the excellence of classic French cuisine, recognising the talent of young chefs through an international culinary competition of the highest level.
Starting his career as a commis chef at The Savoy Hotel in London, he rose quickly through the ranks, leaving his tenure as chef tournant. He then went on to spend six years at Claridge’s where he became premiere sous-chef under Claridge’s executive chef Martyn Nail. Fantoni then took his first head chef role at Enoteca Turi an independent Italian restaurant in Central London specialising in authentic regional Italian cuisine, winning Harden’s award for the Best Italian Restaurant in London in 2006 and 27/30 for food in the Zagat guide, igniting his love of wine and food pairing.
D&D’s south bank restaurant Cantina del Ponte then headhunted Fantoni as head chef where he spent a further three years. He subsequently re-joined his Claridge’s colleague Elias Yiallouris, devising and running the opening of The Gallery Restaurant at the Westbury Hotel in London.
“‘Brian is an accomplished chef, great colleague and a team builder. His breadth of experience goes from 5 star hotels to busy neighbourhood restaurants. The industry is crying out for support in finding skilled chefs, solving problems in poorly run kitchens and staff retention. Brian helped me build a world class team - he is perfectly positioned to make Fantoni Gastronomy an integral and crucial service to any catering business, be it a start-up, developing, established, big or small.’”
What is fantoni Gastronomy?
Fantoni Gastronomy is designed to support new catering and hospitality businesses in their
pre and post opening strategies and implementation.
The south-London based consultancy provides a range of services to create, devise and deliver support and strategy in structure planning, staffing, training, mentoring and pre and post launch plans – all with a view to address the issue of poor staff retention in the restaurant trade. Fantoni Gastronomy specialises in consultancy for hotels, restaurants and cafes that have an ambition of delivering high quality but with low burnout.
“I’ve been studying the market for some time now to try and work out how to best lend my experience to make our industry more sustainable and attractive to young people starting out. In these particularly uncertain times, the consultancy is designed to make sure all those years of experience can help businesses work most effectively to avoid mistakes and crucially, burnout.
Approximately 10% (20,000) of newcomers leave our trade and 1/5th of UK restaurant businesses fail. We want to help start-ups of all sizes know they have some expert hands to help and some knowing shoulders to rest on.”