José Andrés Group appointed Sam Bakhshandehpour as the restaurant group’s first CEO just over a year ago, after chef Andrés stepped back into a founder role to focus on World Central Kitchen. Before moving into a CEO role, Bakhshandehpour served as president of the restaurant group and was essentially leading the business for some time before it was made official.
“I call [José Andrés] the chief spiritual officer for the company, because he set the tone over three decades on our standards of culinary and has trained dozens of chefs and team members,” Bakhshandehpour said. “I talk to him regularly, but he’s less involved in the day-to-day operations of the restaurants as much as he is on the media and philanthropy side.”
José Andrés Group currently has 45 restaurants and one of Bakhshandehpour’s main goals is to continue expanding the restaurant’s global reach, mainly through hotel partnerships, where, he said, the company would ideally run most or all of the hotel’s food and beverage program. He will be looking to open new restaurants primarily in the Western United States (like Arizona, Southern California, Nevada, and Colorado) and in the Middle East internationally, in markets like Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar.
Bakhshandehpour said that moving forward, he wants to focus primarily on expanding the group’s Bazaar meat concept, the Mediterranean restaurant Zaytinya, and a yet-to-be-announced entirely new concept.
“The spirit of all this is rooted in Spain, and we’re very particular about making sure we find the right Spanish opportunities,” he said. “In addition to incorporating the spirit of Spain into everything we do, like with our Spanish steakhouse division that we’re launching, and Bazaar meat has a lot of similarities to some of the most iconic meat experiences in the world that happened to come out of Spain.”
When it comes to expansion strategy, Bakhshandehpour said José Andrés Group will also be taking a look at secondary markets. For example, while he feels the company has “hit critical mass” in Las Vegas, there are still opportunities in nearby secondary markets “within a stone’s throw” of the primary city.
Bakhshandehpour said the company is also looking into licensing the José Andrés name to hotel projects and this is the second phase of expansion the hospitality group will be focusing on.
“José established a brand, and it’s doing well, but that will translate into a spirit of changing the world through the power of food that has built our group brands,” he said. “For decades, people have been preparing for this next expansion phase of licensing and driving traffic. We’ve proven it time and again with restaurants inside of hotels and have had such a successful track record of doing that, judging by how many hotels are in our pipeline, and the number of people in the industry reaching out. That is the beauty of the depth of our bench.”
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