🔒Westport-based restaurant consultant Mark Moeller has found ‘The Recipe of Success’

Mark Moeller started in the restaurant business when he was 15 years old.

It was mom’s orders.

At that time, she was the director of housekeeping for a Ramada Inn in Montville, New Jersey.

“She called me up on a Saturday morning and said, ‘Mark, tell your father to take you to the mall,’” Moeller recalled recently. “Get a white shirt, black tie and black belt, and wear your black pants, your black socks and black shoes. Be here at four o’clock.”

Moeller, being a teenager, protested. “I was like, ‘Okay, mom, I have a party to go to tonight, remember?’ She said, ‘Did you hear me ask you?’”

And thus his restaurant career began because his mom’s hotel needed a busboy.

In the four decades since he first cleared plates, glasses and utensils off of a table, Moeller worked his way through local restaurants and national chains in a variety of service and management roles before finally founding a restaurant consulting business.

In the 25 years since opening The Recipe of Success, based out of his home in Westport, he has worked with more than 350 establishments in 22 states, offering restaurateurs advice on everything from operations to recipes.

More recently, he founded a second business, The Restaurant COO, offering another way to help restaurateurs succeed, and a networking group called the New England Culinary Group, which offers restaurant service providers a monthly forum to discuss industry trends.

That’s a lot on one man’s plate, but the 57-year-old Moeller says he has an ulterior motive.

“I tell people that my goal is to work with as many restaurateurs all over the country as possible so that, selfishly, I can have a great place to go and eat whenever I’m in town,” he quipped.

Learning the business

While his first restaurant job was as a busboy, Moeller quickly worked his way up to server and, later, became a bartender.

“I also became a prep cook and dishwasher,” he said, adding that because it was a hotel, he also was asked at times to do housekeeping chores and even “did a little bit of front desk work.”

When he turned 18, he took on a second job as a server, first at a restaurant called Noodle in a Haystack, and later at an Italian restaurant called BYOB.

He had worked there for a year when the owner said he wanted out of the business and offered Moeller the chance to run BYOB.

“I said, ‘That’s awful kind of you, but I’ve got two issues,’” Moeller said.

First, he had promised his parents he would go to college and had enrolled in Johnson & Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island. Second, he said, “I was 19 at the time, so I couldn’t buy the cooking wine I needed to run the restaurant.”

After graduating from college with an associate degree in hotel food and beverage management, he worked for another Ramada Inn before moving on.

He joined Roy Rogers restaurants for three years, first as an assistant manager, then as a general manager, and then overseeing service, quality and sanitation for all restaurants in a region.

He was subsequently recruited by Caldor, the former department store chain, which was opening franchises of Nathan’s Famous and Sbarro.

“I opened up 40 locations in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland,” he said.

He followed that by working for Chock Full ‘O Nuts coffee in their cafe division, and for Cosi, a sandwich and pizza restaurant chain now based in Boston.

By the books

While all of that restaurant management experience was valuable, it was something he first learned in college that set him on his future career path.

“It was 1987, and I heard this term ‘consulting,’” Moeller said. “I had an idea what it was, but I wanted to learn more. So, I went to Barnes & Noble and I bought four books on consulting. Not restaurant consulting, just consulting in general. And I read them cover to cover, twice.”

He told himself that “someday I’m going to get into this,” and that day came more than a decade later, when he left Cosi.

“I was supposed to be getting promoted, but I couldn’t move to the Boston area,” he said. So, he accepted a severance package.

“It was perfect timing; that launched my consulting business.”

He first worked as a consultant for Joanne’s Gourmet Pizza in New York, then with The Pump Energy Food, which he later helped sell to investors and now operates as Dig restaurant.

In his first dozen years as a consultant, he served three main clients, Moeller said.

“It was great, because it was a steady source of income that I was able to supplement with some of the other smaller clients,” he said. “Sometimes it was helping with equipment specs or doing a training program, or developing some recipes for them, and I just continued to build on that.”

As a consultant and mentor, he helps clients manage “the bigger picture,” he said, including financials, operations, marketing and branding. For the past 10 years, he has worked with the Women’s Business Development Council in Stamford, providing his experience and insight especially to startup ventures.

Cucina Daniella

That includes Cucina Daniella, or Dani’s Pantry, an Italian specialty food business owned by Daniella Palazzolo in Darien.

Palazzolo said her business would not exist without Moeller’s help.

“I don’t believe this would have been possible without him, because I don’t know what I don’t know,” she said.

“In Daniella’s case, she was a farmer’s market chef,” Moeller said. “She would sell her wares and was getting a great response. But at some point they need their own kitchen.”

It took a while, but he finally helped her find the ideal space for her shop, one large enough to be productive but small enough so she could limit the size of her staff, which “gives her an opportunity to be profitable faster,” Moeller said.

In many cases, he said, the people who start restaurants know food but don’t know business.

“If you don’t have the financial acumen, then you need somebody to sit by your side to walk you through each and every item that you’re going to need,” Moeller said.

In addition, he said, it’s not just about how much money you need to start a restaurant, or any business.

“It’s also about your three-year projections,” Moeller said. “How much revenue are you going to be making? … If you don’t show (a bank) viability, and understand that you can only spend 30% of your cost on goods and 30% on your payroll, what do you do when those numbers go awry?”

Consulting also allows him to work primarily remotely, while heading out on the road for other clients to help with opening a location. He also can do a financial analysis of a client’s operations, “trying to help restaurants improve their bottom line,” he said.

Moeller said he currently has clients in Connecticut, New York and Florida, though he has also worked with restaurants on the West Coast.

The COO

While continuing to work with his consulting clients, Moeller also has recently ramped up his new Restaurant COO business. One of his clients is the first franchisee of Schmackary’s, a cookie bakery that was founded on Broadway in Manhattan.

In general, most of the organizations he will work with have at least three locations, he said, “because you need to bring on somebody with C-suite experience to bring that expertise to help you grow properly and minimize the mistakes along the way.”

As busy as he is keeping all of his business plates spinning, Moeller also has a personal life. He describes himself as “extremely family oriented” and shares his home with his fiancée, Lucy Molina. Combined, they have six children.

Not surprisingly, Moeller is the chef at home and does all the cooking.

While he has had a long career in consulting, Moeller says he has been approached with job offers from major restaurant chains, including one from Panera Bread.

“It’s an entrepreneurial company, but the processes and procedures were already in place,” he said. “I did not have the ability to improve upon those or change those. … There wasn’t enough there to keep me satisfied, to keep me happy.”

He adds that he has officially been in the restaurant business, in one form or another, for 42 years, but hasn’t “worked a day in 37 years” because he enjoys what he does.

And how does he define that?

“Helping people realize their dreams and their visions come true,” he said.