The restaurant industry has a way of humbling people who come in from the outside. Luma Makhlouf, a Palestinian-American, finance-trained, former tech sales powerhouse, came in from very far outside. Today, she co-runs P&B Companies, a multi-brand portfolio in Dubai that includes Maiz, Maiz Tacos, Good Burger, Luma’s Cakes, and Bread Catering. In this Restrocast, Ashish Tulsian talks to Luma about identity, bootstrapping, business karma, and why the P&L is the only noise worth listening to.
You didn’t start in food. Where did you actually begin?
Luma Makhlouf: I graduated in finance and business, and worked in that world for a long time. Did I ever think I’d own a food truck, let alone five kitchens across multiple brands? Absolutely not. But I’d always been obsessed with food. My earliest core memory is running home to find out what my mom had cooked, mostly Palestinian food. I asked to go to culinary school when I was in high school in Chicago. There was actually one nearby. They came and did a presentation at my school. But we were a brown family, you become a doctor or an engineer, not a chef. So it waited.
When I moved to Dubai on my own, I had to learn to cook from scratch. I was Skyping my mom late at night from my apartment, learning her recipes, waiting for my flatmates to fall asleep so I could have the kitchen to myself. That love just grew from there, dinner parties, hosting friends, until I eventually went to culinary school on weekends while still working in tech.
You spent years in tech startups before F&B. What did that world actually teach you?
Luma Makhlouf: Business is sales, fundamentally. Whether you’re pitching investors, hiring staff, negotiating with a supplier, or onboarding a new client, you’re always selling your why. Those years in biz dev at GoNabit, at Aimia, across various startups, have trained something in me at a structural level. It became my blueprint. I learned how to be in a room and make people remember you long after you’ve left. That’s something I still use every single day in F&B.
You opened your first brick-and-mortar six months before COVID. How did you survive that?
Luma Makhlouf: I was six months pregnant, painting the walls of our JLT restaurant, when the rumors started. We opened, and COVID hit. Haider called me, and I remember the devastation of that moment. We had just opened, and everything was shutting down. But then I stopped. It’s a pandemic. No one saw this coming. We pivoted immediately. We got on camera and said we’re homegrown, we’re a family business. Timeout created pre-purchase vouchers to support us. We figured it out.
What I’ll never forget is that I was in the hospital, my water broke at 30 weeks, and I was on bed rest for five weeks. My doctor knew I was opening a restaurant, and she let me leave to be there for the opening. Two hours in, I started feeling dizzy and went back. The next morning, they induced me. Maiz opened one day, and Ayla was born the next. And during a 22-hour labor, my laptop was open, and I was watching the restaurant.
You’ve built almost entirely on word of mouth. How did that become a deliberate strategy?
Luma Makhlouf: I call it business karma. The theory is simple: you deliver 10 out of 10 every single time, regardless of the client or the size of the booking. Whether it’s a baby shower for 30 people or catering for Emirates Airlines, you show up the same way. That reputation compounds. It comes back around.
I had a client once, turns out he’s a major entrepreneur who owns creative agencies, and after his baby shower booking, I sent him a small hamper just to say thank you. He called me and said he had never received a thank you from a caterer. That moment is the entire point. We have never paid an influencer. We don’t run ad campaigns. Everything we have built has come from that compounding word of mouth.
You still set up catering activations yourself. People question why.
Luma Makhlouf: It’s strategic. If it’s our first time working with Emirates Airlines, you better believe I’m going to be there. If I’m working with Bloomberg News or a major brand for the first time, I want to be present. People tell me I shouldn’t still be doing this nine years in. But nine years ago, I wasn’t working with Emirates. The milestone is exactly the reason to show up personally, not to delegate. Being a CEO doesn’t mean removing yourself from the things that matter. It means knowing which things those are.
What would you say to a restaurateur who’s doing well at one location but feeling pressure to scale?
Luma Makhlouf: What’s your goal? Decide that early, because F&B is not forgiving, and the paths are very different. Do you want to exit in ten years? Do you want a franchise? Do you want a profitable shop you love running? There is no wrong answer, but there is a wrong answer for you if you don’t know what you actually want.
I see people chasing what everyone else is doing, opening in CityWalk because everyone’s opening there, doing delivery because everyone’s doing delivery. SALT doesn’t deliver. Their burger doesn’t travel well, and they know it, so they don’t. That kind of clarity is rare, and it’s powerful. Don’t scale in ways that dilute what makes you good.
You said you’re drowning out the noise more now. What changed?
Luma Makhlouf: I woke up and realized none of it is real. What people show you on social media and in press releases, that’s the good side. No one is showing you the end of a month where they haven’t been profitable in six months. I’ve been profitable for a long time. That’s what matters. I had to get out of my own head and stop comparing my internal reality to everyone else’s external performance. The P&L is the only noise worth listening to.
What keeps you going creatively after ten years?
Luma Makhlouf: I chase the high of solving a problem. Negotiating a better price on an ingredient I import from Mexico, reducing 2% on a P&L line, and closing a catering deal with a brand I’ve been chasing. And catering and events, I think that’s in my soul because we started as a food truck. Nothing excites me more than closing a deal and then showing up and executing it flawlessly. That union of the sales and the craft, that’s my playground.
We’re opening our first central kitchen. I’m launching new concepts before the end of the year. I can’t believe this is my life, and it’s all ours. Haider and I built it from nothing, didn’t take outside investment, failed plenty of times, and kept going. That’s the only story I know how to tell.
Conclusion
Luma’s journey defies easy description. She is a finance mind, a self-taught cook, a former tech executive, and a Palestinian woman who found her haven and purpose in the food scene in Dubai. The one thing that ties it all together is the one rule she’s lived by: “Do extraordinary work, be incredibly thankful for the people who choose you, and the compounding effect of reputation will carry the day. Ten years, five brands, zero paid influencers… the P&L doesn’t lie.”
