{"id":21021,"date":"2026-05-15T08:26:04","date_gmt":"2026-05-15T08:26:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.restroworks.com\/blog\/?p=21021"},"modified":"2026-05-15T08:26:05","modified_gmt":"2026-05-15T08:26:05","slug":"luma-makhlouf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.restroworks.com\/blog\/luma-makhlouf\/","title":{"rendered":"How Luma Makhlouf Built a Multi-Brand F&amp;B Business on Reputation Alone"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t<div data-elementor-type=\"wp-post\" data-elementor-id=\"21021\" class=\"elementor elementor-21021\" data-elementor-post-type=\"post\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-7fc64e8d e-flex e-con-boxed e-con e-parent\" data-id=\"7fc64e8d\" data-element_type=\"container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"e-con-inner\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-5df6bcc4 elementor-widget elementor-widget-text-editor\" data-id=\"5df6bcc4\" data-element_type=\"widget\" data-widget_type=\"text-editor.default\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<p>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&amp;B Companies, a multi-brand portfolio in Dubai that includes Maiz, Maiz Tacos, Good Burger, Luma&#8217;s Cakes, and Bread Catering. In this Restrocast, Ashish Tulsian talks to Luma about identity, bootstrapping, business karma, and why the P&amp;L is the only noise worth listening to.<\/p>\n<p><iframe title=\"How Luma Makhlouf Built a Multi-Brand F&amp;B Business on Reputation Alone\" width=\"1140\" height=\"641\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/TO6B4IPED4E?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen loading=\"lazy\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><!-- \/wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --><\/p>\n<p><strong>You didn&#8217;t start in food. Where did you actually begin?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><!-- \/wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --><\/p>\n<p><strong>Luma Makhlouf:<\/strong> I graduated in finance and business, and worked in that world for a long time. Did I ever think I&#8217;d own a food truck, let alone five kitchens across multiple brands? Absolutely not. But I&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p><!-- \/wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --><\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p><!-- \/wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --><\/p>\n<p><strong>You spent years in tech startups before F&amp;B. What did that world actually teach you?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><!-- \/wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --><\/p>\n<p><strong>Luma Makhlouf: <\/strong>Business is sales, fundamentally. Whether you&#8217;re pitching investors, hiring staff, negotiating with a supplier, or onboarding a new client, you&#8217;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&#8217;ve left. That&#8217;s something I still use every single day in F&amp;B.<\/p>\n<p><!-- \/wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --><\/p>\n<p><strong>You opened your first brick-and-mortar six months before COVID. How did you survive that?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><!-- \/wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --><\/p>\n<p><strong>Luma Makhlouf:<\/strong> 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&#8217;s a pandemic. No one saw this coming. We pivoted immediately. We got on camera and said we&#8217;re homegrown, we&#8217;re a family business. Timeout created pre-purchase vouchers to support us. We figured it out.<\/p>\n<p><!-- \/wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --><\/p>\n<p>What I&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p><!-- \/wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --><\/p>\n<p><strong>You&#8217;ve built almost entirely on word of mouth. How did that become a deliberate strategy?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><!-- \/wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --><\/p>\n<p><strong>Luma Makhlouf: <\/strong>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&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p><!-- \/wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --><\/p>\n<p>I had a client once, turns out he&#8217;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&#8217;t run ad campaigns. Everything we have built has come from that compounding word of mouth.<\/p>\n<p><!-- \/wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --><\/p>\n<p><strong>You still set up catering activations yourself. People question why.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><!-- \/wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --><\/p>\n<p><strong>Luma Makhlouf:<\/strong> It&#8217;s strategic. If it&#8217;s our first time working with Emirates Airlines, you better believe I&#8217;m going to be there. If I&#8217;m working with Bloomberg News or a major brand for the first time, I want to be present. People tell me I shouldn&#8217;t still be doing this nine years in. But nine years ago, I wasn&#8217;t working with Emirates. The milestone is exactly the reason to show up personally, not to delegate. Being a CEO doesn&#8217;t mean removing yourself from the things that matter. It means knowing which things those are.<\/p>\n<p><!-- \/wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --><\/p>\n<p><strong>What would you say to a restaurateur who&#8217;s doing well at one location but feeling pressure to scale?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><!-- \/wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --><\/p>\n<p><strong>Luma Makhlouf: <\/strong>What&#8217;s your goal? Decide that early, because F&amp;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 <em>you<\/em> if you don&#8217;t know what you actually want.<\/p>\n<p><!-- \/wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --><\/p>\n<p>I see people chasing what everyone else is doing, opening in CityWalk because everyone&#8217;s opening there, doing delivery because everyone&#8217;s doing delivery. SALT doesn&#8217;t deliver. Their burger doesn&#8217;t travel well, and they know it, so they don&#8217;t. That kind of clarity is rare, and it&#8217;s powerful. Don&#8217;t scale in ways that dilute what makes you good.<\/p>\n<p><!-- \/wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --><\/p>\n<p><strong>You said you&#8217;re drowning out the noise more now. What changed?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><!-- \/wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --><\/p>\n<p><strong>Luma Makhlouf: <\/strong>I woke up and realized none of it is real. What people show you on social media and in press releases, that&#8217;s the good side. No one is showing you the end of a month where they haven&#8217;t been profitable in six months. I&#8217;ve been profitable for a long time. That&#8217;s what matters. I had to get out of my own head and stop comparing my internal reality to everyone else&#8217;s external performance. The P&amp;L is the only noise worth listening to.<\/p>\n<p><!-- \/wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --><\/p>\n<p><strong>What keeps you going creatively after ten years?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><!-- \/wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --><\/p>\n<p><strong>Luma Makhlouf:<\/strong> I chase the high of solving a problem. Negotiating a better price on an ingredient I import from Mexico, reducing 2% on a P&amp;L line, and closing a catering deal with a brand I&#8217;ve been chasing. And catering and events, I think that&#8217;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&#8217;s my playground.<\/p>\n<p><!-- \/wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --><\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;re opening our first central kitchen. I&#8217;m launching new concepts before the end of the year. I can&#8217;t believe this is my life, and it&#8217;s all ours. Haider and I built it from nothing, didn&#8217;t take outside investment, failed plenty of times, and kept going. That&#8217;s the only story I know how to tell.<\/p>\n<p><!-- \/wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --><\/p>\n<p><strong>Conclusion<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><!-- \/wp:paragraph --><!-- wp:paragraph --><\/p>\n<p>Luma&#8217;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&#8217;s lived by: &#8220;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&#8230; the P&amp;L doesn&#8217;t lie.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><!-- \/wp:paragraph --><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&amp;B Companies, a multi-brand portfolio in Dubai that includes Maiz, Maiz Tacos, Good Burger, Luma&#8217;s Cakes, and Bread Catering. In this Restrocast, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":21095,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21021","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-restrocast-podcast"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.restroworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.restroworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.restroworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.restroworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.restroworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21021"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.restroworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21021\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21062,"href":"https:\/\/www.restroworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21021\/revisions\/21062"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.restroworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21095"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.restroworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.restroworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.restroworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}