Acquiring and growing exceptional hospitality brands.
Hestia backs world-class founders and management teams with the capital, infrastructure and leadership to build restaurant groups into global brands.
1,000+
sites opened and run
£5bn
of businesses built
Fortune 500
brands advised
£500m+
target portfolio
The leadership team
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ADVISOR TO THE CEO
JUSTIN KING CBE
Justin is Chair of Allwyn, operator of the National Lottery, and Chair of Dexters Real Estate. He was Chief Executive of Sainsbury’s for ten years, leading the business through a major turnaround, and previously Vice Chairman of Terra Firma.
He was a board member of the London Olympic Organising Committee and the Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Group, and was appointed CBE in 2011.
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PROPERTY DIRECTOR
RICHARD WASSELL
Richard has worked in commercial property for over thirty-five years. He established Carter Wassell in 1990 and in 2005 formed TwentyRetail, advising retail and restaurant brands on property.
He was one of the four founding board members of The People’s Supermarket on Lamb’s Conduit Street, set up as an alternative to the big supermarkets and to give people recovering from addiction or leaving prison a route into work. He was among the first Chairmen of the Shop Agents Society and has chaired the Restaurant Property Advisors Society.
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FOUNDER & CEO
ANDREW FISHWICK
Andrew is Chief Executive of Hestia. Before returning to hospitality he produced more than two dozen West End and Broadway shows, winning Tony, Olivier and Evening Standard Theatre Awards, and built and ran theatres including the first new purpose-built theatre in London for over half a century.
He founded SALT, the food and drink marketing consultancy, and was its Executive Chair; he is a Non-Executive Director of All Things Bloom, co-founded the hospitality training charity Home Kitchen, has sat on the board of the British Institute of Innkeeping and mentored for the King’s Trust. He is a Fellow of the RSA, holds an MBA from Warwick Business School, was awarded the Freedom of the City of London and is a Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Entrepreneurs.
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STRATEGIC FINANCE DIRECTOR
SIMON JONSSON
Simon has over thirty-five years’ experience in the accountancy profession, including twenty-four years as a partner at KPMG. His background is in M&A and international and family office taxation, with particular depth in the food and packaging sectors.
He is an experienced non-executive director and board adviser, a former Prince of Wales Ambassador for Socially Responsible Business and a former advisory board chair for Business in the Community.
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ADVISOR TO THE BOARD
TOM KRISTENSEN
Tom has spent fifteen years as a finance director in hospitality. He was CFO of Rosa’s Thai for eight years alongside the founders, through to its sale to private equity, and later CFO and then CEO of Ceviche and Andina. He is a co-founder of and investor in TipJar, now Europe’s largest provider of cashless tipping.
He began as an equity analyst at Linde and Partners in his native Denmark and was CFO of Plymouth Argyle Football Club from 2009 to 2011. He holds an Executive MBA from Bayes Business School and an MSc in Accountancy.
Operators, brand builders and financiers who have opened over a thousand sites between them.
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Partner, Wedlake Bell
SIMON LONGFIELD
FINANCE ADVISOR
Simon advises on the finance side of Hestia’s acquisition programme, supporting the buy-side process and acting as finance lead to CBGM and the lending banks. He is a Fellow of the ICAEW, a member of the Institute for Turnaround, and holds an ICAEW insolvency licence.
Simon joined FRP as a Partner in the Financial Advisory team in 2020 and now works with the firm in a consultancy capacity, alongside a non-executive director role at Embrace Steel Group and an advisory role with Clara-Pensions Group. He spent more than twenty years as a restructuring and financial advisory partner at major London firms before working as an independent consultant on transformation and shareholder value restoration for public and private equity-backed companies, with assignments across hospitality, steel, healthcare, retail and leisure.
JULIAN MATHEWS
Julian is a corporate partner at the London law firm Wedlake Bell, specialising in mergers and acquisitions, private equity and venture capital, with a particular focus on the hospitality and leisure sectors.
Admitted as a solicitor in 1996, he joined Wedlake Bell in 2013, having previously been a partner at Dundas & Wilson and at DLA.
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ADVISOR TO THE BOARD
STEVE SMITH
Steve has spent over thirty years in financial markets, twenty-seven of them at Morgan Stanley, where he was a senior sales executive in European and then global equities and hosted the firm’s flagship macro conference in London.
For thirteen years he sat on the firm’s European Equity Underwriting Committee, overseeing 150 IPOs and numerous rights issues and secondary offerings. He read Economics and Politics at the University of York.
Creative flair, operational discipline
Our mission
We acquire premium restaurant groups and give their founders the capital, infrastructure and leadership to grow.
Who we are
Hestia is led by operators. The executive team has built businesses worth some £5bn and delivered brand work for Fortune 500 hospitality companies. Every investment is supported centrally: HR, operations, sales and marketing, financial oversight, M&A and board-level experience.
What we believe
We believe hospitality is one of the most valuable things a business can offer: a room where people meet, talk and come back.
Hestia exists to back the founders who create those rooms, and to give them what they need to build brands that last.
Our strategy
Profitable, well-loved brands with a clear roll-out plan, spanning Michelin-starred restaurants, private members’ clubs and all-day dining.
Our objective
A £500m-plus premium hospitality portfolio of ten brands within five years.
Our approach
Operate
Led by the Hestia operations team and an extended advisory network, every brand in the portfolio is run by people who have done it before.
Property
Site identification, due diligence and legal completion, managed through long relationships with the best landlords and agents and led by Richard Wassell.
Build brands
Positioning, differentiation and the marketing calendar, drawn from the executive team’s work for some of the world’s largest hospitality and consumer companies.
Use data
Customer profiles and behavioural data pooled across the group to monetise and refine service and culture.
Incubate and accelerate
A central function that develops new concepts and scales proven ones, with shared operations and a forum for founders to exchange ideas.
Sustainability
Resource-efficient, end-to-end supply chain and ESG practice across provenance, construction, operation and renovation.