Leadership series: Tomas Maunier

Our Leadership Series feature in-depth interviews with exceptional and inspiring industry leaders.

We are here talking to Tomas Maunier, COO UK & Europe at Fogo De Chão

You started out as an administrative assistant at a notary office in Buenos Aires and ended up co-founding one of the best-known South American dining brands in the UK. Can you walk us through that journey, and how you ended up building a business in Leeds?

It's a funny old journey when you say it out loud like that. Before any of the notary business, home was Sunday asados and churrasco with the whole family, growing up between Brazil and Argentina, that sense of gathering everyone around a fire and a table. My working life started properly in my family's notary office in Buenos Aires when I was about fourteen, then I trained in law for a few years before realising it wasn't for me. I moved into marketing instead, working alongside my father and sister on some lovely international accounts, and I thought that was where I'd stay.

Then in 2007 my wife won a place to come to the UK for a Master's degree, and we came to Yorkshire thinking we'd be here a couple of years or so. Life had other plans. I met someone locally with real restaurant experience, and between his know-how and my passion for people and our roots, Fazenda was born in Leeds in 2010. Nearly two decades on, we're now part of the Fogo de Chão family, the leading Brazilian steakhouse brand in the world. I'm still here, still slightly amazed by it all, and enormously grateful Yorkshire decided to keep us.

What first drew you to hospitality, and what made you believe there was space in the UK for a Brazilian rodizio concept when you launched Fazenda?

Hospitality found me more than I found it. What drew me in wasn't restaurants as an industry, it was the ritual I grew up with: a fire, good meat, good wine, and people staying at the table for hours because nobody wants the evening to end. That's not really a Brazilian thing or an Argentine thing, it's a human thing, and that was my hunch about the UK too. People here already loved going out and making a proper evening of it; I just didn't think anyone had shown them rodizio done properly, tableside, with real theatre to it.

It felt less like importing something foreign and more like offering people an experience they didn't yet know they'd been missing. That belief was completely untested at the time, and looking back, pretty brave, or naive, depending which day you ask me. Fifteen years and six restaurants later, I'd say the hunch held up.

You now run Southern Wind Group and sit as COO UK & Europe for Fogo de Chão UK, two premium steakhouse brands under your leadership. How do you keep them distinct from one another while still letting lessons from one inform the other?

Good chance to clear this up, because it is actually simpler than the question suggests: it is one brand now, not two. Southern Wind Group is just the operating business, the company behind the scenes, the systems, the people, the culture. Fogo de Chão is the only brand we run today. We partnered with Fogo de Chão back in 2024, and have been part of the Fogo family ever since. From last year we started introducing the brand properly to the UK and European market, and this May we took the final step, rebranding every one of our former Fazenda restaurants across the UK under the Fogo de Chão name. So there is no juggling act between two identities. One brand, one standard, one experience, exactly how we like it.

What motivates you day to day, and what part of running these businesses do you find most rewarding?

The people, every time. I love watching someone join us as a gaúcho or a kitchen porter and, three or four years later, they're running a section and training new starters, genuinely thriving. That gets me out of bed more than any spreadsheet ever will.

What motivates me just as much is the bigger picture: bringing the tradition and joy of South America to the heart of every city we open in, and growing the Fogo de Chão brand across Europe. As the brand grows, I want our people to grow with it, and our love of churrasco to grow right alongside them. That's genuinely what we're chasing.

And it goes further than making our own Team happy, as important as that is. What hospitality does, what we do, at its core, is make people happy, our Guests. There's something quietly wonderful about knowing the world needs hospitality, and that we get to make it a slightly better place, one happy table at a time.

Premium dining and steakhouses are feeling a specific mix of pressures right now: rents, meat and wine costs, energy, staffing. What's hitting hardest at the moment, and how are you responding?

It's the combination that hurts more than any single line, but let's not dance around it: beef costs have gone through the roof. Year-on-year beef price inflation has hit as much as 27%, the sharpest jump since records began back in 1988, and meat prices generally are still roughly a quarter higher than they were before the pandemic. It's not just meat either. Food and drink prices in general are up somewhere around 37% since early 2020, and wine and spirits are about to climb again with new duty rates landing in February, so there's genuinely nowhere in the supply chain that's been left untouched. Add energy costs that reset our idea of 'normal' a few years ago, and prime sites, which is where a premium brand has to be, coming with prime rents attached, and none of that is unique to us.

What I'd say is hitting hardest specifically is the labour market: finding and keeping genuinely brilliant hospitality people is harder than it's ever been in my time in this country.

Our answer hasn't changed much in fifteen years, even if it's tested more than ever: invest properly in training and progression so people want to build a career with us rather than just a job, and be as disciplined as we can everywhere else before the menu is ever touched. Some of this does eventually reach the Guest through price, because if we absorbed every cost increase indefinitely, we wouldn't be a strong, growing business in five years' time, we'd just be a generous one on the way out. What I do think we owe the Guest is fairness, any increase reflecting real cost, never greed, and the experience on the plate and around the table staying every bit as good as it's always been.

Looking a few years out, with cost pressures, labour shortages and changing diner expectations all moving at once, what do you think will end up redefining "success" for premium restaurant groups?

I think success stops being purely about site count. For years the instinct in this sector was to expand quickly and prove yourself through scale, but premium dining depends on genuinely exceptional locations and Guests who are willing and able to spend on a special night out, and there aren't unlimited numbers of either. 

The groups who win over the next few years will be the ones who get comfortable growing more slowly and more deliberately, protecting the experience and the margin rather than chasing headlines.

Success will look more like: are Guests coming back a third and fourth time, are your best people staying ten or fifteen years instead of one, and are you still unmistakably yourselves in a market that keeps trying to flatten everything into the same format. Quieter metrics, but the ones that actually keep a business standing in ten years.

How do you keep track of what's changing in dining trends, guest expectations and regulation while running more than one brand at once?

Worth saying again here: we operate as one brand globally now, Fogo de Chão, so 'more than one brand' isn't quite how I'd frame it these days.

I don't get onto site floors as much as I used to, and I think it's important to say that plainly rather than pretend otherwise. What we do have, though, is a brilliant Team of people all around the world who are genuinely at the forefront of the action, people I trust completely and, more importantly, listen to. We don't set out to build managers, we set out to build leaders: people who feel Fogo and think Fogo, who love what they do for our Team and our Guests in equal measure. When you care about something the way they do, you always want it to be better, and that's really how we improve, one person who cares enough to push for better, multiplied across every restaurant we run.

Beyond that, we lean hard on being part of something with forty-seven years of international expertise behind it. We observe, we get out into our restaurants and the industry around us, we talk to Guests and to people across hospitality, and the simplest test we hold ourselves to is this: we only give our Guests what we'd want to be given if we were the ones sitting at the table.

If you were deciding where to put money next, new sites, technology, people, something else, where would you focus it?

People, still, without much hesitation, everything else genuinely follows from that. But I don't want to undersell new sites: growth matters to us, and opening well in the right locations is a real priority. The honest connection is that you can't open new sites properly if you don't have the people ready to run them the way we want them run, so investing in people is, in a very real sense, how we invest in growth.

Technology matters too, more than people might expect, and it's an area we've been investing in seriously and will keep investing in. But that investment is almost entirely about how we run and operate the business behind the scenes, forecasting, scheduling, supply chain, not about what the Guest sees or receives at the table. We're never going to be a business that tries to engineer the human moments away with technology. At the end of the day this will always be a people business, and every pound we spend, on sites, on tech, on training, is really in service of that one thing.

What do you think will separate the steakhouse and premium dining brands still thriving in ten years from the ones that aren't?

It comes down to one word, really: experience. People don't go out simply to eat, they go out to feel something, to feel special, looked after, part of an occasion. The brands still thriving in ten years will be the ones that understand eating out was never really about the food alone, it's about the feeling around it: the service, the warmth of the people looking after you, who you're sitting with, the whole atmosphere of the evening.

Location, the view, how a room is designed, all of that plays its part too, it all feeds into the same feeling. But everything, the food, the service, the room, the people, eventually lands in the same place: one overall experience, one feeling a Guest walks away with. The brands that never lose sight of that, that keep building towards the feeling rather than any single ingredient of it, are the ones that will still matter in ten years.

If you could change one policy or piece of regulation affecting restaurants in the UK, what would it be?

It's less about business rates for me and more about the bigger picture. I'd love to see us rejoin the EU, or short of that, hospitality VAT brought closer to what many of our European neighbours offer, or the recent rise in employer National Insurance contributions reversed. Hospitality is a genuine engine for this economy, yet it keeps being made harder to run one, and I do believe we were stronger, and better connected on people and goods, as part of the EU. Isolation rarely helps anyone; competition and connection do.

That said, I don't spend much time waiting on government to fix things. The economy has been sluggish pretty much globally for a while now, and I think it's on us, as leaders and as citizens, to take responsibility for our own decisions and do what we can, one step at a time, rather than expect politicians to have every answer. There are people who need government help far more urgently than businesses like ours do.

What skills or instincts do you think the next generation of hospitality leaders will need that weren't as important when you started out?

When I started, being a good operator was mostly about the room in front of you, the Guests at your tables, the Team on your floor. That still matters enormously, but the next generation will need to think across markets and cultures much earlier, because brilliant hospitality ideas now travel internationally very quickly, ours included. They'll need real fluency with technology and data without ever letting it get between them and the Guest, and I think they'll need more emotional intelligence than we talked about when I started, real skill in looking after their Teams' wellbeing, not just their rotas.

I'd add three things on top of that. A good leader now can't only manage this quarter's numbers, they need one eye permanently on the long term, on building something with real longevity rather than one great year followed by a shaky one. They'll need to get genuinely comfortable adapting as generations and guest behaviours shift, because what worked for one generation of diners won't automatically work for the next. And they'll need to take sustainability seriously, not as a slogan, but as something that protects the planet and the long-term health of the business in the same breath, the two really aren't separate questions any more.

The instinct for hospitality hasn't changed. The context they'll need to apply it in has got a lot bigger, a lot faster, and a lot longer-term than it used to be.

Looking back at building Fazenda from nothing into a national brand, and now taking on Fogo de Chão UK, what would you point to as your biggest achievement so far?

There's a layer underneath all of this that most people don't see, and it's worth saying: we came to this country leaving everything I'd built behind, no friends, no contacts, starting again completely from zero. We weren't fleeing war or hunger, we came from a good place, to study and to try to do better, and staying was never really the plan. But people rarely understand how much harder it is to succeed as an immigrant, far from your own people, rebuilding from nothing even when you're starting from a position that was already strong. That makes whatever we've achieved here mean more to me, not less.

It's tempting to say opening our first restaurant in Leeds, or getting to London, or becoming part of Fogo de Chão, and all of those genuinely matter to me. But the achievement I'm proudest of is getting our business and our people through 2020 and 2021 in one piece. We came desperately close to losing everything, and we still lost two sites and said goodbye to colleagues I cared about, which has never stopped sitting heavily with me. But we saved the vast majority of jobs, kept the culture alive, and came back stronger, eventually reopening in Birmingham and opening our first restaurant in London. Everything since, including this new chapter with Fogo de Chão, only exists because we got through that. That's the achievement underneath all the others.

What I will say is that Britain, and Yorkshire especially, welcomed us with real warmth when we arrived, and building a life and a business here has only been possible because of that. It's part of why the hate, anger, fear and division I see so much of in the world today makes me genuinely sad, because I know first-hand how much better things can be when people choose to welcome instead.

Maybe that's part of why I ended up in hospitality in the first place, even if I didn't see it that way at the time. At its heart, this industry is about welcoming people in, sharing your culture and letting them share theirs, sharing your life with people you've never met before. It might be the most human act there is, and I feel lucky that it's what I get to do every day.

What's the most important lesson leadership has taught you?

That people will forgive you for a lot, a quiet night, a mistake on their order, a delay in the kitchen, if they can feel that you genuinely value them. What they won't forgive, and shouldn't, is feeling like a number. I learned fairly early that if you get the people side properly right, so much of the rest of the business takes care of itself. What took me longer to learn is how you actually get the people side right, not through better systems, but through vulnerability.

Being transparent, being a real person rather than just a job title, is what makes people believe you when you say you value them. Simon Sinek talks about leaders eating last, and there's real truth in that: whatever you plan for, however hard you prepare, life will always throw you the unexpected, and that's exactly the moment your Team is watching to see whether you're a title or a human being. With the benefit of hindsight, I wish I'd built our training structures and our 'this is who we are' playbook even earlier than I did, it would have saved us some bruises. But that's leadership, isn't it: you learn the important lessons slightly too late to avoid the mistake, just in time to fix the next one, and always in time to remember that a real core, clear values, adaptability and plain human honesty matter more than any plan ever will.

Is there anything still on your list, something you haven't achieved yet that you're chasing?

Plenty, and I think that's exactly how it should be. Professionally, the next step is clear: we want to take our Fogo passion, that joy, right across Europe and into the Middle East. That's our Team's mandate now, our vision and our goal, and I'd love for the people who've grown with us so far to keep growing right alongside that expansion, wherever it takes us.

Personally, I don't think I know how to stand still. I'm always looking for the next challenge, the next thing worth chasing, I think it's just how I'm wired. It probably keeps me entertained more than anything else, but it also means the list never really runs out, and I've made peace with that. Or not.

How do you work out what actually matters when everything on your desk feels urgent?

I'm probably not the best example to follow here. My brain doesn't work in neat lists, it moves fast, jumps around, and some days it's genuinely a bit chaotic in there. So the system, such as it is, comes down to filtering in the moment: anything touching safety, anything Guest-facing, anything genuinely big, gets dealt with immediately, no negotiation. After that I start working out what matters most from what's left, focus on it, then move to the next thing on the list.

I work best under pressure, jumping between several things and circling back rather than working through one at a time in a straight line. It's not the tidiest way to run a day, but it's when I feel most alive, and most myself.

Most people who've built something from the ground up have at least one hard call they'd rather not have had to make. What's yours?

2021, without question. We'd built Fazenda into something we were genuinely proud of, and then the pandemic very nearly took it all away. Coming out of administration, I had to be part of the decision to close two of our restaurants and say goodbye to colleagues who'd been part of building this with us. I remember saying at the time that we were proud to have secured over two hundred jobs through that process, and I meant it, but pride and heartbreak sat very close together that year. It's still the hardest thing I've had to be part of, and I hope it stays that way. Some lessons you only need to learn once.

What do you want people to say about what you built, both at Southern Wind Group and in UK hospitality more broadly?

I don't really think about it in terms of the brand or the restaurants themselves. When I eventually leave this world, what matters to me is knowing I gave everything I had, that I didn't leave anything in the tank. But more than anything, I want everyone who's ever worked alongside us to feel that we helped make their life a little better for having been part of this with us.

I still believe the UK should embrace hospitality far more than it currently does, it's a real force for good and for this economy. But that's a fight for the industry to have, not a legacy I need for myself.

You've spoken before about staff turnover at Fazenda running well below the industry average. Is that still the case, and what's the thinking behind it?

We're running at around 66% retention year to date, which is a solid number for this industry, and one of the results we care about most and work hardest to protect. But I'd say straight away that the number on its own means very little if all you're doing is holding on to the wrong people. Retention is only worth chasing if you're retaining good people, people who genuinely care and want to grow.

The thinking behind it hasn't changed since day one: treat the job as a career, not a shift. That means proper training from week one, clear paths to progress, from gaúcho to trainer to manager, or now, potentially, across an entire global brand. Some good people will always move on, that's just life, but the focus is on growing our people properly, so that the ones who want to stay and grow with us are genuinely happy here. Hospitality has a reputation for high turnover because too many businesses treat their people as replaceable. We've tried hard, for fifteen years now, to prove that doesn't have to be the model.

What's proving effective right now for attracting and keeping good people in an industry known for high turnover?

Career paths that are real, not just words in a job advert. People need to see, quite concretely, that starting as a gaúcho or a chef de partie with us can lead somewhere, whether that's a general manager role, a training role, or now, with Fogo de Chão behind us, opportunities across other markets entirely. Beyond that, it's the basics done consistently: fair pay, a genuine focus on work-life balance, and a culture where managers are taught to properly look after their Teams.

None of that is revolutionary. What's effective is doing it consistently for fifteen years rather than treating it as a campaign you run when recruitment gets hard. And now that we're ready to grow and enter new markets, I think we're becoming an even more interesting proposition, there's a genuinely bigger story for someone to be part of than there was even a year ago.

What, technologically or operationally, are you most curious about at the moment?

AI, without question. Specifically, how it can help us operationally: productivity, efficiency, and understanding data in ways that would take a person weeks to work through manually, forecasting, spotting patterns across sites, that kind of thing. That's where I think the real near-term value is for a business like ours.

But I want to be clear about where the line sits. This is, and will always be, a business of people, that's not going to change, and it shouldn't. I don't see AI replacing the gaúcho at your table or the warmth of someone genuinely looking after you. I see it helping us understand our Guests and our operations better behind the scenes, so our people can spend more of their time doing what only people can do.

How does sustainability actually show up in the day-to-day running of these restaurants, rather than just as a line in a report?

Sustainability is a much broader subject than people give it credit for. Most people hear the word and think local sourcing, but that's only one small piece of it. Real sustainability is about weighing a lot of different things together: how respectfully you run a business for your community and the environment, and, just as importantly, whether it's actually sustainable economically too.

Take tomatoes. If they're grown locally and in season, that's the easy, obvious choice, and we take it. But if they're local and out of season, forced along in a heated greenhouse just to tick the 'local' box, or grown somewhere that was never naturally suited to them, that's usually the wrong call, even against tomatoes shipped in from somewhere like Italy where they grow properly in the sun. We look at the overall impact, not just the word 'local' on a label. And even genuinely good local, in-season produce often comes at a real premium, one that either eats into the economics of the business or ends up on the Guest's bill. It's rarely as simple as 'local good, imported bad.'

So in practice, the day-to-day version of sustainability for us is: do the best you can with what you have, think properly about the impact of what you do, and offset it wherever you genuinely can. We know our Guests eat a great deal of meat when they visit us, and we understand what that means for the environment, which is part of why we offset through initiatives like gift trees. We're also very aware that while our Guests are enjoying generous portions, plenty of people elsewhere have nothing on their plate at all, which is part of why we give back through Action Against Hunger and local charities too.

On waste specifically, we've worked hard at it, over the last five years we've cut our wastage by nearly 11%, and every little genuinely helps. Someone once said to me that the world wouldn't be better off if ten companies improved their footprint by 100%, it would be better off if ten million companies each improved theirs by 10%. I think about that a lot.

What's one piece of advice you'd give someone starting out today who wants to build something in hospitality the way you did?

My best piece of advice: hospitality isn't just about being a great cook or a brilliant chef and deciding to open a restaurant. A restaurant is a business first, and that comes with all sorts of complications people don't see from the outside, the numbers, the people, the property, the regulation. Take my word for that one.

Don't wait to feel qualified either. I came to this from a notary office and a marketing agency, not a hospitality background, and I've never once felt that held me back, if anything it gave me a slightly different way of looking at the business side of things. What actually matters is caring properly about the people in front of you, your Team and your Guests in equal measure, and being willing to do the unglamorous work of getting the details right, again and again, long after the opening-night excitement has worn off. And say yes to the unexpected turn. Mine came from a house move that was only ever supposed to be temporary. Some of the best things I've built were never part of the original plan.