Any honest assessment of NGMI's hospitality track record has to start with the numbers, and the numbers are not great on paper. Seven restaurants opened since 2012. Four still standing. Three sold. One closed. Call it a 65% survival rate if you're being generous, lower if you include the Epic Night Club experiment, which wasn't a restaurant but definitely taught the same lesson.
That's not a great number. It is, however, a very normal number for this industry. And yet we keep opening restaurants. Here's why.
The real math
The canonical industry stat — 60% of restaurants fail in year one, 80% in year five — isn't quite right for Luxembourg, but the shape is. Small market, high fixed costs, thin margins, punishing labor requirements, and a regulatory overlay that makes any pivot a six-month project. If you're going to play this game, you need to be doing it for a reason that survives the bad months.
The reason, for us, is embarrassingly simple
It's a passion. This is going to sound soft and it's supposed to.
I went to culinary school at 16. From there to Lausanne for hospitality management. My entire adult operating vocabulary — covers, prep, plating, service — is the vocabulary of this industry. When I say "operate," what I actually know how to operate is a kitchen on a Saturday night. Always been on the line. Always preferred the tougher job. Everything else I've learned — the fund, the agency, the real estate — is adjacent to that center of gravity.
You can either build businesses you understand, or you can build businesses you believe will work. The first list is always shorter than the second, and the first list is the only one that compounds.
Every time NGMI opens a restaurant, I know — in a way I don't know for any other sector — exactly what I'm walking into. I know what the kitchen sounds like at 7:45pm. I know which supplier is going to be a problem in month three. I know what the P&L looks like in August in Luxembourg when everyone is at the beach. That knowledge is the only edge I trust, and restaurants are where I have it.
Why the math is worse than it looks
Because we count every attempt.
Big hospitality groups quietly rebrand, retool, or walk away from a concept without ever marking it a "failure." We count Bronx Dogs & Burgers in the closed column because it closed. Coffee Rocket was sold. Gruppetto Café was sold too — to a lawyer who's a serious coffee geek, ran it under the Gruppetto name for four months, then rebranded it to Nuuk. Same story as Snooze City, shorter runway: new owner, old name, a few months, a rebrand. The rebrand costs are real. We keep learning that lesson. None of these are written off — they're written down, in public, on the portfolio page. The denominator gets bigger every time we try something, which keeps the survival rate looking ordinary.
If we only counted the Crown branded concepts — Snooze City (9y, sold), Snooze Belval (open since 2017), Los Monos (open since 2023) — the survival rate is 100% and the cumulative turnover is a number that would get applause at any hospitality conference in Europe. But that would be cooking the books, and the holding company is named NGMI, so we don't.
Why the math is better than it sounds
Because the wins run long.
Snooze City ran 9 years before a clean cash exit. Snooze Belval has been open 7 years and is still open. Ristorante Roma has been open since 1950 — we acquired it in 2024 as the 5th owner in 75 years; we didn't invent it, we inherited a 75-year-old institution with a Michelin reference and a Gault&Millau line, and our job is to keep it running for the next 75. Pavillon Merl has been on the Parc de Merl since 2017.
The failures are fast. They cost a year, maybe two. The successes run five, seven, nine, seventy-four. Time is the asymmetry. You lose small and fast and you win slow and long, and if the ratio is anything close to right, the portfolio compounds regardless of the headline survival rate.
What Snooze Belval taught me that Snooze City didn't
Snooze City was the first of anything. Every decision was new. Snooze Belval, opened in 2017 — two years into City — was the first time I had to ask "does this playbook scale, or did we just get lucky in Hamm?" It's a different question.
The answer turned out to be: the playbook scales with two conditions. First, the location has to fit the concept — Belval is a young, growing, under-served part of the country, and a neighborhood sports bar belongs there the way it belonged in Hamm. Second, you can't run two restaurants the same way you run one. You need a second operator, a second head of kitchen, and a clear handoff. That sounds obvious. It isn't, until you've tried to do both from one phone.
Los Monos, opened in 2023 inside Blocx, is the third application of the same playbook — and the first one where the host business isn't itself a restaurant. Different again. Different staffing model, different revenue rhythm. Same fundamentals: a concept I understand, in a location that fits it, with an operator who can run it when I'm not in the room.
So why keep opening them
Because I know how, because the wins run long, and because the alternative is building in a domain I don't understand, which is how the failures actually get expensive.
Probably not gonna make it. Some of them won't. The ones that do will run for decades, and that is the only bet I know how to place.