How Suzanne Goin and Caroline Styne’s Lucques Group Took on the Hollywood Bowl
Photo Caption: The 18,000-seat venue features picnic baskets, a wine bar, and restaurants, and food stalls.
Skift Take
Running successful restaurants in Los Angeles for decades is a feat on its own, but running food and beverage at an 18,000-person venue takes something special.
There’s no one way to build a restaurant empire. Some restaurateurs create a family of unique entities that fill gaps across one city landscape. Others hit on a fast-casual idea that’s easily replicated across the country. For longtime business partners chef Suzanne Goin and Caroline Styne it was a little bit of both. But then they added an 18,000-person venue to the list.
Under the Lucques Group umbrella, the two oversee three acclaimed restaurants in Los Angeles — Lucques, their first, which turns 20 this year, A.O.C. and Tavern — plus three casual Larder cafes that offer counter service and a strong grab-and-go component, a full-scale catering arm, and a wholesale bakery business. So when they were approached to take over the food and beverage operations at the iconic Hollywood Bowl for 2016, they had reservations.
It meant creating food and beverage programs for the various venues throughout — three full-service, sit-down concepts, three marketplaces, standalone kiosks,
