Dubai-it: From kitchen sink to $50 million CEO, how Stephen Flawith built Pickl and a fresh fast-food empire in Dubai

Dubai: Grit, grime, grounding. The forces that define a professional kitchen offer a special kind of education. It is fast, physical, and unforgiving. You learn to keep your station in order, to communicate when the room is loud, and to solve a problem before it reaches the customer. Stephen Flawith started there. Before becoming the CEO and founder of Yolk Brands, a $50 million umbrella company behind Pickl, Bonbird and Southpour, he was washing pots. “I went from the pot washer all the way through all of the ranks,” he says. Flawith trained as a chef in the UK. Not in the relatively organised aisles of a culinary school, but through the chaotic, hard school of restaurants, moving from kitchen, to front of house, to events, and finally to hospitality management. At one point, he was spending around 80 hours a week in kitchens. It taught him accountability. “Our first business model, me and Nabil [Al Rantisi] take it out and laugh at it sometimes,” he says. “We were going to do Excel, then we'd have enough money in a year to open site number two. By week six, we were doing 4x and we were looking for site number two immediately.” Picture: Ashok Verma “From the age of 18, I had always been interested in hospitality, and I guess hospitality is kind of where the misfits of society fell at that time. I was a young skater surfer kid in the UK growing up and that kind of just felt perfect, … I just kind of found my place. I found that outlet for creativity and passion, which also had the structure of discipline behind it. It made me into who I am today. It instilled that sense of … hard work and problem solving. I'm not sure that I would be here today if I didn't have that initial kitchen background, which is very military. You are in charge of your station. You cannot let down service, because your station's a mess and you're not organised. You have to communicate as well.” The Dubai-It track Those lessons are now being applied across a restaurant group that started with a single Dubai-born burger concept. Pickl opened eight years ago in a 2,000-square-foot space in Jumeirah Lakes Towers. Flawith says Yolk Brands now has about 50 restaurants across eight countries, with another 28 in development. By the end of the first quarter of next year, he expects the group to be around the 100-restaurant mark. It is the very definition of the 'Dubai-It' philosophy: taking bold, highly ambitious ideas and executing them with record-breaking speed and uncompromising quality. “When we’re exporting our brands around the region, and we're coming into Egypt and Saudi Arabia, our training team goes in and teaches the same skill set to our partners in our restaurants in different countries today,” he says. “They teach them the foundations of communication and teamwork and decision-making.” Flawith was born and raised in the UK, but the UAE was familiar long before he moved here. His family had been in the region since the 1970s, first in Saudi Arabia and later in the UAE. His father moved to Dubai in 1994, and Flawith spent school holidays coming out to see him before eventually moving to the city himself about 12 years ago, in 2014. Growing up in Dorset, on England’s south coast, he “never wanted to own restaurants”. However, by the time he arrived in Dubai, he had worked extensively in hospitality. Flawith joined the Appetite 1762 group, which he describes as a pioneer in the city's hospitality scene at the time. The group was known for its fresh food positioning. “We were the pioneers and doing things very differently,” he says. The business that began with a single outlet in JLT is now valued at over $50 million, targeting 100 outlets worldwide - showcasing the ultimate Dubai-It mindset of taking unique concepts and scaling them globally. Picture: Ashok Verma He eventually acquired the business. But after a point, he felt there was nowhere else for him to go within it. His business partner Nabil Al Rantisi, who had also been a partner at 1762, encouraged him to start something of his own. The concept was straightforward: fresh food at the speed and price point of fast food, with a model that could be replicated. “We thought, ‘let's do something that we can scale’,” Flawith says. Pickl emerged from that thinking: “How can we get fresh fast food and take that to a mass market?” Everything around the food had to work at scale too - from concrete floors to the furniture. “Ninety percent of that hard work is in the supply chain,” he adds. “That's what people don't see.” Yolk Brands now operates supply across eight countries. Flawith says the company forecasts supply needs nine months ahead, while expansion requires planning even further out. “We're forecasting up to two years on the herds now.” Why Dubai makes perfect business sense Flawith's relationship with Dubai is both personal and practical. He sees the city as a natural base for a business looking towards both Europe and Asia. “I mean, it's the hub of this part of the world,