When Bread Head Restaurant Group’s first popup debuted in Grand Central Market during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, chefs Jordan Snyder and Alex William sold about 10 sandwiches, mostly to friends and family.
Five years later, the duo is opening a fourth brick-and-mortar location in Woodland Hills – and eyeing a fifth soon in Thousand Oaks. Coming from a Michelin-starred background at Hollywood-based Trois Mec, the two believe that sandwiches deserve the same artistry as fine dining. When the celebrated French eatery closed in 2020, they started their own fast-casual venture.
The road to success was paved with hard work. The pandemic shrank the outdoor dining market, rent was surging and breaking into Los Angeles’ highly saturated quick-service industry was no easy task. Together, they did multiple pop-ups across the city, considered operating via a food truck, delivered for DoorDash to keep the business afloat, before eventually joining forces with Venice Brands Chief Executive Greg Willsey and former Night + Market restaurants executive Michael Pasternak to open their first permanent location in Santa Monica in 2024. From there, the restaurant soon expanded into Manhattan Beach and Westwood. The new Woodland Hills location would open in December at Topanga Village, and the Thousand Oaks one in the second quarter of 2027. Snyder described it as “light at the end of the tunnel.” And to get there, he said, took a serious commitment to house-made products and high-quality ingredients.
“I always joke around and say we made the world’s most complicated sandwich shop, and it really is true,” he said, “We deal in an honest way of running a restaurant.”
A thoughtful expansion
With the upcoming expansion, the founders told the Business Journal that they would keep the concept founder-led instead of franchising at the moment.
“It’s not at a place yet where we can just hand the package over to someone and say, ‘Go, operate a Bread Head,’” Snyder said. “That’s where concepts can sometimes fail – not being led by the people that truly care.”
They also do not plan to take outside funding and prefer to keep everything in-house – an increasingly rare choice as private equity and venture capital reach ever deeper into the dining scene for many other L.A.-founded brands. Dave’s Hot Chicken, for example, sold for $1 billion to Atlanta-based Roark Capital Management last June.
The hard founding days have passed for Bread Head, but the current economy presents a different set of challenges. Margins are tight because labor, food and operations are getting more expensive, Deloitte reported in May. The inflation, on the other hand, is making the consumers more discerning with a tighter budget.
In addition, the report analyzed 416,000 consumer data points across 271 restaurant concepts over three years, ending in 2025, and found that four out of 10 consumers engage in value-seeking behavior. Among the top performing players in the quick-service industry, quality stands out as the main motivator behind restaurant choice – and that’s what Bread Head will stick with to survive the harsher consumer landscape, the chefs said.
“There’s a whole lot of money in the product and the ingredients,” Snyder said. “That’s what will keep a lot of people in the game through ups and downs of the economy.”
