Toronto Restaurateur & Hospitality Expert
30 years of experience transforming Toronto’s culinary landscape. Available for consulting & speaking engagements.
What Yannick Does
Public Speaking
Engaging keynote presentations on restaurant operations, hospitality leadership, and navigating the challenges of the modern food service industry.
Restaurant & Hospitality Consulting
Strategic guidance for restaurant concepts, operations optimization, menu development, and brand positioning based on 30 years of proven success.
The Art of Dining Like a Pro
(Class Based Offerings)
A professional course series designed to help hospitality teams and entrepreneurs strengthen their guest experience, operational systems, & overall business performance.
Brand Strategy & Experiential Development
Expert advice on scaling hospitality businesses, retail expansion, and navigating the intersection of restaurants & consumer products.
Hospitality Consulting
Yannick partners with founders, operators, and organizations across every stage of the hospitality journey; from concept creation to multi-unit growth, operational turnaround,
& brand reinvention.
- Menu strategy & culinary program design
- Customer experience (CX) & service culture training
- Leadership coaching for hospitality founders & managers
- Financial modeling, P&L strategy & cost control systems
- Restaurant concept development & brand creation
- QSR / QSR+ development & scaling
- Food product (CPG) strategy & retail expansion
- Hospitality operations consulting
Keynotes, Workshops & Leadership Training
Beyond consulting, Yannick works with leadership teams, organizations, & institutions through speaking engagements and private training sessions focused on hospitality as a business & leadership discipline.
- Hospitality leadership sessions
- Client-experience and service culture intensives
- Executive workshops
- Corporate training
The Art of Dining Like a Pro
A private masterclass in business hospitality & relationship-building.
In today’s business world, the most valuable conversations rarely happen in boardrooms; they happen around a table.
The Art of Dining Like a Pro is Yannick Bigourdan’s signature masterclass for executives and client-facing professionals. It reframes business dining from a social activity into a strategic leadership skill—teaching participants how to build trust faster, represent their brand with intention, and turn everyday meals into meaningful business moments.
This is not etiquette training.
It is applied leadership through hospitality.
Participants
learn how to:
- Lead client interactions with confidence and emotional intelligence
- Represent their brand powerfully in high-touch environments
- Build deeper relationships through conversation, presence, and awareness
- Navigate social and service dynamics with composure and control
- Turn business meals into measurable relationship and reputation assets
This masterclass is delivered privately to organizations, leadership teams, and curated groups.
Full program structure and customization options are shared upon request.
What Organizations Say
This is the rare session that sticks. Clear language, real stories, immediately usable tools. We’re rolling it out globally in manager onboarding.
We’ve all done business dinners—few of us made them count. Yannick gave us a practical, humane system: align the goal, set the tone, let the guest lead, and close with grace. It’s now a playbook our leaders can teach and scale.
Yannick reframed hospitality as brand in action. Our clients noticed: ‘That dinner told me everything about how you’ll manage our business—calm, prepared, and generous.’ That’s the reputation we want.
This wasn’t a talk about forks. It was leadership training disguised as hospitality. Our client-facing teams now treat every meal as a strategic moment—comfort, pace, tone, and follow-through. The change in confidence and outcomes has been immediate.
Yannick turned ‘taking clients to dinner’ into a repeatable playbook for trust and results. Our team left with tactics we used the very next day—and they worked.
Let’s Redefine How You Connect!
Book Yannick for your next conference, leadership offsite, or team development session.