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The Olive Tree Group
On a Kuala Lumpur street that held two bars and a 7-Eleven, a Taj-trained operations manager signed a lease in 2007 and waited for other operators to follow. Eighteen years and one pandemic later, eight outlets within a 400 m radius of Changkat Bukit Bintang answer to the same owner.
From One Kuala Lumpur Street to Six Malaysian States and Bali
Accessible Markets for The Olive Tree Group
Transformation Arc
In 2007, four years after opening his first restaurant in a leafy Kuala Lumpur expat suburb, Leslie Gomez signed a lease at 34 Changkat Bukit Bintang. The street, by his own later account, contained “only two bars on the whole street… our neighbours were mostly restaurants, a lawyer’s firm, and a 7-11.” He opened a bar called Ghazal Mahel (“house of poetry”) and waited for other operators to follow. Eighteen years on, eight outlets within a 400 m radius of Changkat Bukit Bintang answer to The Olive Tree Group — the most concentrated single-owner food-and-beverage cluster in Malaysia.
The group today operates roughly thirty-one outlets across thirteen brands in six Malaysian states and Bali, employing between five hundred and seven hundred people. Its headquarters sits at Menara Hap Seng on Jalan P. Ramlee, the same building where its namesake flagship opened in 2009. Ownership has remained with the founder throughout: Gomez self-funded the group for seventeen years before drawing his first external debt in 2020.
How one operator made a street
The Changkat bet is the single most important structural decision in The Olive Tree Group’s history. In 2007 it was contrarian; today it is the cluster that defines the group. The corporate vehicle behind the original 2007 bar — Ghazal Mahel Sdn Bhd, registration 754891-T — is still the operating entity for the same outlet, now trading as Sutraa Kitchen + Bar. The 2018 rebrand from Ghazal Mahel to Sutraa preserved an eleven-year lease while refreshing the customer-facing identity. Eighteen years in, the original lease is the group’s most durable asset.
The cluster around it grew brand by brand. Sutraa, Rockafellers, Soul Room, Why Not, Te Amo, Temptations and a La Chicá outlet now occupy adjacent and near-adjacent addresses; the group also operates Frangipaani in nearby Bukit Damansara and the namesake Olive Tree at Menara Hap Seng. The economics of a cluster of this concentration are simple to describe and difficult to assemble. A single operator on a single street pools staffing, sourcing and security across multiple formats. Customers can move from Indian fine-dining to a gastro-sports bar to a lounge over a single evening without crossing a road. Landlords negotiate with one tenant for many leases. The founder is in walking distance of every outlet on the street.
The format mix on Changkat is deliberate. The street draws a mixed expat-and-tourist crowd whose evening typically begins with food and ends in a bar; the group’s eight outlets cover the full arc rather than competing for the same hour. A cluster operator who controls multiple formats on one street captures more of each customer’s evening spend than an operator with a single concept would, and concentrates the staff transfers, group bookings and last-minute table moves that single-outlet operators have to refuse. The infrastructure cost — back-office, compliance, procurement, head-office HR — is amortised across eight venues rather than one.
The same concentration cuts the other way in a downturn — and it did.
The contrarian name
Gomez chose the “Olive Tree” name as positioning language for an expat-and-tourist clientele that runs at roughly seventy percent of the customer base — a segment that responds to European signifiers. The cuisine itself is North Indian: the group’s flagship at Menara Hap Seng serves North Indian fine-dining, and Pride of India, Frangipaani and Sutraa all run Indian menus. The founder is Goan-Indian, trained at Taj Hotels. He has been candid that the choice of name was commercial, not culinary.
This is not unusual in Kuala Lumpur’s expat-belt restaurant economy, but the group’s willingness to keep the signifier explicit while operating a North Indian core distinguishes it from operators who quietly converged on European positioning over time. The Olive Tree Group did the conversion at the front door and left the kitchen alone.
Five percent and the loan that kept the foreign workers housed
The Changkat cluster’s first severe test arrived in March 2020. Malaysia’s first Movement Control Order took effect on 18 March 2020. The group’s model — full-service restaurants and ambience-led bars built on dine-in traffic — was structurally incompatible with lockdown. For the first time in seventeen years of operation, the group drew external debt. The first SME loan from a Malaysian lender funded the operating shortfall.
The trough came the following year. Between May and September 2021, during MCO 3 and the third pandemic wave, group revenue ran at roughly five percent of pre-pandemic comparables. The cluster that had been an asset became a concentrated liability: thirty-odd outlets, almost all in expat-tourist neighbourhoods, in a country whose dining-out segment was effectively closed. Sanitation cost ran at RM 2,500 per outlet per month. Two percent of the workforce was trimmed — a number that is operationally lighter than most peer operators recorded — and the group’s foreign-worker contingent was retained and housed throughout. The retention cost was real; the alternative was sending workers home with no domestic safety net to return to.
In a 2024 retrospective, Gomez framed the operating lesson directly: “The MCO taught us quite a lot. It taught us to evaluate and decide what is important to maintain in order to succeed. We had to restructure at a time when the business is expanding… we came out of it, we survived, and we worked hard to open ten more outlets in the next two years.” The five-percent figure is the only group-level revenue datapoint The Olive Tree Group has ever publicly disclosed. The group does not publish consolidated financials.
The post-MCO doubling
The expansion that followed the trough is the structural counter to the cluster-vulnerability question. In 2022, the group opened Rockafellers at Straits Quay marina mall in Penang — its twentieth outlet and its first major post-MCO opening. The Penang opening matters because it pushes the group beyond the Klang Valley for the first time at meaningful scale, and because Rockafellers is the format the group has since used to test a licensing-light expansion model: the brand travels to multi-state locations through licensing arrangements rather than the group taking on every lease and every full operating commitment. The licensing turn is a structural evolution from the founder-operator-on-every-lease model that defined the first seventeen years.
The same year, the group was named BrandLaureate Brand of the Year. In 2023, at the Hospitality Asia Platinum Awards, the group took twenty-eight trophies in a single ceremony — an unprecedented sweep coinciding with the group’s twentieth year of operation. By the end of 2024 the count was past twenty-eight outlets, with Frangipaani @ Prana Bali — the first international outlet — opening that year alongside Sol Level 40 @ The Met, a fortieth-floor rooftop concept in Mont Kiara serving Latin American and Amazonian cuisine.
By late 2025 the group reached thirty-one outlets across thirteen brands in six Malaysian states and Bali. La Chicá, the group’s Mexican casual format, opened at Imago Mall in Kota Kinabalu — the group’s first outlet in Sabah. The same year, Gomez was honoured with the ESG PLUS Leadership Award, recognition that the obligations the group refused to abandon during MCO 3 — foreign-worker retention, supplier relationships, landlord negotiations — were now measurable as governance practice.
The numerical arc is unsubtle: roughly seventeen outlets pre-pandemic, ten to eleven new openings in the two years after the trough, and a doubled footprint by 2025. The group did not contract through the crisis; it added to its lease portfolio and its brand count while servicing the SME loan it drew in 2020.
Thirteen brands, one P&L
The portfolio is the second structural fact about The Olive Tree Group. The thirteen brands span North Indian fine-dining (The Olive Tree, Frangipaani, Pride of India), gastro-sports (Rockafellers Kitchen + Bar, multi-state), pork-free bar concepts (Rock Bottom, in Bangsar, Desa ParkCity, Johor and Melaka), Mexican casual (La Chicá, including the new Sabah outlet), European fine-dining (Luca, Bangsar Shopping Centre), lounge and club formats on Changkat (Sutraa, Soul Room, Why Not, Temptations, Te Amo), a beach concept (The Beach Bar Langkawi), a casino-adjacent format (WOW Genting) and the rooftop Sol Level 40. Frangipaani has been Michelin Guide-selected; Rockafellers operates the licensing model that allowed the format to expand multi-state without the group taking on every lease itself.
The portfolio shape matters for the same reason the Changkat cluster does: a thirteen-brand operator whose formats span price points from casual Mexican to forty-storey rooftop fine-dining can ride out the loss of any single segment. When MCO 3 closed dine-in across the country, every brand in the portfolio took the same hit at the same time — the diversification did not protect against a category-wide shock — but in a normal trading environment the multi-format mix smooths revenue across the week, the season and the customer demographic. The group’s portfolio cost is institutional: thirteen brand identities, thirteen marketing programmes, thirteen menu R&D cycles, all under a single P&L without the management depth of a listed restaurant company.
The group’s halal status is mixed and worth stating precisely. There is no documented JAKIM certification at any outlet. Selected outlets self-declare “Pork Free” on the group’s website — Rockafellers in Bangsar and Langkawi; Rock Bottom in Bangsar, Desa ParkCity, Johor and Melaka — while other outlets serve both alcohol and pork. The group’s positioning is expat-tourist, not halal-mainstream, and the segmentation between pork-free and unrestricted outlets is deliberate. It is also a structural ceiling: an operator that does not hold full halal certification cannot address Malaysia’s mass dining market, and the group has been clear that this is not the segment it is competing for.
What the cluster bought
Eight outlets on one street is either Malaysia’s most concentrated single-owner F&B cluster or a structural exposure to one street’s downturn. Between 2007 and early 2020, the cluster read as the first interpretation. Between May and September 2021, it read as the second. The post-MCO expansion has restored the first reading, with the working capital cost of the 2020 loan attached and the licensing-driven multi-state footprint added on top.
For an investor reading the group from outside Malaysia, the institutional questions are three. First: can the cluster economics on Changkat be replicated on a second street, or are they specific to the years of operator presence and lease accumulation that built them? Second: does the licensing model that has driven Rockafellers’ multi-state expansion deliver the same brand discipline as the founder-operated outlets on Changkat? Third: how much of the group’s resilience through MCO 3 was the cluster, how much was the founder’s seventeen-year refusal to take on debt, and how much was the segment of customers — expats and tourists — who returned to dining out as soon as restrictions allowed?
The group has stated an intent to reach fifty outlets within three to four years and has named Sarawak, Brisbane, the Gold Coast, Singapore and Dubai as targets in its expansion pipeline. None of those outlets is yet operational beyond Bali. Whether the eighteen-year track record on Changkat Bukit Bintang translates to a Sydney rooftop or a Dubai bar remains the next test of the cluster operator’s institutional shape.
The original 2007 lease at 34 Changkat Bukit Bintang is still trading. The corporate vehicle that signed it in 2007 still operates it. The street is no longer two bars and a 7-Eleven.