Leslie Jerome Gomez

In the first three years, I kept wondering, did I make a big mistake? Things were tough at the start, we were struggling to get by, just breaking even. I had to keep reminding myself, business is full of ups and downs… You have to keep strong and keep going.

From Goa to Kuala Lumpur, with a four-year detour #

The Gomez surname points to Goa — the Portuguese-Catholic strip on India’s western coast that sent operators into hospitality across the British and Gulf service economies long before the IT diaspora made other Indian states famous. Gomez has not addressed his own heritage directly in the public record. The Taj group, headquartered in Bombay, drew heavily from that pool. By the late 1990s a Taj-trained operator with regional ambition had two reasonable next moves: stay inside the Indian luxury circuit, or take a position in one of the Asian markets where the Taj brand was less dominant and the customer mix was more international.

Gomez chose the second. D’Tandoor, the Malaysian hospitality group he joined in 1999, gave him three years of observation inside someone else’s kitchens before he committed his own capital. He arrived in Kuala Lumpur in 2000 on the Malaysia My Second Home programme — a long-stay visa requiring liquid assets, a fixed deposit, and the kind of financial commitment a tourist visa does not. The MM2H is a structural decision dressed as a residency category. He has been operating under it ever since.

The four-year apprenticeship at D’Tandoor turned out to matter more than the Taj credential. It taught him how a hospitality group is run inside Malaysia rather than how a luxury hotel is run inside India — a different problem, with different cost structures, different staff dynamics, different regulatory rhythms. By the time he opened Pride of India in Desa Sri Hartamas in 2003, he had spent more time observing the Malaysian market from inside an operating business than most first-time restaurateurs spend on feasibility studies.

Pride of India, years four and five #

Pride of India was a North Indian fine-diner in a leafy KL expat suburb. There were no investors, no chain, and no fallback. For the first three years there were also no profits — the restaurant broke even and not much else.

In two separate interviews two years apart — FMT Lifestyle in July 2023, and again with The Star in 2025 — Gomez returns to the same period as his structural existential stretch. “In the first three years, I kept wondering, did I make a big mistake?” he told FMT, sitting in Te Amo on Changkat Bukit Bintang. “Things were tough at the start, we were struggling to get by, just breaking even. I had to keep reminding myself, business is full of ups and downs… You have to keep strong and keep going.”

That he returns to the same doubt twenty years later — in two interviews two years apart — is the tell. The years four and five of Pride of India were not a passing mood. They were foundational. The founder who would later sign the first SME loan of his career to keep foreign workers housed during MCO 3 had already practised, alone and without an audience, the discipline of treating losses as tuition.

He did not quit. He did not raise outside capital. He did not pivot the format or chase a hotter neighbourhood. He stayed in Desa Sri Hartamas and waited for the Indian fine-dining audience he had bet on to find him. By 2007, he was in a position to sign a second lease — and the lease he signed surprised everyone who had been watching.

The Changkat bet #

Changkat Bukit Bintang in 2007 was not a nightlife street. It was, in Gomez’s own description, a stretch of lawyers’ offices, restaurants, and a 7-11. Two bars existed on the entire street. The expat-bar cluster that would later define the area — and that would later become The Olive Tree Group’s structural identity — did not yet exist.

Gomez signed a lease at number 34 and opened a bar called Ghazal Mahel. He has explained the logic in the cleanest terms he will offer publicly: “Believe it or not, there used to be only two bars on the whole street. Once the bars set down roots, the whole vibe shifted.” Other operators followed. Within a decade, the 400-metre stretch of Changkat housed eight of his outlets — the most concentrated single-owner cluster on any F&B street in Malaysia. The original Ghazal Mahel lease, held under Ghazal Mahel Sdn Bhd (754891-T), still anchors the street. The customer-facing brand has rebranded twice; the corporate vehicle has not moved.

The Changkat bet matters in this profile not because of the cluster economics — that story belongs to the brand profile — but because of what it reveals about the operator. By 2007 Gomez had been profitable for two or three years at Pride of India and had a tested format he could have replicated. He chose instead to plant a flag on a quiet street and wait. That is a particular kind of patience. It is the same patience that had carried him through years four and five.

The seventeen-year discipline #

Between 2003 and 2020, Gomez did not take an external loan. Pride of India funded Ghazal Mahel. Ghazal Mahel funded the 2009 flagship at Menara Hap Seng — the restaurant that gave the group its name, The Olive Tree, a Mediterranean signifier deliberately chosen for an expat-tourist clientele despite the cuisine being North Indian. The 2009 flagship funded the 2013 multi-format expansion. By 2018 the group ran roughly eighteen outlets and four hundred staff, all of it self-financed.

This is unusual. A hospitality operator who reaches eighteen outlets without external debt has either grown unusually slowly, or operated with unusually conservative margins, or both. Gomez did both. The discipline did not look like a virtue at the time — there were faster-growing competitors, better-capitalised entrants, easier paths to scale. It looked like a virtue in March 2020.

When Malaysia’s first Movement Control Order took effect on 18 March 2020, Gomez signed the first SME loan of his seventeen-year career. He has not framed the decision as a defeat. “The MCO taught us quite a lot,” he told Malaysiakini in 2024. “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 loan was not a sign that the seventeen years of discipline had failed. It was a sign that even seventeen years of discipline cannot fully prepare an operator for what came next.

Five percent #

Between May and September 2021, group revenue ran at roughly five percent of pre-pandemic comparables. The MCO 3 lockdown coincided with the third pandemic wave; the dining-out segment was effectively closed. Sanitation costs alone ran at RM 2,500 per outlet per month against revenue that had effectively collapsed.

Gomez trimmed two percent of the workforce. The number is the most telling fact in the entire arc. The operationally optimal cut, by every standard hospitality-industry calculus, would have been higher. The morally bearable one was two percent. Foreign workers — the staff most exposed to displacement in a Malaysian downturn, with no domestic safety net to fall back on — were retained and housed. Gomez has not described this choice as strategy. He has described it as obligation.

That distinction matters. A founder who frames staff retention during a crisis as strategy is making a calculation about retention costs and rehiring friction. A founder who frames it as obligation is making a different calculation — about what the group is for, and what they owe the people who built it. The 2025 ESG PLUS Leadership Award named the obligations Gomez refused to abandon during MCO as governance practice. The award was institutional. The choice it recognised was personal, made in a year when no one was watching.

What twenty years bought #

The HAPA 2023 ceremony gave the group twenty-eight trophies in a single evening. At the same ceremony, Gomez was named HAPA Elite Entrepreneur of the Year — Setting Footprints in F&B. Twenty years after opening Pride of India in Desa Sri Hartamas, the founder who had privately wondered whether he had made a mistake was publicly singled out as the operator who had built it back at scale.

By late 2025 the group operated thirty-one outlets across thirteen brands in six Malaysian states and Bali, employing roughly five to seven hundred people. The 5% revenue trough of 2021 had been answered by the addition of ten or eleven outlets in the two subsequent years. La Chicá expanded into Kota Kinabalu. Frangipaani opened at Prana Bali — the first international outlet. Sol Level 40 opened on the fortieth floor of The Met in Mont Kiara. The expansion thesis — that the institution is more durable than any single trough — had been publicly tested and not falsified.

The structural features of the platform remain unresolved. The group’s only public group-revenue datapoint is the 5%-of-normal disclosure from 2021; no full-year revenue figures are in the public domain. In the available public record — twenty-two captured interviews across two decades of media coverage — there is no second voice. No institutional spokesperson steps in front of him. Asked about succession, he has said publicly that he would love to hand the group to a next generation but is “not sure if the new generation can handle the pressure.” It is a candid answer. It is also the answer of a founder who has not yet built the institution that exists separately from him. Whether the platform’s next chapter is family succession, professional management, or external capital is, on the available evidence, genuinely open.

For now the calendar is full of new outlets and the awards keep arriving. The doubt of years four and five reads, in retrospect, as the founding myth of a thirty-one-outlet platform — proof that the operator who self-funded for seventeen years, then took his first loan to keep his foreign workers housed, was building something more durable than the next opening or the next award. The Goan-Indian operations manager who landed in Kuala Lumpur under MM2H in 2000 has spent twenty-three years making the same bet. The bet is still on.

Last updated: April 30, 2026