El Poblado · Medellín · Colombia
A 55–70-seat accessible-premium smokehouse in Barrio Manila — acquired turnkey from the former Viva Italia at Cra. 43E #11-49. Churrasco theater without the churrascaria cost structure, on a lease at 2.3% of sales.
Confidential — prepared for invited investors
The concept
The concept takes the craft and theater of premium live-fire dining — pit-smoked meats, tableside carving, curated wine and open-flame cooking — and re-engineers it into an accessible-premium restaurant built for speed, consistency and a lower guest check. Central Texas smoking technique is the production backbone, with brisket, ribs and pork cooked low and slow for deep bark, smoke and yield discipline. Brazilian-style picanha carving adds selective tableside theater Thursday through Sunday, while Mexican parrilla and street-food accents bring char, acid, chile and freshness across sides, sauces and shareable plates. The model avoids all-you-can-eat economics, oversized kitchen brigades and high protein waste, delivering a distinctive smokehouse experience with leaner labor, tighter food cost and broader everyday appeal.
Barbecue is batch production: brisket, ribs and pork smoke ahead on a one-day forecast cycle; service is carving and assembly. That is the structural trick that halves labor — the benchmark Texas counters run on a slicer and a cashier.
Table-side picanha passes and board presentations Thursday–Sunday dinner — the churrasco moment guests photograph, without continuous rodizio labor or protein waste.
8–12 South American labels, 4–6 by the glass. Chile and Argentina dominate Colombia’s import market — high-margin check builder with zero bar complexity.
Ember & oak, open to the room
The dining room — rattan light, lime-washed stone, neon
Brisket by the slice, boards for the table
Establishment photography — Barrio Manila façade and dining room; pit and carve are concept art direction.
The three-gate menu rule
Every SKU passes three gates — trend, theme, margin — at held quality. The template: mazorca bought weekly at Central Mayorista on DANE-SIPSA price bulletins, smoked, charred, dressed crema-mayo, costeño cheese and chile-lime. A low-cost local input, transformed by technique into a signature side at a 78–84% contribution margin. Esquites cup for takeaway. The whole sides program is engineered this way — sides at 18–22% food cost buy down beef-heavy plates to a 33% blended COGS.
The micro-market
Barrio Manila sits between the Golden Mile hotel corridor and Parque Lleras — inside Comuna 14 (El Poblado), where 92.6% of housing is in Colombia’s top two socioeconomic strata and the living-conditions index is the city’s best. Layer on a record international visitor flow led by the one source market that needs zero education on brisket: the United States.
Schematic, not to scale. Feeder properties & comps verified Aug 2026.
The model is built from operating businesses, not theory — an experience benchmark, the two nearest premium-protein comps, and the three El Poblado hospitality projects whose international-investor practices (dual-currency reporting, scenario ranges, FDI registration) this plan adopts.
The economics — FINAL acquisition model
The former Viva Italia at Cra. 43E #11-49 is available as a going-concern contents package — ovens, kitchen line, refrigeration, tables, chairs — at COP 100M (≈ USD 33K) one time, 95% turnkey, on rent of COP 4.0M/month plus utilities. That single fact converts a construction project into an operating conversion: no 6–8 weeks of build, no civil works, and occupancy at 2.3% of base sales against a Manila asking band of COP 6.8–12.5M (≈ USD 2.2–4.1K). Every column below foots exactly; every anchor is cited under Sources.
Capitalization is down ~39% from the COP 410M (≈ USD 134K) draft and ~67% from the superseded COP 752M (≈ USD 246K) ground-up build. The pit, extraction and kitchen scope collapses into one COP 40M (≈ USD 13K) line because the acquired kitchen is sound and the balance of the equipment is already held in the US and Mexico; opening costs, contingency and the working-capital reserve are cut to match. Life-safety spending (extraction, fire, grease) is still not minimized — the adjacent wellness-branded hotel makes smoke engineering an underwriting gate.
2.3% of base net sales against a ≤9% guardrail, and 41–68% below the Manila asking midband. The lease IS the deal: minimum 5-year term or 3+ with protected renewal, CPI-capped escalation, landlord consent in writing.
9.4% of sales. Core-5 roster plus flex pool ≈ 5.9 FTE-equivalents versus 13–14 in conventional full service. Statutory floor honored; 42-hr week, 35% night from 7 p.m., 90% Sunday priced into the boards.
26.2% blended. Beef CPI runs +14.37% YoY, so pricing is by cooked yield, pork share steps up 5 points, and the Mexican-parrilla sides program at 18–22% food cost buys the beef plates back down.
Core labor, rent, fixed utilities, marketing floor, admin and a COP 2.0M (≈ USD 0.7K) maintenance reserve on the acquired FF&E. Contribution margin ≈70%, which is why break-even lands at ≈COP 64M (≈ USD 21K) — roughly a third of the base case.
| Downside | Base | Upside | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Net sales | 135.0$44K | 175.0$57K | 220.0$72K |
| COGS | 36.527.0%$12K | 45.826.2%$15K | 52.824.0%$17K |
| Loaded labor | 18.013.3%$5.9K | 16.59.4%$5.4K | 19.08.6%$6.2K |
| Rent (acquisition terms) | 4.03.0%$1.3K | 4.02.3%$1.3K | 4.01.8%$1.3K |
| Utilities & fuel/wood | 6.0$2.0K | 7.0$2.3K | 9.0$2.9K |
| Merchant / delivery | 5.4$1.8K | 6.1$2.0K | 7.7$2.5K |
| Marketing | 4.0$1.3K | 4.4$1.4K | 5.5$1.8K |
| Other operating expense | 15.0$4.9K | 18.0$5.9K | 19.0$6.2K |
| Maintenance reserve | 2.0$0.7K | 2.0$0.7K | 2.0$0.7K |
| UNIT EBITDA | 44.132.7%$14K | 71.240.7%$23K | 101.045.9%$33K |
EBITDA before D&A, financing, income tax and owner/central costs. Downside labor is HIGHER than base — the lean roster has a fixed floor and a pre-authorized add-back rule. Honest stress test: substitute conventional full-service staffing at COP 44.0M/month (≈ USD 14.4K) and base EBITDA is still COP 43.7M (25.0% · ≈ USD 14.3K) — the deal clears a conventional hurdle on the rent advantage alone.
| Downside | Base | Upside | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Annualized unit EBITDA | COP 529.2M · USD 173K | COP 854.4M · USD 280K | COP 1,212M · USD 397K |
| Simple payback on COP 250M (≈ USD 82K) | ≈ 6 mo | ≈ 3–4 mo* | ≈ 2.5 mo |
| Cash-on-cash (pre-tax, pre-D&A) | ≈ 212% | ≈ 342% | ≈ 485% |
*Base payback includes a conservative 6-month ramp at downside run-rate; stabilized payback is ≈ 3.5 months. These are arithmetic restatements of the scenario model, not return promises: they sit before Colombian corporate income tax (35%), before dividend withholding (up to 20% for non-residents absent treaty relief) and before D&A and financing. For contrast, deeded-suite programs in the same blocks market 12–15% projections against measured occupancy supporting ~6–12% gross — the spread is the operating-risk premium.
Smoke ahead, carve to order — the concept that legitimately runs lean. The pit is the factory; service is carving and assembly.
Core-5 roster + weekend flex pool ≈ 5.9 FTE-eq vs 13–14 full-service.
The below-market lease, not aggressive revenue, is the structural margin driver. Every month at COP 4.0M (≈ USD 1.3K) versus the COP 10M (≈ USD 3.3K) asking midband is worth ≈ COP 6M (≈ USD 2.0K) of EBITDA.
COP 1,750,905 + 249,095 (≈ USD 573 + USD 82) minimum honored; Ley 1935 tips add ~COP 1.0–1.5M/mo (≈ USD 330–490) take-home; add-back kill-rule pre-authorized if service strains.
The machine
DCT Global Group builds products for the modern entertainment and hospitality world — this unit runs like one. Every cover, yield and labor-hour hits a telemetry stack from day one, and menu decisions follow contribution-margin kill rules, not sentiment.
Hotel & condo partners carry coded menus — channel attribution per feeder property, per night.
Raw-in / cooked-out weights by batch; cooked-yield variance alarms at 2 points.
By daypart, reviewed weekly; one-FTE add-back pre-authorized when service telemetry strains.
Resident regulars vs visitor cohorts tracked like season-ticket members — repeat rate is the franchise metric.
Weekly wholesale bulletins set the produce basket; menu engineering reacts monthly.
Any SKU below contribution floor for 8 weeks is redesigned or cut. No exceptions, no favorites.
Diligence gates cleared · SAS incorporated · FDI registered · asset and lease documents signed
Equipment audit under load · extraction survey · pit smoker ordered (4–6 wk critical path)
The “5%”: theme conversion, signage, wine cold storage · permits under the new entity
Supplier qualification: two protein bids per species, yield cards, three-gate menu priced
Hiring & training — pit lead first, then core-5 roster · POS and engagement stack live
Friends & family and hotel front-desk tastings → soft open at a 70–80% capacity ceiling
New Colombian SAS. Asset purchase of contents and lease position — never a share purchase of the seller’s entity.
COP 125M (≈ USD 41K) per side at base; the lean-to-heavy delta reserved as a pre-agreed contingent commitment.
FX channeled with declaración de cambio; FDI registered with Banco de la República, formalizing dividend remittance and repatriation.
50/50 board with reserved matters — budget, capex >COP 20M (≈ USD 6.6K), debt, related-party contracts, distributions. Operating control to the DCT Global Group-appointed GM.
Quarterly, only after working capital is back to 3 months of fixed base and the maintenance reserve is funded. Dual-currency statements with the TRM stated.
Monthly investor pack from POS telemetry within 10 business days: P&L in COP and USD, covers, check, channel mix, hotel league table, KPIs vs guardrails.
Gates & risks
This is a priced, sited deal — so it closes on gates, not on momentum. Execute an LOI with exclusivity and escrow, run the diligence gates as a two-week sprint, and start the nine-week clock only when the lease, extraction and asset gates are green. If the lease terms or the extraction survey fail, the fallback is the documented ground-up build model at a different site: the concept case does not depend on this address, but the FINAL economics do.
Next step
Four institution-cited strategy documents — market & demographics, marketing, operating & supply chain, opening & financial — plus the demographics deep-dive annex and this model’s complete arithmetic. Vet everything.
partners@dctglobal.group
