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, 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, so it is a 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 of the 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: the 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), about 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 because 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 is 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, and 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, so we get 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, not 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
