Future plans
Four things have been critical La Petite Maison’s success — including the sourcing of fresh produce, the lively atmosphere and clever menu engineering. Last but by no means least is the team, which is predominately European and comprised of people that have worked with either Ani or Toussaint in the past.
“Without them we couldn’t do what we do now,” says Ani.
With the restaurant approaching its first birthday, Toussaint says one of his main objectives is staff retention: “My greatest skill is to create teams and that’s why I’ve been successful. The most important focus as a manager is retaining staff — sometimes people want to see something else, so you have to enable them to progress”.
This is where La Petite Maison’s expansion plans will come into play — the group is opening a restaurant at Le Vendôme Beirut Hotel in Lebanon by the end of the year.
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“We’re going to recruit people and train people for Beirut — Dubai is going to be the training centre for other restaurants,” says Toussaint.
“You need to notice when people are bored or they want to learn something else, then send them to a different restaurant, you know where they are, you can always take them back.”
Despite numerous approaches to expand the La Petite Maison enterprise, Toussaint says that growth will be “slowly but surely”.
“Every year we want to do another, but we will do each one properly, one after the other,” he says, explaining that training different restaurant teams will be the most important element of growth.
With the front of house team setting up the tables, Toussaint returning countless calls and chef Ani disappearing into the kitchen, a salivating Caterer team decided it was time to leave this wonderful ‘little house’ in DIFC ahead of the regular dinner service stampede. One thing’s for sure though, we’ll be back…
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