The Studio Betting Your Next Favorite Restaurant Won't Have a Dining Room

Most people meet DFG Ventures without ever hearing its name. They order a chopped salad from Goop Kitchen on a delivery app, or a burger from Questlove's Mixtape at a food hall in Westlake Village, and never learn that a small studio in El Segundo built the brand, staffed the kitchen, and figured out how to keep the food intact for the 45-minute drive. That anonymity is the point. DFG Ventures - registered as DOM Food Group - is a company designed to sit behind other companies.

Founded in 2020, DFG describes itself in plain terms: a venture studio that incubates, invests in, operates, and consults on scalable food businesses. The unusual part is the word "operates." Plenty of firms write checks into restaurants. Far fewer put on an apron. DFG does both, and that combination is what makes it worth understanding.

01The gap it noticed

The insight is almost embarrassingly simple. A chef, a celebrity, or an influencer can command an audience of millions and still have no idea how to run a kitchen at scale. As founding partner Tony Owen has put it, creators often have the following but lack "the operational capacity or infrastructure to actually build a business around it." Fame is not a supply chain. A recipe is not a restaurant.

DFG positions itself in exactly that gap. The partner supplies the name and the audience. DFG supplies everything unglamorous behind it: the menu engineering, the kitchen operations, the delivery-first packaging, the unit economics. The result is a brand that looks like a passion project and runs like a business.

That one observation about the 45-minute meal explains a lot about how DFG thinks. A dish that shines under restaurant lights can wilt in a paper bag on a car seat. Building for delivery means rethinking the recipe, the container, and the timing - the kind of detail that rarely makes headlines but decides whether a brand survives.

02Who is actually in the room

DFG is not a group of first-timers experimenting with food. Its partnership reads like a short history of modern American eating. Tony Owen is the grandson of Dominick DiMatteo Jr., founder of the Dominick's supermarket chain, so the grocery business is quite literally inherited. Mario Del Pero co-founded Mendocino Farms, the fast-casual sandwich chain. Donald Moore spent more than two decades at The Cheesecake Factory as a culinary leader and now serves as CEO of Goop Kitchen. Nathan Tan rounds out the founding group.

That mix - grocery, fast-casual, and large-format culinary - is the studio's real asset. It means DFG can talk credibly to a landlord, a food scientist, a delivery platform, and a movie star in the same afternoon. Each partner has already made the mistakes that sink first-time restaurateurs, which shortens the distance between a good idea and a shift that actually runs.

Owen tends to describe the work less like a pitch and more like a discipline. He has talked about careers as climbing a mountain rather than a ladder - a route defined by "overcoming uncertainty, stagnation and failure" - and about the value of listening more than talking in an industry that rewards noise. It is a quieter posture than the celebrity brands the studio serves, and probably a necessary one for a business whose job is to make other people's names work.

03The flagship: Goop Kitchen

If you want to understand the model, start with Goop Kitchen. DFG operates the business side of the food pillar for goop, Gwyneth Paltrow's wellness company. The format is a "ghost" or digital kitchen: almost no dining room, orders placed online, food built for pickup and delivery. When the El Segundo location opened in late 2022, it was designed around easy parking and fast pickup, not table service.

The numbers have followed. Goop Kitchen's sales grew roughly 60% year over year, with individual California locations reporting around $20,000 in daily revenue and established sites averaging close to $7 million in annual sales. On that strength, the brand has moved into the San Francisco Bay Area and, in 2026, into New York City, where it plans a delivery-first rollout of up to seven locations - most of which customers will never walk into.

What makes goop a useful test case is that food was never a side hustle for the brand. Paltrow's company began in 2008 as email recommendations to friends and grew into a wellness business with fashion, beauty, and food pillars. Handing the operational side to DFG let goop keep its point of view on ingredients while someone else owned the logistics of getting a salad across Los Angeles traffic intact. The division of labor is the product.

04A portfolio, not a chain

Goop Kitchen is the loudest example, but DFG runs a portfolio. Each brand tests a slightly different version of the same thesis: that a strong identity plus disciplined operations can outrun a traditional restaurant.

• Goop KitchenThe flagship delivery-first chain built with goop, expanding from California to New York.
• NeighborlyA "curated food hall" that is one part multi-brand kitchen, one part corner-store superette - mixing influencer concepts, LA staples like Mini Kabob and The Beverly Hills Cheese Store, and packaged goods.
• Mixtape by QuestloveQuestlove's better-for-you riff on the burger joint, remixing comfort food with cleaner ingredients. Debuted inside Neighborly in Westlake Village.
• Cravings by Chrissy TeigenA food concept extending Chrissy Teigen's Cravings brand into operating kitchens.
• The Sausage ProjectOne of several concepts still in development inside the studio.

05How the studio works

DFG's four verbs are not marketing filler - they map to how the company actually spends its days. It runs the same loop across every brand.

A small tell sits in the paperwork. DFG's registered industry codes point to portfolio management and management consulting - not restaurants. It is classified more like an investment firm than a diner, which is a fair description of how it behaves.

The economics of that loop reward repetition. Every brand DFG builds teaches the studio something about packaging, delivery timing, or menu design that it can carry into the next one. A ghost kitchen that costs less to open than a full-service restaurant, combined with an audience the partner already owns, lowers the two biggest risks in the business: real estate and marketing. Get both down, and a single kitchen can serve several brands from the same line.

06Where it fits, and who it's up against

The ghost-kitchen category has a bruised reputation. High-profile operators expanded fast, leased out kitchen space to third parties, and then retrenched when the delivery boom cooled. DFG's answer to that history is ownership. Instead of renting counter space to brands it does not control, it builds and runs the brands itself, which keeps quality and margin inside the house.

That places DFG in a crowded but distinct spot. It shares territory with multi-brand and ghost-kitchen operators such as CloudKitchens, Wonder, Kitchen United, and Local Kitchens, and with celebrity-brand shops like Virtual Dining Concepts. What separates it is the studio structure: operator depth on one side, investment discipline on the other, and a preference for owning the whole brand rather than a slice of a food court.

07What you can actually do with it

For a diner, DFG is invisible infrastructure - the reason a celebrity meal shows up hot and consistent through an app. For a chef, an influencer, or a food entrepreneur, it is something more useful: a partner that already knows how to turn attention into an operating business, and is willing to run the hard parts. That is the trade DFG offers. You bring the audience or the idea; it brings the kitchen.

Whether the venture-studio model can be as repeatable in food as it has been in software is still an open question. Restaurants are stubbornly physical, margins are thin, and taste is unforgiving. But DFG's early record - a flagship growing at a healthy clip, a portfolio of recognizable names, and a footprint stretching from El Segundo to Manhattan - suggests the studio has found a real seam in the market. It is quietly building the plumbing behind a generation of food brands, one delivery order at a time.