Maybe it was the heat or maybe there had been a misunderstanding over our plans. I am rushing to lunch at Mlýnec when I realise that Sanjiv Suri is actually waiting for me around the corner at V Zátiší. Both restaurants are packed shortly after noon. Prague really have this many people craving fine dining on a Tuesday lunchtime, I wonder as I hurry into the restaurant on Bethlehem Square.

“Catch your breath and don’t plan anything else now. We are going to sit down and have lunch in peace,” he says. He is not annoyed by my delay. Still, it sounds almost like an instruction, even though it comes with a broad smile. Sanjiv Suri is wearing a perfectly tailored coral jacket and his manner is just as polished. 

But when he tells me to breathe, he means it.
“Breath is connected to everything we do. It’s the same with our decisions, they are with us every microsecond, just like breathing. I call that karma. Do I choose to get up in the morning and exercise, or not? That is karma. We create our own destiny.” You get the picture now? This is another chapter in the life of a meditating man in his sixties who built restaurants where, at one point, almost everybody who is somebody in the Czech Republic had eaten at least once. At the same time, now he is personally back at the head of the company because he wants to take annual revenue to between €80 million and €100 million.

Our conversation is interrupted by Daniel Bureš, who has been head chef at V Zátiší for the past two years. “This guy has incredible talent. I’m really excited about him,” Suri says enthusiastically. At the same time, he watches closely as Bureš puts the finishing touches on our dishes at the table. It takes only a moment to understand that working for Sanjiv Suri cannot be easy. Nothing escapes his attention and he does not hesitate to let people know right away.

“I have very high expectations because we constantly have to push ourselves. People around me tell me that things need time, and that is something I am learning. I cannot treat everyone the same way I treat myself. So I am working on myself, and I am glad that I am.”

Does the same approach work in business, where according to Suri, the company recorded the highest revenue in its history last year, while also making its lowest profit? “If you only work twelve to fifteen hours a week, you are not going to figure out what is happening. That is why I decided to return to running the company full time,” he says without hesitation.

His return reflects developments in his personal life too. Like many people who build businesses in hospitality, Suri had allowed work to take over, he was often away from home for as many as fifteen hours a day. During that period, both of his marriages gradually came to an end and he wanted to spend more time with his children. In 2018, for the first time in the company’s history, someone else, outside of the company, became CEO of Zátiší Group. First it was David Vrba, followed by Martina Sedláčková. Suri as the founding father eventually realised that he wanted to do things differently and gradually returned to full management control. The reason why the company wasn’t running as he had envisioned, he believes some of the problems came from hiring decisions.

“If you make soup from fresh carrots and put two or three rotten ones in it, the whole thing is ruined. We used to hire almost anyone who had a pair of hands. Before Covid, we employed 389 people full time. Then the number fell to 153. Now we are back above 300, but everyone who joins the company, and everyone who leaves, has to go through an interview with me.”

The figures provided by his team show the scale of the company’s ambitions. Next year, Zátiší Group expects revenue of between €45 million and €50 million, with an EBITDA margin of 10 to 12 percent. Today, the business rests on three main areas. Around half of revenue comes from event catering, one quarter from restaurants and one quarter from corporate dining through company canteens (Zátiší Canteens). Within two or three years, the company wants each of those three segments to account for roughly one third of the business.

The target of €80 million to €100 million in revenue applies to the Czech market by 2030. The group is also planning expansion abroad, with Munich, Berlin, Warsaw and Bratislava among the cities being considered. The company says those plans are not yet developed enough to publish financial targets. It has also not decided whether it will finance the expansion itself or bring in an investor.

So what does it take to succeed at Zátiší Group? According to the owner, you have to be “humble and hungry”. “You have to love hospitality. If you don’t, and if you cannot smile even when nobody is watching, then we have hired the wrong person.” Another requirement is what he calls an ownership mindset. Employees are expected to treat the company as if it were their own.To some extent, that is literal: every employee shares in the company’s profit, from the head chef to the person washing dishes.The profit share is currently paid once a year, the plan is to move to a quarterly system so that employees feel their participation more regularly.

The second advice from Suri to his people is to not spend too much energy on things they cannot control.“If you spend most of your time thinking about those things, you lose energy. That is why I am not too worried that we are still not at Žofín,” he says. Zátiší Group was supposed to take over Žofín Palace in January last year after winning a public tender organised by Prague 1. Suri’s company offered annual rent of CZK 20.4 million, roughly two and a half times the amount paid by the previous tenant, the NKL agency. NKL refused to hand over the palace, arguing that its contract gave it the right to extend the lease.

The dispute went to court. So far, the court has supported Zátiší on the central issue: it confirmed that the tender had been conducted in accordance with the law and that the new lease agreement should remain valid. The ruling is not yet final. The premises have not been vacated, the area has not been cleared and Suri is still waiting for the moment when the company can begin operating the building. After more than twenty months of limited operations, and a whole process that the company believes could last as long as two years, Zátiší expects that it will effectively have to rebuild the Žofín operation from the ground up. The ambition is to create the most prestigious event venue in Prague, with significant potential for growth in events, visitor numbers and revenue, but the company says it will only be able to define exact figures once the final operating concept and business model are clear.

Suri says he learned the importance of admitting when you do not know something after meeting the Dalai Lama. “I was doing the catering for Forum 2000, where he came to meet Václav Havel,” he recalls. After lunch, which Zátiší served at Bellevue, the Dalai Lama apparently said that he did not want to return to his scheduled programme.“I told him he could stay in the restaurant for as long as he wanted, but on one condition. I wanted to be allowed to talk to him. That is exactly what happened, we spent two hours talking and I asked him a lot of questions. To many of them, he said he did not know. I think he said it about forty times and hen there was silence. When we do not know the answer, we often invent a story, we tell it at work and to our children. I no longer have a problem telling my team that I simply do not know and since then, the trust between us has become much deeper. Most people can tell when you are bluffing anyway.”

He speaks just as openly about one of the darkest periods of his life, when he suffered from depression during the Covid pandemic. “Our fixed payroll costs were more than €1 million a month. Revenue fell from CZK 80 million to half a million. Suddenly, you did not even have enough money to cover notice periods, you had no idea how you were supposed to handle it. My reaction was that I spent four and a half months in such a deep depression that I just stayed in bed and slept, I did not want to see anyone. I was taking antidepressants and seeing a psychologist.”

What helped him recover? “What helped was realising that it was not only about me. I had a responsibility to 150 or 200 members of the team and their families, as well as to my children and the people closest to me. That thought was the first step towards functioning again.” says today.  “Do not imagine it as some kind of awakening. Getting better is a process.”

The company went through a similar transformation. “After Covid, we focused on turning the company into a stronger and more resilient organisation built around the best talent, technology including AI, and B Corp principles,” he says. “We already believed in those values before Covid, and the process is still continuing.”

I ask him whether he would do it all again. His face, which seemed to darken as he remembered the most difficult period of his life, suddenly lights up. “Immediately. Yes. I would not change a single moment because it made me who I am today. Life is an arena and we are gladiators. You have to go in, fight, get scars, fall down and do it again. I love the process. It is like going to the gym. At first everything hurts and you think, damn, I cannot do this. But the next day you come back stronger.”

Business ethics are important to him in another area as well. Zátiší Group recently became the first hospitality company in the Czech Republic to receive B Corp certification.The international certification looks at a company’s social and environmental responsibility. It assesses not only profit, but also the impact on employees, communities and the environment. The minimum score is 80 out of 180 points. Zátiší Group received 96.8 points. Its goal is to reach 140 points within the next three years.

“We do not need a certificate to hang on the wall. It is a way of proving to ourselves every year that we are serious about our values.” The word impact becomes a recurring theme throughout our conversation. Suri takes out his phone and shows me a table. “Look at how many people we actually feed every day. Fine dining restaurants such as V Zátiší account for only five percent of revenue. The real core of the business is corporate dining, eighty percent of the people we feed every day eat there. That means six to eight thousand hot meals a day and eight to ten thousand guests from Monday to Friday.” Suri is counting.

Philanthropy has been important to Suri since the beginning of his career. Since last October, the company has been paying for a hot lunch every day for 20,000 disadvantaged children in India.

“It is not because it happens to be India. It is because this is the best ratio of impact to resources that we have ever found. By the end of the year, we want to add another 10,000 children.” For Suri, charity also provides a counterbalance to the commercial side of the company: this year, Zátiší Group expects to record 2.5 million paid transactions. In response, he wants the company to provide five million meals to children who might otherwise not even go to school.

The group’s restaurant plans are just as ambitious. Luxury restaurant Bellevue is expected to return to central Prague in the first quarter of 2029 after years of closure. “The contract is signed. František Novák has taken over the project. He is the former director who led the original Bellevue to six consecutive placements in the European TripAdvisor top 20.” The company is also planning the Bursa restaurant in Holešovice and other projects. “By 2030, we want to have at least 1,000 restaurant seats. Today, we have 220.”

Suri’s ambitions may take him mentally back, from where he came to Prague. He studied hotel management in Paris and worked for companies including InterContinental, Le Méridien and Oberoi. “This year it will be fifty years since I entered the business. I find that incredible,” he says, raising an eyebrow.

He moved to Prague in 1990. He was thirty one years old and lived on the top floor of the Swedish Embassy, thanks to his girlfriend at the time, who worked there. Prague after the Velvet Revolution fascinated him so much that he decided to stay and one year later, in 1991, he opened his own business. Economist Dana Krautstenglova was so convinced by his idea that she left her secure job and joined him in building the company as a managing director and remains in that role today. Together, they opened the V Zátiší wine bar on Liliová Street.

V Zátiší and Bellevue later became benchmarks for fine dining, they brought something that the hospitality industry, damaged by decades of socialism, had largely been missing – quality, sophistication and knowledge of gastronomy. Over the past 35 years, Prague has changed and its restaurant significantly moved much closer to the international cities that Czechs once looked to for inspiration.Suri now faces far more competition.

“Yes, times have changed, but Zátiší Group is not just about restaurants, even if it sometimes looks that way. As I said, corporate dining and catering are what our business is built on. That is why I do not feel pressure to follow every trend and I also run a very diverse company.”

When you spend your life building a business, you want to know to whom you will one day pass on your empire, in which invested so much of your life energy and resources in it. Or not? “That question is simply not on the table for me,” he says.