Julia Heyer
Managing Director at Heyer Performance
A little bit about Julia…
Julia’s wide-ranging restaurant career encompasses development, operational and corporate experience across the globe. Before founding Heyer Performance in 2009, Julia worked with Alain Ducasse, SushiSamba restaurants and Richard Sandoval’s Modern Mexican Restaurant Group. Her roles have included Controller, Operations Analyst, Sales Manager, Acting GM, and Director of Development. Over the years, she has led the creation, negotiation, design, development and project management of a large variety of new ventures. This multi-faceted experience has sharpened her skills and insights for the strategic use of Food and Beverage that drives the subsequent concept development, experience creation, business structuring, operations management and project execution.
With Heyer Performance (HPI), Julia and her team support owners and managers of Real Estate, private equity firms, co-work spaces, hotels and restaurateurs on how to optimally use Food and Beverage as part of their overall business – and then helps them successfully program + develop the experience and business through the opening and beyond. With HPI she has spearheaded and supported more than sixty food and beverage ventures—projects ranging from 450 to 29,000 square feet in size, and fast casual to three-Michelin star in type. From crafting Food halls in size, deal structure and curation mix, over envisioning the future of co-working experiences, to creating the right fit of F+B experience in hotel, resort and club environments: Julia leads the growing HPI team in programming and developing unusual spaces and deploying F+B as a strategic tool in venues nationwide and internationally.
A native German, Julia graduated from Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration, where she won the prestigious RC Kopf student achievement award. Today, as a Cornell guest-lecturer and instructor at the Institute of Culinary Education in New York City, she enjoys helping the next generation of talent succeed. She also serves on the Mayor’s Council of Food & Beverage for New York City and has been quoted or mentioned in The Wall Street Journal, Crain’s Business News, and New York Times.