Gary FX LaMorte built Honest Hospitality Team around a truth most operators learn the hard way.
Talent can carry a kitchen for a while. Systems determine whether the operation can hold.
LaMorte had spent years at the most demanding end of the business, moving from casual dining through Michelin-starred kitchens before stepping into senior culinary leadership. He worked with Thomas Keller and Andre Rochat, then became the first vice president of culinary operations for the Michael Mina restaurant group. He opened more than 30 restaurants with the company.
That work gave him a rare view of hospitality at scale. He was not watching one kitchen perform on a good night. He was moving through concept after concept, team after team, opening after opening -- observing where excellence held and where it began to drift.
The gap was obvious.
Each restaurant had its strengths. Each had its blind spots. Much of the difference came down to the chef in charge and the tools that chef had built, borrowed or inherited.
LaMorte understood that because he had lived it.
Early in his career, he made lists to keep himself out of trouble. In a high-pressure kitchen, a missing detail could become confusion, waste, inconsistency or a frustrated team trying to recover in real time.
The lesson stayed with him.
“Having your own recipe book in your back pocket is extremely valuable as a chef,” LaMorte said. “You can train as many people as can hear the sound of your voice. As soon as you learn to digitize your tool, you can train as many people as can view devices or print pieces of paper, which becomes pretty unlimited.”
That idea became part of the foundation for Honest Hospitality Team.
LaMorte founded the company in 2018 after leaving the corporate restaurant world. The goal was not simply to consult. He wanted to take what he had learned inside highly organized, well-funded restaurant groups and make that level of operational discipline available to more of the industry.
Today, Honest Hospitality Team works across consulting, culinary development, kitchen design, business planning, boutique catering, private restaurant operations and sports nutrition. Its client list includes professional sports organizations in Las Vegas, including the Raiders and the Las Vegas Aces, as well as The MINA Group, Red Bull, SLS, sbe, Culinaire Staffing and Starr Restaurants.
The Challenge: Scale without the Drift
Honest Hospitality Team operates in environments where menus change constantly, service volumes shift and teams cannot depend on memory, binders or one chef holding the whole operation together.
LaMorte knew opsi co-founder James Passafaro before the platform existed. The two met at The MINA Group, where the pressure to execute at a high level exposed the difference between a five-star team and a kitchen operation that could deliver consistently high quality.
Years later, that connection came full circle. Honest Hospitality engaged opsi by GoTab to bring more structure, visibility and control to daily kitchen operations. Passafaro had helped build those same operational lessons into the software, giving chefs and teams a way to manage the work without losing the standards behind it.
“I've been using opsi since the inception,” LaMorte explained. “I’m kind of a day one guy.”
Opsi by GoTab is an intelligent restaurant management solution designed to streamline kitchen operations and financial tracking. By leveraging opsi, restaurants can save thousands of dollars per year while dramatically reducing training time for new employees, thanks to its intuitive and centralized management tools.
GoTab acquired opsi in 2025 and integrated its back-of-house tools into a broader entertainment commerce platform, connecting guest-facing operations with the systems teams need behind the line.
What Opsi Gives Chefs
- Centralized recipe management with live updates and food costing
- Recipe scaling by volume for any service size
- Efficient prep and production planning
- Automated inventory tracking and waste reduction
- Invoice processing and SKU management
- Dynamic, station-level task lists
- Nutrition labeling with USDA data
- Mobile recipe access for the whole team
- Fast, secure user and access management
- Seamless kitchen collaboration and execution
LAMORTE: ‘YOU THINK FINE DINING IS THE HIGHEST LEVEL RELATIONSHIP, BUT IT’S NOT’
Honest Hospitality Team’s sports nutrition work shows what operational excellence looks like under pressure.
The company does not simply serve meals to professional athletes and executives. It runs daily, performance-driven food programs where the same people return again and again. The kitchen has to deliver variety, consistency, nutrition and personal care across hundreds of service days each year.
The Las Vegas Raiders’ sports nutrition program, operated in partnership with Honest Hospitality, was ranked tied for second in the nation by the NFL Players Association last year. LaMorte credited the recognition to the players and to years of work, leadership and growth by the team.
“We’re in year seven with the Raiders now,” LaMorte shared. “We’re in year five with the Las Vegas Aces. Through that, we learned a whole new language about food outside of leisure and luxury dining. In this case, it was functional and sports-related.”
The relationship is different from restaurant hospitality because the audience is different. A dinner guest may visit once. Athletes, coaches, executives and staff come back every day. The kitchen learns their preferences, routines and rhythms.
“You think fine dining is the highest level relationship, but it’s not,” LaMorte said. “In corporate dining, you feed the same “guests” every day. You know who they are, what their story is and what’s going on with them. It becomes a lot less about what you want as a chef and a lot more about nurturing them.”
That is where Honest Hospitality separates itself. The team brings fine dining discipline into a daily food program, then uses that structure to make the experience feel personal instead of repetitive.
365 Menus, 1,500 Recipes and the System Behind The Service
Chef Gary FX LaMorte changes menus every day, 365 days a year.
That may sound like a creative challenge. In practice, it is an operational one.
Breakfast tends to be more stable because people want routine in the morning. Lunch and dinner move through a broader rotation, with some items staying off the menu for six to eight weeks unless players or staff request them sooner.
“In corporate dining, you have a captive audience, so you have to change your menus all the time,” LaMorte explained. “We change our menus every day.”
Every menu change touches the whole operation: purchasing, prep, inventory, labor, nutrition, station setup and execution. With one team, Honest Hospitality manages more than 1,500 recipes in opsi by GoTab.
Those recipes have to work in motion.
A chef may need to shift from a 300-person lunch to a 90-person snack period. A cook may need the latest recipe, the correct yield and the right prep notes without stopping to ask where the information lives. A manager needs the system to protect consistency without slowing service.
“We need to create very detailed prep lists that show each station’s items, what they’re making, how much to make and what is currently in inventory,” LaMorte said.
Opsi by GoTab gives Honest Hospitality Team one place to run that work. Recipes, prep lists and production details live in a system the team can use at kitchen speed. Cooks can pull up a recipe, scale it by volume and move straight into production.
“I need different people to be able to open their phone and pull up one recipe out of 1,700,” LaMorte said. “If we’re serving a 90-person snack period instead of a 300-person lunch, they can scale the recipe down to that volume. Fifteen seconds later, they’re in the walk-in gathering ingredients.”
That is the difference between storing recipes and running an operation.
LaMorte said opsi by GoTab works because it does not bury the team in complexity. It gives employees what they need in the moment and lets the kitchen keep moving.
“The user interface is designed to be manageable from both a visual and intellectual standpoint,” LaMorte said. “It’s not trying to show you 50 million things it can do. It’s saying, ‘Here are the six things you need.’”
Honest Hospitality Team Builds Kitchens Where People Want To Stay
LaMorte is still driven by food, but the mission behind Honest Hospitality has moved beyond menus.
“I started Honest Hospitality because I wanted to make people healthier with food, and I wanted to create better jobs in hospitality,” LaMorte said. “I didn’t know how I was going to do it, but I knew I had some tools, and if I worked hard, I could figure that out.”
That mission carries particular weight in an industry known for long hours, high turnover and teams often asked to perform without enough structure behind them.
The work that matters most to LaMorte now is not only what happens on the plate. It is what happens inside the kitchen culture. He wants to build places where people are supported well enough to stay.
“What brings me the greatest joy is creating work environments that support people so well that they don’t leave,” LaMorte said. “When you have employees for seven or eight years, they have a level of comfort and security in their life that can be rare in hospitality.”
He sees corporate dining and sports nutrition as part of that future. Both still demand skill, creativity, discipline and speed, but they can offer chefs a more sustainable path than the traditional restaurant grind.
“At a certain point, you start asking, ‘Do I really want to spend the rest of my life working 110 hours a week in the cage?’” LaMorte said. “You’ve spent years building this craft. The question becomes, ‘where else can it take you?’”
LaMorte says the Honest Hospitality Team is passionate about empowering people.
The company gives chefs and hospitality teams a way to bring high-level culinary skill into environments built for longer, healthier careers.
Opsi by GoTab supports that model by supporting their work with an operating system: documented recipes, scalable production, clear prep information and the operational structure teams need to execute with confidence, all available on a mobile device.
“I believe it is mandatory now to have fully documented recipes available for people to use,” LaMorte added. “If you are not providing them to your staff, you will not have consistency.”
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Operator: Honest Hospitality Team; Las Vegas
Founded: 2018
Founder: Gary FX LaMorte, a 30-year industry veteran and former first vice president of culinary operations for the Michael Mina Group
Concept: A hospitality company that brings fine-dining discipline to operators who cannot staff it themselves, spanning consulting, culinary development, kitchen design, business planning, boutique catering, private restaurant operations and sports nutrition
Scale: A daily food program running 360 days a year, with menus that change every day and a library of more than 1,500 recipes in a single sports nutrition outlet, used by 30-plus team members across seven or eight concepts
opsi by GoTab Tools Used
- Mobile recipe access for 30-plus cooks, pulled up on a phone at kitchen speed
- A single portal managing seven or eight concepts from one login
- Centralized recipe management with live food costing across a 1,500-plus recipe library
- Recipe scaling by volume, resizing a dish from a 300-person lunch to a 90-person snack period in seconds
- Detailed, station-level prep and production lists tied to current inventory
- Invoice processing with AI and human review, plus SKU management
- Automated inventory tracking and waste reduction
- Nutrition labeling that pulls from a USDA database
- Fast, secure user management for onboarding and removing staff in under a minute
- Standalone platform that integrates with the GoTab, or other popular point-of-sale systems and kitchen display systems
Why it works: opsi by GoTab gives Honest Hospitality Team fine-dining-level operational discipline at the speed and scale of a daily, high-volume food program. It protects consistency across constantly changing menus, documents the work so any cook can execute it, and stays simple enough that new hires need almost no training, freeing the team to focus on the food and the people they feed.
About the GoTab and opsi Integration
The platform provides real-time recipe management with live food costing, automated inventory tracking, invoice processing and dynamic task lists built for restaurant teams. Operators using opsi by GoTab can save thousands of dollars a year while cutting training time for new employees, thanks to its intuitive, centralized tools.
Ready to connect your recipes, your tasks and your costs on one easy-to-use mobile platform? See how opsi by GoTab gives operators back-of-house control, protects consistency and keeps teams moving as their menus and volumes change. Visit GoTab.com and opsi.io to request a demo, or contact the team to see what opsi by GoTab can do for your operation.
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