Built in Victoria. Made for Toronto.
A consultancy for independent operators who want to make lasting impacts.
Red Book Consulting was founded in 2026 by Ethan Allwood — a chef who spent most of his career building inventory systems for the kitchens he ran, and decided to build them for everyone else too. The firm now operates across independent restaurants and care kitchens, grounded in partnership with doctorate level economic theory.
How this started
The same problem kept appearing in every kitchen.
Backed restaurants, independent operators, luxury hotels, high-volume premium casual — different scales, different cuisines, different ownership structures. But underneath the surface, the same pattern: capable people doing good work, undermined by systems that weren't built for the operation. Counts that took two hours and still came out wrong. Orders placed on intuition. Vendor prices that drifted unnoticed until month-end. Owners working harder every year and getting less of their own time back.
Most of these operations didn't have a food problem. They had a system problem. And the firms that came in to fix it usually arrived with a software product, a process diagram, and a contract — and left without doing the part that actually changes anything: working with the people who run the kitchen, so the system runs after the consultants leave.
Red Book was built to do that work. We build, install, and maintain the operational backbone — and we stay long enough for it to stick.
Whose on your team
Ethan J. Allwood
Founder
Ethan has spent his career in independent and luxury hospitality kitchens, most recently at TopTable Victoria, reinforcing his understanding of multi-supplier inventory management and multi-level system implementation, ultimately rebuilding the operation's forecasting and variance frameworks on personal devices. Before TopTable, he led food operations for the Fairmont Empress's seasonal luxury outlet during peak cruise season, scaling from sole operator to a five-person team and posting a single-night revenue of $37,000 at the operation's peak.
Before the Empress, he spent two years as Chef Manager at Earls Restaurants in Victoria, where he drove a 28% improvement in food cost performance through high frequency counts for certain cost drivers, building routines around ordering and inventory, and investing in people. — the same architecture that now sits at the core of Red Book's weekly reporting cadence.
The pattern across each role was the same: build the inventory system, coach the team to run it, watch the numbers change. By the end of his time at TopTable, he had built so many of these systems that the next move was obvious — build them for everyone else.
Ethan holds A-Levels in Economics, History, and Sociology from The Alice Smith School, where he received the Head of School Award for Leadership and achievement awards in History and Economics. He is currently continuing his education through the Google Data Analytics Certificate program, the Anthropic AI Architect Program, and the University of Toronto Continuing Studies program in Data Science and Service Design, beginning September 2026.
Outside of Red Book, he runs a long-standing culinary research project — testing dishes weekly and hosting dinners to develop a future omakase concept, building the recipe foundations and operational design for a restaurant he plans to open later in his career. The project is its own kind of methodology work: applying the same systems thinking to a kitchen of his own that he applies to the kitchens of his clients.
We respond within one business day.
Think we would be a good fit?
We respond within one business day.