Restaurant Owners Uncorked - By Schedulefly

Keith Santangelo joins Wil in-studio to trace his journey from growing up in a Cajun-Italian butcher/grocery family in Baton Rouge to owning New York City restaurants, leading major restaurant groups, and now serving independents through AccessWave. They reminisce about Keith being one of Schedulefly’s earliest customers, talk about the magic of independent restaurants as “third places” (with Seinfeld’s diner as a touchstone), and unpack how the industry’s resilience showed up during COVID. Keith walks through selling his Hell’s Kitchen spots before the pandemic, stewarding scratch-kitchen concept Jose Tejas/Border Café through the shutdowns, then running operations and finance for Serafina’s global group and navigating licensing vs franchising abroad. From there, he explains why he pivoted from opening more restaurants to building an insurance and benefits solution specifically for hospitality, bringing a “unreasonable hospitality” mindset to a traditionally cold, transactional world. Throughout, they dig in