About Dan

Dan Anton spent nearly a decade building Lahpet from a market stall into a multi-site Burmese restaurant group in London. He introduced a cuisine most Londoners had never encountered and worked out what it takes to build an audience for a new culinary offering - through concept development, operational discipline and the commercial realities of scaling a restaurant business.

That experience is what Ground Up Projects is built on. He works with hospitality founders and operators at the intersection of brand, operations and commercial performance - whether that's an early-stage concept finding its footing or an established business under pressure. The focus is on what actually drives performance in real trading environments: clarity of concept, disciplined execution and a model that works beyond the first site - the stuff that actually breaks businesses when it goes wrong.

He is also co-founder of Tōji-ya, a house of Japanese bath and recovery rituals opening in 2027. It draws on the same instinct that built Lahpet: taking something unfamiliar, understanding it properly, and making it make sense to a new audience. He writes about building it in the Toji-ya journal.

His writing through Ground Up Dispatch covers the economics and realities of the industry from the inside - the kind of perspective that tends to stay private.