Nathalie Moukarzel never set out to become a CEO. For years two things ran quietly underneath everything she did, a love of food and of cooking for others, and a longing to build a place where she could share that feeling with people who needed it as much as she had, and neither of them looked much like a career at the time. Fat Macy's, which helps people experiencing homelessness into work and into homes of their own, began as an experiment she fully expected to fail, and became instead a crash course in finance, employment law, hiring and, on more than one occasion, plumbing. Then came Sohaila, the Lebanese restaurant and wine bar in Shoreditch named after her grandmother, built on nostalgic recipes cooked properly and run as a serious commercial endeavour, whose first four years have just arrived in print with the publication of the Sohaila cookbook.
What stands out in Nathalie's story is her candour about the trade-offs that most people in her position would rather leave unsaid. She is refreshingly clear that leading a social enterprise means earning meaningfully less than a comparable operator, that growing the turnover does nothing on its own for your own salary, and that the loneliest part of the job is carrying the numbers quietly while everyone around you gets on with doing theirs well. She is just as clear about what she gets in return, which is complete control over what the business is for.
In this Career Spotlight, Nathalie talks about learning every part of the business months later than she should have, why hiring for enthusiasm about the mission is not the same as hiring for the ability to do the job, and the piece of advice about letting go that made the business better almost immediately.
Career Spotlight: Nathalie Moukarzel, Co-founder & CEO of Sohaila & Fat Macy's
What was the journey that led you to your current role?
None of this was a plan.
Two things were running underneath everything I did, long before they met. One was food, the whole sphere of hospitality, the cooking for others, cooking for myself, and discovery of so many things in between. The other was being part of something, a place, a space, where I could possibly share the way I felt about food and cooking with people who maybe needed it in the same way or more than I had. Neither felt like a career direction at the time. They were just the things I couldn't stop thinking about.
Starting something was less a leap than an experiment I expected to fail politely. What I hadn't reckoned with was how quickly it stops being about the idea and starts being about capability. I didn't necessarily choose the role I ended up in, I think perhaps I happily backed into it one step at a time. I learned finance because the numbers were the thing that would quietly kill us. Then employment law, hiring, plumbing... Each of those was learned months later than it should have been.
Opening the restaurant, Sohaila, came from somewhere more personal — nostalgic recipes, cooked properly, as a serious commercial restaurant partnered with a heritage project. We have built something together, that is more than we understood it would be at the beginning.
If there's a through-line, it's that every step was a response to what the last one exposed. I'd love to claim strategy. It was mostly paying close attention.
What’s been the hardest thing about your career journey so far, and how did you get through it?
Hospitality margins are brutal, and social enterprise margins are hospitality margins with a mission attached. There have been stretches where I've known exactly how many weeks of runway we had and had to keep leading a team who didn't, because telling them would have caused the thing I was trying to prevent. That's the hardest part — not the numbers themselves but carrying them quietly while everyone else is doing their job well. There are moments of total calm on the outside, total craziness inside, and absolute loneliness.
What got me through it, practically: forecasting far enough ahead that the hard decisions arrived as choices rather than emergencies, and building a board I could be completely honest with. The thing I got wrong for years was treating bad news as something to solve before sharing. The people who could actually help were the ones I was protecting from it.
What got me through it, personally: a small number of people who understood the specific texture of it. Not a network — three or four people I can text at 11pm.
What's the realistic salary range for your role? At entry level, mid-career, and at the top.
Salary in a social enterprise sits below what the equivalent job pays in commercial hospitality, and that gap is widest at the top. Entry-level and mid-level roles are comparable to the sector generally. Upper mid is where the divergence starts, and at founder or director level you are taking a meaningful discount against what a comparable operator would earn. That is a real cost and worth being clear-eyed about before you commit.
What you get instead is control over what the business is for. Nobody is going to ask you to compromise the mission to protect a margin, because the mission is the margin. Whether that trade is worth it depends on how much you need the difference — and it is a genuine question, not a rhetorical one. It is easier to answer at thirty than at fifty.
How has your earning potential changed over time, and what has influenced those jumps, plateaus or dips?
Not in a straight line, and not in a way that tracked how well the organisation was doing.
The jumps came when the shape of the income changed, not when it grew — when trading revenue became the majority of it, for example — because a board can only justify paying a CEO properly against money it can count on next year as well as this one. Turnover on its own does nothing. You can grow substantially and watch your own salary sit exactly where it was.
The plateaus came from choosing to hire ahead of myself. Every time there was headroom, the honest question was whether it bought me a raise or bought us a valuable member of staff, and for a long time the second answer was the right one.
The dips are always in changes to the economy, such as the rise in national insurance or ingredients, where I took a cut. Entry level staff will not know about it because it is not on their radar.
The uncomfortable truth: my earning potential is higher outside this sector than in it, and I've made a repeated choice not to test that. I'd rather say so plainly than pretend the trade-off doesn't exist.
What’s the most unexpected part of your role?
How much of it is editing rather than deciding.
I assumed a CEO's job was making calls. Most weeks it's closer to being the person who holds the through-line — making sure the menu, the funding application, the staff handbook and the Instagram grid are all telling the same story, and catching it early when they drift. A lot of leadership is noticing incoherence before it becomes a problem.
The other genuine surprise is how physical the work still is. I write board papers and I also carry crates. Cookbook launch / event days involve a runsheet and a lot of standing. I don't think I'd trust a version of this job where I'd stopped doing that.
What’s the best part of the job?
Getting to build something with real aesthetic ambition, and having that be the mechanism rather than a decoration on top of it.
The cookbook is the clearest version. Recipes, wine, spices, four years of the restaurant, and all of it made properly — the writing, the photography, the design. It would be easy to treat that as the nice-to-have and locate the serious work somewhere else. It isn't. The room has to be one people actually want to sit in. The food has to be good enough that someone comes back before they've been asked to care about anything else.
The people, and specifically what happens to a team when it has been together long enough to stop explaining itself.
Something comes out of the kitchen that I didn't know was coming and it's exactly right. Someone spots a table that's about to go wrong and handles it before I've registered the problem. Nobody is checking with anyone. That's what a good kitchen and a good floor actually look like from the inside, and it takes years, and it isn't something you can hire for directly — it accumulates.
What’s the hardest or most draining part?
The relentlessness. A restaurant doesn't pause. Someone calls in sick at 9am on a Saturday / a delivery doesn't arrive / the extraction fails and it doesn't matter what was in the diary — you're fire fighting and the week you planned is gone. That happens often enough that I've stopped planning weeks tightly, which is its own small defeat.
Underneath that is the harder thing: when you're running a business whose failure would cost people their housing pathway, not just their job, you can't fully put it down. I've got better at boundaries but I'd be lying if I said I'd solved it.
What skills matter most in your role, beyond the obvious ones?
Reading a room you're not in. Anticipating how a landlord, a journalist, a supplier or a team member will receive something before you send it. Most of my avoidable mistakes have been failures of this.
Financial literacy at a granular level. Not "understanding the P&L" but knowing your gross margin per dish, your labour percentage on a Tuesday, what a rent-free period is actually worth. Hospitality is decided in small numbers and you cannot delegate the instinct for them.
Narrative discipline. Being able to say the same true thing in eight words, four hundred words or a twenty-page board paper without it becoming a different thing.
Knowing when to be the difficult one. Negotiating a lease, holding your price, telling a long-standing supplier no. Being liked is not the job.
What did you have to learn the hard way?
That hiring for enthusiasm about the mission is not the same as hiring for the ability to do the role. Some of my costliest mistakes were people who believed in it completely and couldn't do the job, and I gave them far too long because ending it felt like a betrayal of the values. It wasn't. Keeping someone in a role they're failing at is the unkind option.
Also: get it in writing. Every warm verbal agreement I didn't paper — with a landlord / partner / supplier — eventually cost me money or a relationship, usually both.
What advice would you give to someone trying to break into the industry
Get commercially competent first, or in parallel. The sector is full of people who care and short of people who can read a cash flow forecast and negotiate a lease. If you can do both, you are genuinely rare, and you will be able to build the thing you actually want rather than the nearest compromised version of it.
Practically: go and work in a good restaurant for a year. Do shifts. There is no substitute for knowing how a service actually falls apart. Then find a small organisation where you'll be too under-resourced to specialise — you'll learn more in eighteen months than in five years somewhere well-staffed.
And start something, even something tiny. A supper club, a stall. Not because it'll succeed, but because it teaches you the difference between an idea you like and a thing people will pay for.
What’s the best piece of advice that YOU were given?
That the work would be better if I let go of some of it.
It came from someone who was generous enough to tell me gently, which mattered, because I would not have heard it any other way. I was doing everything. Not because I thought no one else could, but because handing something over felt like a risk I hadn't earned the right to take.
What they were actually saying was that delegating isn't a trust exercise about other people. It's a trust exercise about yourself — believing you have built something good enough that it doesn't need your hands on every part of it at once. It took me a long time to believe that. The business got better almost immediately.
About Nathalie Moukarzel
Nathalie Moukarzel is the co-founder and CEO of Fat Macy's, the London social enterprise that supports people living in temporary accommodation to move on from hostels and into homes of their own, and of Sohaila, the mission-driven Lebanese restaurant and wine bar at 232 Shoreditch High Street.
A chef by background, she co-founded Fat Macy's with Meg Doherty a decade ago, running its training programme through a catering company before opening Sohaila in the summer of 2022 to give it a permanent home. Trainees work in the restaurant's kitchen and front of house alongside its professional chefs and teams, with one-to-one support and grants to help them into independent housing.
The restaurant is named after Nathalie's Lebanese grandmother, with whom she grew up cooking, and in September 2026 Nathalie and Meg published Sohaila: Lebanese Recipes Made with Fat Macy's, a book of more than a hundred recipes that also tells the story of the restaurant and the work of Fat Macy's.
