She Had a Ph.D. He Ran a Steakhouse. They Joined Forces and Run 10 Restaurants Together.

Before there were lines out the door, Alexandra Lourdes and Steve Jerome were just trying to solve different problems.

Lourdes, then a Ph.D. student at UNLV, had started collaborating on campus events with her friend Lin Smith Jerome, who was married to Jerome and would soon become her closest creative partner.

At the time, Jerome was running a high-end steakhouse and needed to boost foot traffic. He asked Lourdes and Smith Jerome to organize a happy hour at the restaurant. The event packed the patio, and it lit a spark for a new business.

The happy hour worked so well that the restaurant wanted more — weekly events, full-on marketing support, a real partnership. There was just one issue: Lourdes and Smith Jerome didn't technically have a company. So they made one. That night, Smith Jerome filed the LLC paperwork. Lourdes mocked up a logo at the dining room table. Suddenly, they were in the restaurant marketing world, prioritizing storytelling, community and in-person energy over traditional ads. What started as a one-off collaboration quickly became The Refined Agency — and eventually, the foundation for Refined Hospitality Group.

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Bouncing from coffee shop to coffee shop with their laptops, Lourdes and Smith Jerome eventually thought, Why not just create one we actually like working in? They brought Jerome in as a partner, and their idea became Café Lola: part creative hub, part coffee shop and the first concept the three of them built together.

Building on that momentum, they launched Saint Honoré — a boutique doughnut shop tucked into a hard-to-find parking lot, where they decorated pastries by hand and hoped someone would come in.

"We were throwing more doughnuts away than we were selling," Jerome says. "One customer would trickle in. That was it."

Lourdes decided to document what life looked like as a small business owner. "I ended up doing a day-in-the-life [video], and I just started filming everything I was doing, decorating doughnuts, and that video blew up to like a million views," she says. "All of a sudden, I became a storyteller."

Lourdes has since grown her audience to more than a million followers on Instagram and 2.5 million on TikTok.

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Built different, built together

Jerome will be the first to tell you he's not on social media. He prefers to let the food and hospitality speak for themselves. But he also knows the power of what Lourdes does with a phone and a story.

"She brings people in. I try to keep them coming back," he says.

That line isn't just a catchphrase. It's how Refined Restaurant Group works. Lourdes leads content and community, drawing audiences through authentic storytelling. Jerome handles operations, quality and guest experience. They don't compete for the same role. They complement each other in every one.

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That clarity has allowed them to stay small, fast and deeply connected to their guests. Refined doesn't need corporate approval to pivot. If a menu item isn't resonating or a customer comment surfaces something new, they can adjust the same day. New ideas come from staff, followers and sometimes their own kids. The gap between idea and execution is often just 24 hours.

The team's agility shows in the concepts they've built: five Café Lola locations, two Saint Honoré shops (also home to their pizza spinoff, Pizza Anonymous), the fried chicken brand 3 Little Chicks, and two full-service restaurants, Sorellina and Emilio's, each a tribute to their families. What ties it all together isn't a cuisine. It's a point of view.

They care about quality. They care about speed. And they care about the people on both sides of the counter.

What started as a happy hour experiment and a quiet doughnut shop has become a model for how to build something bigger without losing your voice. They didn't just grow a restaurant group. They built trust, one story at a time.

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