Photo courtesy of Thompson Hospitality Corporation
Warren Thompson, president and chairman of the board, Thompson Hospitality Corporation.
On any given morning on King Street in Old Town Alexandria, there’s a wait for a table at Milk & Honey, where shrimp and grits and other Southern staples set the tone. It’s a scene that captures what Warren Thompson has been building for decades—restaurants rooted in story and experience—and one that now serves as a front door to a much larger, fast-growing portfolio.
Before most of his restaurants have turned on the lights, Thompson is already deep in the numbers—moving line by line through the previous day, scanning for patterns. Weather, tourism, a strong dinner service in one neighborhood, a slow lunch in another—it all tells a story. He’ll zero in on a handful of locations, trying to understand what changed and why. It’s a habit that has stayed with him, even as the company — now a $1 billion business — behind those numbers has grown far beyond what his younger self might have imagined.
That younger version of Thompson was already thinking like an operator. At 15, he was raising 100 hogs, buying his father out of the business when teaching demands pulled him away. Before that, there were peaches and apples—sold alongside his dad—part of a long family tradition of making something extra when the primary paycheck wasn’t enough. His father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had all done the same, building supplemental businesses while working in segregated schools that didn’t pay them fairly. The lesson stuck: ownership wasn’t just ambition, it was necessity.
Photo courtesy of Milk & Honey
Milk & Honey in Old Town Alexandria
There was also a story that lingered. Thompson often heard about his great-great-grandfather, who had been enslaved and later started his own company at 30. Thompson carried that with him, quietly measuring his own path against it. He would start Thompson Hospitality at 32.
More than three decades later, that company—through its Thompson Restaurants division—has settled into a rhythm of steady, deliberate growth. In 2025, revenue climbed 12 percent year over year, driven not by any single concept but by a portfolio that stretches across formats and audiences: Milk & Honey, Makers Union, Wiseguy Pizza, Matchbox, Austin Grill. Eleven locations opened or converted that year, and the pace is inching toward something close to a drumbeat—with a long-term goal of reaching even more locations by the end of 2027.
Photo courtesy of Milk & Honey
A Southern-inspired chicken and waffle dish from Milk & Honey restaurant.
Some of that growth is familiar—more restaurants in more neighborhoods—but some of it is happening in places where diners are just passing through. Thompson is pushing further into airports, with Wiseguy Pizza and Makers Union headed to Reagan National, part of a broader move into high-traffic, non-traditional spaces like transportation hubs and college campuses. At the same time, the geographic footprint is stretching outward, with expansion plans taking shape in Virginia’s Tidewater region, Pennsylvania and North Carolina.
Tidewater, in particular, carries a different kind of pull. It’s home. There are already a handful of Thompson concepts there, and more are on the way—Milk & Honey, Wiseguy Pizza, and potentially Austin Grill, Ms. Peach’s, Big Buns, and Makers Union. The expansion reads like a business strategy, but it also feels personal, a return threaded through with memory.
That sense of story—where something comes from and why it exists—is something Thompson talks about often. He believes a restaurant needs it. Not just a menu or a design, but a point of view that people can feel when they walk in. It’s part of what has fueled the rise of Milk & Honey, the Southern-inspired concept that has become one of the company’s strongest growth engines. Five new locations opened in 2025, bringing the total to 19, with more on the way.
Some of the newer concepts lean even more directly into that idea of legacy. Ms. Peach’s Southern Kitchen, introduced in late 2025, is named for Thompson’s grandmother, Hattie Warren—a woman he describes as small in stature but formidable in presence. She bought land on her own, even setting some aside for sharecropping without telling her husband, a move that left an impression. “God will never make more land,” she used to say, a line that still echoes in how Thompson thinks about investment and growth.
Inside the company, growth shows up in quieter ways, too. Thompson tends to measure success less by openings than by trajectories—like the employee who started as a dishwasher at Milk & Honey and now oversees dozens of restaurants as a vice president. Those are the stories he returns to most often, the ones that mirror, in some way, the path he’s been on since he was a teenager figuring out how to run a small operation of his own.
Not everything about the job scales so neatly. Running a company—especially one that continues to expand—can be isolating. There’s no real peer inside the organization, no obvious counterpart to trade notes with at the same level. Over time, Thompson has built a network outside the company for that, people who understand the weight of decision-making when there isn’t a clear roadmap.
Still, the day-to-day remains grounded in details: the feel of a dining room, the consistency of a dish, the small signals that bring someone back a second time. At Milk & Honey, that might be the shrimp and grits, still the top seller, or the catfish he tends to recommend without hesitation. At home, his preferences tilt toward crab—a nod to his Tidewater roots.
And then there are the quieter rituals that have nothing to do with expansion plans or operating models. Watching “The Price Is Right” with his daughter. Flipping over to “Shark Tank” or “Mad Money,” using those moments to talk about cost, value, equity—how money works, and what it means to build something.
If there’s a through line connecting all of it—the early businesses, the steady growth, the new markets—it’s a particular kind of patience. Thompson isn’t chasing scale for its own sake. The goal, as he frames it, is to build something that lasts: Brands with meaning, systems that hold up under pressure, opportunities that extend beyond a single role or title.
The numbers each morning are just one way of checking that progress. The rest shows up more gradually, in places and people, over time.
