Editor’s Note: Airport Experience News has launched the ACDBE of Distinction award to honor small, Airport Concessions Disadvantaged Business Enterprises-certified firms that excel in their field. Cheng Lor, president of Aero Service Group, is one of six winners for 2024.
The Reluctant Restaurateur
A Pivot To Help His Aging Parents Turned Into A New Career For Cheng Lor
BY Sarah Beling
Cheng Lor’s path to founding, operating and growing Aero Service Group – now in its second successful decade in business – has been a long and winding road.
A refugee whose family fled the deadly Killing Fields of Cambodia in a dangerous six-year journey through slave camps, landmines and refugee camps before migrating to the United States, Lor’s first brush with the hospitality industry was working as a cashier and busboy, and later, assisting his parents in establishing their own restaurants near their new home in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area.
“I worked in a Chinese restaurant that my dad worked at when I had just turned 14,” says Lor. “I was a busboy and a cashier for six months, and I said, ‘I will never do this again. I’m going to school.’”
Lor went on to study accounting and political science and later, pursue his J.D. (Juris Doctor) degree. But while working as a corporate attorney for Minneapolis-based firm, Lindquist & Vennum, he was pulled back into hospitality. This time, he was motivated by a desire to help his parents with their retirement.
“As refugees to this country, retirement planning was never on their radar. Feeding the kids and getting them to school was always the number-one priority,” says Lor. Drawing on what he’d learned from his parents’ restaurants, he began to investigate the possibility of opening an airport concessions space. To do so, Lor reconnected with fellow Twin
Cities restaurateur Bob Helman, who he remembered from their time as neighboring restaurant operators in a downtown St. Paul office building.
In 2003, Lor met with Helman, then working for sandwich brand Erbert & Gerbert’s, about a potential airport location opportunity. The two teamed up with Bob’s colleague Michelle Ranum and another concessionaire, Sayed Ali of Creative Host Services (now SSP America) to pitch an Erbert & Gerbert’s location in response
to an RFP from Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport (MSP). They didn’t win the RFP, but when Ali offered them an opportunity to operate a Ben & Jerry’s and Stage Deli with him in 2005, Lor took the chance, and jumped with both feet into the airport concessions space.
“I had no intentions of ever going back to food and beverage,” says Lor. “Mr. Ali saw what I was trying to do, which was really to build a retirement portfolio for my Mom and Dad, and offered us an opportunity,” he adds. “We would not be here today without Mr. Ali and the ACDBE program.”
Forward Steps
The collaboration was fruitful, and eventually, Lor left his law job to run Aero Service Group full-time. Lor brought on business partner Binh Le (a fellow refugee, in his case from Vietnam) in 2008. Ranum became the company’s CMO and Helman the company’s COO.
They opened additional concessions at MSP, Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport (BWI), Des Moines International Airport (DSM), and eventually Nashville International Airport (BNA). “Growing outside of the MSP market is difficult and requires wonderful relationships, because no one can do it alone,” Lor says, emphasizing that the connections he had fostered in the company’s early years led to support as they bid in new markets.
“We were blessed with the support of Mr. Ali, who helped us with opportunities in Des Moines and Baltimore,” he says. “We were then further blessed by our relationship with Fraport USA, who trusted us enough with an opportunity to grow with them at Nashville with the opening of Three Casks in 2022 and New Heights Cantina & Taqueria (coming in 2025).”
Aero Service Group currently operates a wide portfolio of concepts as direct operators as well as subtenants with prime concessionaires, though the company’s preferred model is to operate its own units, Lor says. Aero’s concepts range from local favorites and trusted brands to the company’s signature, hyper-local craft breweries like MSP’s Stone Arch, the first of a series of locally themed bar/restaurants that now includes Three Casks (BNA) and Portermill Crafthouse (DSM).
Opening a concept like Stone Arch gave the team “huge anxiety,” says Ranum of the challenge to create a high-volume, high-quality brewery using only local purveyors. But with the help of the “amazing” Minnesota craft brewery industry, she adds, an impeccable dedication to detail (down to baking burger buns and slicing potatoes in-house), and the team’s collaborative spirit, the restaurant became so successful that they were able to customize the concept across other partner airports.
“We don’t do this on our own,” adds Lor. “It takes a whole group of people to really breathe life into an organization and breathe life into a concept. If you asked me, ‘what is the strongest attribute of Aero?’ [I’d say] it is culture and the team that executes it.”
The holistic culture that Lor has fostered at Aero is reflected in the unusually long tenure of his colleagues, many of whom, like Ranum, Helman, and Le, have been with the company for more than 15 years. Whether it’s providing transit subsidies for employees to get to work or paying staff health insurance premiums while they were on furlough during the COVID- 19 pandemic, Lor says that his guiding philosophy involves a deep understanding of the impact his company can make on someone’s life. It’s what drives him to keep going amid the myriad challenges in the industry. “When you have your purpose,” says Lor, “that will see you through dark and difficult times.”
And now, years into a solidified career as a concessionaire, Lor’s experiences escaping the Killing Fields still shape his perspective as an entrepreneur. “In Cambodia we were dealing with life and death – literally – on an everyday basis,” he says. “You recognize that in life and in business, we are all going to make mistakes. We learn from them, we grow from them, and we all try to move to the next level,” he adds. “But unlike the Killing Fields, it is not life and death. that is a blessing that all of us have in this country and industry.”
