Restaurant company executive to speak at Rotary evening event

R.J. Dourney

R.J. Dourney will be the Chester Rotary’s speaker at its next First Thursday Rotary Meeting at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 3 at the Fullerton Inn, 40 the Common in Chester. The topic of Dourney’s talk will be ethics in business.

Dourney is a 30-year veteran of the restaurant industry and a talented speaker. He and his family also own a home in Chester.

In 2014, he was named CEO of COSI Corporate,  a publicly traded restaurant company with 115 locations in the United States, Costa Rica and Dubai.   Dourney is also the founder of Hearthstone Associates: formerly the largest franchisee of COSI and was one of the largest privately held restaurant companies in Massachusetts.

Dourney merged Hearthstone with Cosi Corporate in 2015. Prior to founding Hearthstone Associates, Dourney held a number of key executive positions including overseeing North America for Applebee’s Restaurants, a $3.1 billion restaurant system.

Dourney also sits on a number of for-profit and not-for-profit boards including the Inner-City Scholarship Foundation of Boston and the Catholic Schools Foundation. He is currently studying to be a Permanent Deacon in the Catholic Church’s Archdiocese of Boston.  Dourney attended Villanova University where he studied business and economics and is a frequent radio talk show guest and a university-level guest lecturer on subjects including entrepreneurial leadership, restaurant culinary trends and ethics in business. He lives in the Boston’s South End with his wife and three daughters.