[EO San Francisco] From Kitchens to Entrepreneurship: Harold Jurado’s Recipe for Restaurant Success

Harold Jurado is the Owner and Director of Operations at Ramenwell, a ramen shop based in San Francisco’s Mission District known for its innovative approach to Japanese comfort food. He is also the Founder and CEO of Umami Hottie, a growing brand that produces chili oils and Japanese-inspired retail products. Harold’s career spans decades in the culinary industry, with experience working in renowned restaurants across Chicago, New York, and Las Vegas.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[05:05] Why Harold Jurado decided to enroll in culinary school
[07:11] Harold’s journey from salad intern to sous-chef in New York
[10:34] The evolution of restaurant technology over the past 20 years
[19:33] Balancing diverse customer preferences with humility and adaptability in the kitchen
[22:42] Why Harold decided to open a ramen shop
[26:05] The hard truths of understaffing or overhiring in a new restaurant
[27:45] How reviews shape restaurant growth and Harold’s approach to handling feedback
[32:44] Umami Hottie’s journey into retail and product development

In this episode…

For restaurateurs, the path to success is rarely straightforward. From mastering the fundamentals of cooking to navigating the highs and lows of entrepreneurship, creating a sustainable restaurant demands grit, adaptability, and vision. How do seasoned chefs build businesses that survive challenges like poor reviews and global pandemics?

According to Harold Jurado, a seasoned restaurateur with decades of experience in the culinary world, success hinges on humility, incremental growth, and a willingness to learn. He highlights that understanding both the artistry and business of food is essential — balancing flavors and margins alike. Reflecting on his early career, Harold shares how digitizing recipes at his first restaurant set the foundation for consistency and scaling. Years later, he overcame staffing challenges, harsh reviews, and the financial strain of running Ramenwell by listening to customer feedback and embracing delivery and technology. His approach shows that small, intentional changes can lead to lasting impact in the competitive restaurant industry.

In this episode of the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast, John Corcoran visits with Harold Jurado, Owner and Director of Operations at Ramenwell and Founder and CEO of Umami Hottie, to discuss how he transitioned from culinary school to entrepreneurship. Harold shares how he turned setbacks into opportunities, the role of technology in modern restaurant management, how the pandemic reshaped his business approach, and the importance of staying grounded while pursuing bold ambitions.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Related Episodes

“014: Glenn Allen of Open Table & Glyder | How OpenTable Pioneered Online Restaurant Reservations” on the Smart Business Revolution

Quotable Moments

“I realized that for me to get the most out of my life, being an entrepreneur was right up my alley.”
“Taste something along the way… that way, your brain starts to make associations of what garlic is like raw or when it’s burnt.”
“I just packed up my bags and moved west… I never wanted to open up another restaurant.”
“It’s like working out… a couple weeks later, you’re like, oh, I don’t see any improvement.”
“Incremental growth… that’s how we’ve been able to find success.”

Action Steps

Embrace continuous learning: By committing to ongoing education and skill development, you can stay competitive and innovative in your field, which is crucial in a rapidly evolving environment like the restaurant industry.
Cultivate resilience and flexibility: Building resilience helps you navigate setbacks with more confidence and flexibility, essential traits for overcoming obstacles and seizing new opportunities.
Leverage technology for efficiency: By integrating technology into your processes, you can increase efficiency, improve consistency, and focus more on strategic areas of your business.
Seek customer feedback and adapt: Engaging with your audience to understand their preferences and adapting your services accordingly can enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty, ultimately driving business growth.
Foster a collaborative environment: Encouraging a collaborative workplace not only empowers employees but also leverages diverse perspectives, leading to more innovative solutions and a stronger team dynamic.

Sponsor for this episode…

At Rise25, we’re committed to helping you connect with your Dream 100 referral partners, clients, and strategic partners through our done-for-you podcast solution.

We’re a professional podcast production agency that makes creating a podcast effortless. Since 2009, our proven system has helped thousands of B2B businesses build strong relationships with referral partners, clients, and audiences without doing the hard work.

What do you need to start a podcast?
When you use our proven system, all you need is an idea and a voice. We handle the strategy, production, and distribution – you just need to show up and talk.

The Rise25 podcasting solution is designed to help you build a profitable podcast. This requires a specific strategy, and we’ve got that down pat. We focus on making sure you have a direct path to ROI, which is the most important component. Plus, our podcast production company takes any heavy lifting of production and distribution off your plate.

We make distribution easy.
We’ll distribute each episode across more than 11 unique channels, including iTunes, Spotify, and Google Podcasts. We’ll also create copy for each episode and promote your show across social media.

Co-founders Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran credit podcasting as being the best thing they have ever done for their businesses. Podcasting connected them with the founders/CEOs of P90x, Atari, Einstein Bagels, Mattel, Rx Bars, YPO, EO, Lending Tree, FreshBooks, and many more.

The relationships you form through podcasting run deep. Jeremy and John became business partners through podcasting. They have even gone on family vacations and attended weddings of guests who have been on the podcast.

Podcast production has a lot of moving parts and is a big commitment on our end; we only want to work with people who are committed to their business and to cultivating amazing relationships.

Are you considering launching a podcast to acquire partnerships, clients, and referrals? Would you like to work with a podcast agency that wants you to win?

Rise25 Co-founders, Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran, have been podcasting and advising about podcasting since 2008.

Episode Transcript

Intro 00:02

Welcome to the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast, where we feature top founders and entrepreneurs and their journey. Now let’s get started with the show.

John Corcoran 00:12

All right. Welcome everyone. John Corcoran here. I’m the co-host of this show. And you can check out some of our past interviews. Got lots of great interviews with previous CEOs and entrepreneurs from especially from the San Francisco Bay area. Given this series, and I’m also the co-founder of Rise25, where my company helps connect B2B business owners to their ideal prospects using done-for-you podcast and content marketing. And this episode is brought to you by EO San Francisco, which is the Bay area chapter of Entrepreneurs Organization, which is a global peer to peer network of more than 18,000 influential business owners across 200 chapters, 60 plus countries. And if you are the founder, co founder or owner or controlling shareholder of a company that generates over seven figures a year in revenue, you want to connect with other like minded, successful entrepreneurs? EO is for you and the EO San Francisco chapter enables leading entrepreneurs in the Bay area to learn, grow, and achieve greater success. If you want to learn more, you can go to eonetwork.org/sanfrancisco. All right. My guest here today is Harold Jurado. He is the Owner of Ramenwell, which is a ramen shop in San Francisco. He’s a restaurateur, a long history working in a lot of different restaurants. He also is the Founder of Umami Hottie, which we’ll hear about as well, and started his restaurant about a year and a half before the great pandemic set in. So he had a year and a half notice to try and get systems in place before throwing them all out, because none of them worked during the pandemic. But first, let’s start. So you grew up in Chicago, Harold, and actually, you know, there’s a lot of restaurateurs. You hear their story started from like learning a lot from their parents. But your father was actually a doctor and an entrepreneur, and so you learned from him. Your mother is more artistic but weren’t weren’t cooking a lot as a kid.

Harold Jurado 02:06

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks so much, John. I grew up in Chicago, probably, you know, the typical kid running around in the streets, playing a lot of sports. And my mom was a cook. She had a restaurant, bakery. So there was no reason for me to cook. Everything was ready made. Everything was on the table. There was always food covered with a piece of paper towel. There’s always a pot of rice. And I was always so active and so outdoors all the time. But through my mom, who’s, you know, an entrepreneur, she had her own place. And my dad, who’s a doctor, and he also had his own practice. I realized that for me to get the most out of my life and the most out of, I think my, my restlessness, like my ability to or my my need to need to stand up and get out and keep moving. I felt that being an entrepreneur was riding right along in my alley, right up my alley.

John Corcoran 03:03

You mentioned that your mother made artistic cakes, which were you felt kind of connected to and inspired by their particular cakes that you brought home that you were like, oh my God, that looks amazing. I want to do that.

Harold Jurado 03:14

Yeah, absolutely. So she was a cook. So like, the cook I think is the way she was able to feed the community. But then also the cakes is the way that she was able to feed her artistic side. She would create, you know, three, 4 or 5 tier wedding cakes for my sister’s wedding. She did 300 plus mini cakes for each guest. Plus, you know, the multiple tiered wedding cake in which they sliced, you know, ceremonially and ceremonially.

John Corcoran 03:38

Yeah, something like that.

Harold Jurado 03:40

Exactly. Yeah. So, yeah.

John Corcoran 03:42

So I mean, that’s amazing. Like building those multi tiered wedding cakes. That’s not easy to do.

Harold Jurado 03:48

No, no. It’s definitely a feat figuring out how to hold the cakes up. Also while transporting it was probably the hardest part. Yeah, I was, you know, early on I, I got a taste of being part of that entrepreneur that my mom was by driving the delivery truck around, making and setting up the cakes and then also just being just being there and and talking to the, the clients about what they’re looking for and what they wanted. You put it together on site, or you stack this thing and then drive it over. We would put it together on site so they would be separate. We would there would be different pillars that would hold it up and then kind of like sticks within the cake to hold up the pillars, to make sure that it was stable enough to stand up.

John Corcoran 04:30

Yeah. You got to be an engineer to put those things together.

Harold Jurado 04:33

Yeah. And then there was always a bag of icing just in case something, someone smooshed against it. Something happened along the way, you know, maybe, maybe a kid put their finger in the cake, but yeah, there’s. You have to be ready for anything. Just like nowadays.

John Corcoran 04:46

So you actually went to a couple different colleges, figured out that kind of corporate life wasn’t the fit for you. You knew you wanted to go into the service industry, whether it was nightlife or restaurants or something like that. But what’s kind of amusing is you didn’t cook much, you went straight to culinary school.

Harold Jurado 05:05

Yeah. Bit of a leap of faith, I guess it was. So I went to I, you know, I followed the path that I was supposed to. I graduated high school first year, went to Syracuse. Didn’t like being in the middle of nowhere. Decided to come back to Chicago and go to DePaul and realized that it wasn’t the environment. It was actually school that I didn’t like. And at that point I figured, well, what was the what’s the way for me to fast track into into working into working with my hands specifically. So I just jumped into culinary school. I figured that if anything, I can use this experience to understand the service industry as a whole. I was I was afraid that if I did become a manager or GM or owner that I wouldn’t understand half of the business in that it would be as a detriment to myself. So I figured that if even if I learned this skill, even even if I learned this part of the business, that it would help me become more whole as I as I try to become an an entrepreneur and open up my own business. And it’s proven. So yeah.

John Corcoran 06:14

And I’m not familiar with culinary school, but are there like business classes as well for people who want to start a class or start a restaurant?

Harold Jurado 06:23

Not really. I’d say culinary school in general is just the basics, and it didn’t even cover Asian food much when I was when I was there, it was 20 plus years ago. So I think that that cuisine or those cuisines were on the up and coming. And even if there was business classes, it would be the most simplest. I don’t think we’ve learned how to do a P&L. I think we did learn how to do some inventory, how to cost, how to cost a dish out. And so at the most simplest of systems and there’s really nothing.

John Corcoran 06:57

So you started your career working at a restaurant called Japonais in Chicago, and you literally started from intern and you worked your way up, eventually going to work in other locations. But talk a little bit about getting started there.

Harold Jurado 07:11

Yeah, there was a really popular restaurant called Japonais, and I just went in there and I needed, needed to do an internship for school. So they accepted me and I was on the salad station to start. And it it was wild, you know, barely making any money, working 12 hour days. And just what exactly I thought I was going to be getting into. So there was no surprises there. But then when I finished my internship, went back to culinary school, I knew I was going going to go back to that company so I can grow. And then little did I know that they were going to open up a second restaurant in New York. And as soon as I got back after culinary school, I started to be groomed to be the sous chef of the new restaurant. So that means going through all the all the all the stations and learning every single dish from, from the ground up, including pastry. And and I also put everything down on the computer digitally, which wasn’t, which wasn’t what they had before.

John Corcoran 08:13

Yeah. It was that was that pretty cutting edge at the time because it really was. I think everyone should work in a restaurant at some point in their career. I waited tables in high school and college and, you know, worked as a cashier in a restaurant and delivery. And I think it’s such great experience. But, you know, back then it was hardly anything digital. It was very rudimentary digital.

Harold Jurado 08:38

Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, the recipes were pretty simple and there was nothing. I think everything was written down. I think everybody had their book in front of them, and whenever they needed a recipe, they had to look within their little pocket book, which was normal. You know, you write down the recipe, you write down steps or steps to create it, and then that’s it. But because I felt that they were going to expand to multiple restaurants, and I had to be able to bring all those recipes to somebody else, I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel every time. I needed, needed to teach somebody how to make a spring roll. So I got a huge my first laptop. £20 computer. It was massive, and I brought it with me to work every day and off the clock I would take all the recipes and I would, you know, I would type it in. And if there was any difference in what we were doing versus what was written down from the on the master copies, then we would try to figure out where the discrepancy is. And at that point, yeah, we took it. We took that to New York.

John Corcoran 09:36

So you had the digital version of it to bring to New York. But it’s interesting because one, The technology and restaurants have just changed so dramatically, and the way restaurants market themselves and get reviewed and all that kind of stuff. You know, one of my first interviews on this podcast 14 years ago was one of the co-founders of OpenTable who told this story about, like in like the .com era. You know, back then, you know, the idea of, like, booking a reservation online through a computer was foreign. Everyone called. Right? Yeah, they had to actually run. They drove around San Francisco with a Vespa with a computer on the back, and they would go to restaurants, and they’d put a computer with a internet line on the host station, because back then host stations didn’t have computers, so they had to put one there so they could manage the reservations. But for you, like reflecting on the last 20 years of being in restaurants, how much has technology changed the world of restaurants?

Harold Jurado 10:34

You know, it’s still pretty basic in the kitchen. I think technology definitely has made things a lot easier to for myself to run a restaurant basically as the only owner. So we, we utilize technology with, like you said, with the with the reservations. We do it with invoicing now. We do it with everything, all the information that we need to send to the accountant. Basically, I’m able to take a lot off my managers and staff’s hands to allow them to focus on the food and the service. I think one of the biggest besides that was a big jump for me at trying to figure out how to digitize everything, to create, to make things more consistent. But I think one of the biggest jumps for me was figuring figuring out how to utilize the cloud and Google Sheets and which, you know, I didn’t understand until I went to Google and figured out that I can not. I don’t only have to keep everything on my computer and try to find the different files to share with, you know, with, you know, with my staff, everything can live in the Google Drive, which was foreign to me when I when I started it, you know, almost ten years ago. And it just keeps getting better and better, and it makes my life a lot easier.

John Corcoran 11:45

So so we’re jumping a little bit ahead of ourselves here. But this this is amusing. So I want to I want to follow along with this. So you ended up this is years later. You end up opening a restaurant for Google. And and you are like, you’re like opening this restaurant, but you’re like, asking people about like, how does Google Docs work? Is that tell me that.

Harold Jurado 12:07

Yeah. Basically, this is part of my training to understand how how the culinary teams at Google communicate with each other. And it took, you know, a month or two for me to understand what I was doing because I’m pretty good with fire and knives. But when it comes to anything on the computer it takes, the learning curve is so steep.

John Corcoran 12:26

It’s really. Of course, it makes sense that Google would, you know, if they have their own restaurant on their campus, that they would expect that their tools are being utilized there?

Harold Jurado 12:35

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

John Corcoran 12:36

Yeah. So quite the learning curve for you then.

Harold Jurado 12:38

It’s. Yeah, it’s everything that comes in that’s new is still quite the learning curve. It takes a lot. It takes me a lot of effort to understand what’s what’s happening, especially because where we where we are in the Bay area, everything moves so fast. So there’s so many new technologies. And I just I barely learned the last, you know, the older technology. And now I have to learn something new.

John Corcoran 12:59

Right, right. That’s true. All right. So going back you had worked at Japonais and then you decide you moved from Las Vegas to New York, where you help with opening that restaurant there. And at a certain point, you. I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but it kind of felt like you had a bit of a partying lifestyle. And so, ironically, you said, I need to get out of New York to go to Las Vegas.

Harold Jurado 13:25

Yeah, yeah, I think I had the quintessential chef life of just partying a little bit too much. But at that point in New York, I was living check to check. Still, I didn’t understand that as a manager and a big name restaurant, that I felt that I should be saving a lot more, but I didn’t see that happening. So New York didn’t offer that, and I didn’t see myself growing there unless it was going to move to a different restaurant and that wouldn’t be financially growing. And so but at that point, I heard that they were opening a new restaurant in Las Vegas, and I wanted to try a different change of scenery. And then so I asked them for a transfer, and since I already opened up one restaurant in New York, I felt that it was advantageous for them to allow me to transfer to Las Vegas to help them open that up.

[Continue to Page 2]

John Corcoran 14:20

And Sin City helped curb your partying lifestyle. Ironically, you know.

Harold Jurado 14:24

This, it may be called Sin City, but if you actually want to, you know, go in the casino and gamble and and party, it’s pretty expensive. So as a resident there, I think most of the residents didn’t go on the strip and hang out too much where everyone’s partying.

John Corcoran 14:38

Yeah, you hear that from people who live there. So. So you work at Japanese in Las Vegas, and I want to hear the story, but you heard about Chef Charlie Trotter, who was kind of a celebrity chef at the time. He had plans for the new wing of the Venetian Casino and Hotel. And what did you do?

Harold Jurado 14:59

Yeah, my friend was working at Trotter’s, studying to be a sommelier, and I knew that he was going to open up a new restaurant in the Venetian, which, of course, I lived in Vegas already, and my roots are in Chicago, which is where his flagship restaurant is. But I felt that I, I had an opportunity to to work in both at that point to train in Chicago and then open up Las Vegas whenever that happened. So I went to Chicago to talk to the chefs there and to have an interview. and I did a stage, basically a trial run, and they made me taste some food and, and asked me what was what did it need? And me being yeah, me being more. They hold off some ingredient or ingredients and then they say taste this and decide I don’t know if the held anything up, I think, I think they just wanted my opinion on what what it tasted like, you know, the nuances that I could pick up. Then also what I felt that I might need.

John Corcoran 16:00

Oh, that’s throwing you under the bus. This is like what we’re actually serving to diners and you have to criticize it.

Harold Jurado 16:06

Yeah, yeah. And from the last restaurant, because I was focusing on being a sous chef in the systems and training people more. So I wasn’t trained myself as much when it came to the food. So. So I was good with setting up cooks to be successful, but I was not good at reflecting on what the food was supposed to be like. And that’s where yeah, that’s where the that’s where the consistency came in of putting of digitizing. All the recipes came in. At that point, you didn’t have to think about what was in it because it was, you know, it was ready to go. But I had no answer. I’m like, I’m not sure what it needs. Maybe more salt, you know, some some random. Yeah. Really? Yeah. Some random comment. And they’re like, you know, I see you’re good with, you know, the management part, but we need you to be stronger with the food part. So we need you. If you want this position you’re going to have to work here for until until we open up Las Vegas. So basically I worked there for free for two months as a, as a training stage before I went to Las Vegas, so I yeah, I got the job, which was which was my goal.

John Corcoran 17:13

And how does one develop that your palate. Like did you just try a lot of different things. And eventually over time you learn what’s missing or what needs to be added in?

Harold Jurado 17:22

I think, well, to develop your palate, you just have to keep tasting, taste everything, taste tastes something that’s burnt. Tastes something before it’s cooked. Taste something along the way. That way, your brain starts to make associations of what garlic is like raw. What it’s like after it’s, you know, soften what it’s like when it’s burnt. So it can create a spectrum of, of those flavors. And that’s with everything at that point. Or maybe you’re not tasting raw duck, but you’re tasting duck along the way of its cooking. If it’s roasted, you know, maybe you taste it after 30 minutes, an hour, then when it’s ready. And then and then also through conversation of things to make this food better and in different in different cultures as well. Why does so many cultures use lime or vinegar or acidity? And then you know, how is salt use? What are what are ways to put salt into a dish? From actual salt to fish sauce to miso to soy sauce. There’s. Yeah. So along with all of the tools that we try to put in our toolbox To to help food be expressed. There’s also mentally in ways to mentally ways that we need to associate our palates and then and then also palates of others. So if you taste something, you make sure that you have another person taste it and give their opinion. That way you can create that association of, oh, this person is from India. This is why they think this tastes like that or, or whatnot. So it’s just a whole web of, I guess, associations of different flavors and then also different upbringings.

John Corcoran 18:58

Yeah. It’s that’s such a great point about asking people what they think, what they what would improve it. And I’m sure once you open your own restaurant in addition to before, but but I’m sure it became extremely valuable. But it’s also hard to like ask someone, especially knowing that people have different preferences and idiosyncrasies of people. How do you incorporate that into your cooking? You know, being open minded enough to ask people what they think, while at the same time being mindful that everyone has different preferences.

Harold Jurado 19:33

I think it comes from being humble and not having too much pride. A lot of chefs think that they have the final say, but if no one’s coming in your store and if no one’s buying anything, then maybe you should give some of that, you know, give some of that up. In the beginning, we did have ramen. Well, we did have a dish in which we work or collaborated with a local barbecue spot to smoke and slowly cook our chashu, which I thought was exceptional. But then enough people came in and didn’t understand what we were doing, that we had to, you know, change it to something a little bit more traditional. So yeah, I mean, if at that, that is also what helped us grow. We didn’t know exactly what we were doing wrong. So we went the old school way and we just printed up comment cards for people to fill out. And then that’s how we just got better.

John Corcoran 20:29

Yeah. So tell me about, I guess about 2015, you ended up moving to the Bay area. We talked about it a little bit before you ended up working for for Google. What was that like going from Las Vegas, Chicago, New York to all of a sudden moving to Silicon Valley, which to those who don’t know, Silicon Valley, it can be a bit of a bedroom community, especially compared to New York, Las Vegas. It just doesn’t have wild lifestyle compared to some of those other places.

Harold Jurado 20:55

Yeah, I think one of the issues I had when moving here is that I didn’t grow up and I didn’t go through, you know, the trenches with a lot of the culinary scene over here. So I don’t have as many friends and as many culinary as big of a culinary community as back home. That being said, I wasn’t sure what how to move forward with the skills that I have, and I felt that maybe another environment change would be is what I need, and that’s obviously a theme. So I just packed up my bags and I moved west and ended up in San Francisco. But I felt I never wanted to open up another restaurant because I had my own in Chicago also, and it failed after a year and a half. And so I felt that if I was going to grow or at least try to be somewhat happy in this field, I was going to go corporate. So I applied at Google and got, you know, it’s like a three round interview, which never, never really happens in the restaurant. And then they they saw that I have a noodle background like ramen. So they asked me to open up their noodle cafe. And at that point commuting was was a little bit tough. I’ve never been a big commuter, but it was about two hours out of my day. But I did end up getting benefits such as paid time off and weekends off. No nights off. So it was that was probably the biggest adjustment for myself that I could.

John Corcoran 22:27

Then at a certain point in time, you’re like, forget this benefit stuff, forget this corporate stuff. I’m going to throw it all out the window, and I’m going to start my own ramen shop in San Francisco. So what was that journey like, starting your own restaurant, especially after, as you said, having done one before that didn’t work out?

Harold Jurado 22:42

Yeah, after about two years over there, I wasn’t making even though I was working at Google, I wasn’t making engineer money and everything was so expensive out here. It still is. So I figured if I’m ever going to survive out here and not go to another part of the country and try to move again, try to figure out where my place is, then I’m going to have to try my hand at being an entrepreneur and making making my own money, because it doesn’t matter if I became an executive chef or opened up more cafes for Google, I don’t think I would would make enough money to to to achieve my, my goals and my dreams. So with that, I felt that. So when I moved out here, I saw a different type of clientele. When I opened up the Noodle Cafe, we had 100 people in line for free food and everything is free. So they could go to any cafe they could go to, you know, and get burgers or or anything. All across the campus. But they were coming to my cafe, which, which was, you know, just insightful. And I felt that if I can do that here, I can do that in the Bay area in general and profit off of it. So I was able to find a an investor who believed in me. And, and we went forward with opening up our first restaurant.

John Corcoran 24:00

And, and what sorts of decisions did you make that were deliberately different from the previous restaurant that you’d opened up?

Harold Jurado 24:07

Oh, man, there’s so many. It’s there’s so many decisions. When the location. So my restaurant in Chicago was at my building my parents had, which my mom had a restaurant there. We got it, outfitted it for myself. But my mom’s our son didn’t do well and neither did mine. So the most important part for me was location. How do I find a population that I resonate with and that I can actually serve? So that’s when we went to the mission. I walking around the mission, I felt that those were my type of people, and that it’d be more in line with what the type of food I’m doing, which is more relaxed and not not as refined.

John Corcoran 24:53

Yeah. And so you open it and it’s got some good buzz right when it opens. What was the first year like?

Harold Jurado 25:01

It had good buzz I think, because I had a name coming from out of Chicago. But the first year was horrible. The first month and a half, two months, we were trying to figure out our place. We were trying to figure out our footing, and we got we, you know, we’re super busy. But then we weren’t there yet. So we got slightly negative reviews. And I know nobody wants to be reviewed in the first couple of weeks of them starting anything. I mean.

John Corcoran 25:25

That’s such a hard thing about restaurants. It’s like you, they come out in the review you so early on.

Harold Jurado 25:31

Yeah it is. It’s like working out. And then a couple weeks later you’re like, oh, I don’t see any. You know, you’re obviously not working out. This isn’t good. Or you know, I don’t see any improvement. It takes it takes a lot of time. So I feel that if I were, you know, such as review platform, I would try to give other people or businesses some time to, you know, learn about themselves first. That being said, after about 2 to 3 months, we had to let go of most of the staff. So at that point, we were making very, very oh, we just didn’t have enough because they were not good or because the you were struggling or what we were struggling. You know, we started out with high hopes. Now we are you know, we had very little money to go around, so I had to cover a lot of the shifts and a lot of the hours. We still didn’t have, we didn’t have. I let go of the GM, let go of our servers and a few cooks, and I was there prepping, cooking, managing everything.

John Corcoran 26:30

In retrospect, do you think you overhired when you opened?

Harold Jurado 26:35

I do, yes. I yeah, I felt that I’m in retrospect, everything’s, you know, looking back at it, you could have, you know, we could have built up the people that were there first and in a busy, in a busy state before having so many people to cover it. But then, like I said, it’s like the cart and the horse. We got bad reviews because of bad service, maybe. And then, well, maybe if we had those people in the beginning, we wouldn’t have had those issues and the reviews would have been better, which would have brought more people in, which would have been able to keep those people. So it’s a weird equation to try to put.

John Corcoran 27:09

A different I mean, I was talking I interviewed someone else recently that was a restaurateur and it is crazy how many different things you need to execute on flawlessly, consistently, over time in order for a restaurant to be successful. You know that everything you’ve got perishable foods, you’ve got people working with knives and fire in the kitchen, and you got to do it flawlessly every night, night after night. And if someone has a bad night, they immediately run out and they put a one star review online and it sits there and it I mean, that must just mess with your brain.

Harold Jurado 27:45

It does all the little decisions. I sometimes sit and I think, well, first of all, I need to bring more people into the fold. I need to bring more of my managers into the fold and give them more responsibility. And that’s I think that’s, you know, as an entrepreneur, it’s hard for us to let go of a lot of things. Yeah, like the littlest thing. Like today I had to go in and restain a piece of the shelving that it just is that we just built or or whatnot. All these little, all these little decisions. But yeah, all the it was maddening in the beginning. But then I decided to during the pandemic, I decided to start to look out for myself. So I stopped opening up Yelp reviews. I just didn’t care anymore. Like Google reviews are out there, they’re a lot nicer. So and I got those alerts. So I looked at those. So that was one of the first steps. Second step was when if I do see a review and I’m and I’m emotional and I want to type back, I’ll type it, I’ll delete it and then I’ll tell my manager, hey, you should respond to this review, you know, say sorry or say thank you so much for a great review, whichever it is. Yeah. But in the end, yes, all the decisions we have to make, all the little things that you know, can move the needle up or down is can be maddening.

John Corcoran 29:03

So by the time so you, you actually said that January 2020. February 2020. Were good months for you? It was actually I think you righted the ship by that point. And then the pandemic hits.

Harold Jurado 29:15

Yeah. No, absolutely. It was it was great. I was we were becoming profitable. It was amazing. And then we had to shut down and the pandemic hit and everybody shut down. So I couldn’t be I couldn’t play the victim card, you know, too long like, oh, look at look at me. We, we are now losing all this money because everyone was going through it. So we figured out, how can we go through this better than better for ourselves. So we just kept at it. We pivoted here and there. We just kept trying. I think our grit is what.

John Corcoran 29:47

Takeout and things like that. What did you do?

Harold Jurado 29:49

We did takeout. We have a front window that’s a pretty large window that we put a piece of plastic in front. We had a speaker that somebody had to speak into so we could hear it on the inside. We moved our some of our cooking operations closer to the window. So it wasn’t so far of a walk. And then when delivery happened, we were able to pivot to delivery, which was a blessing in disguise because before we never did delivery. And I actually hated people eating a ramen at home because it’s not because it could take 4 to 5 minutes from the point where it’s made. It’s waiting for a driver. The driver gets there, you know, but now it’s about one third of our one third of our revenue. So it’s helped a lot. Yeah. So you never know never know what’s going to happen.Yeah. And then and then there was a lot of starts and stops after the pandemic coming out of the pandemic. You know it was like it opened up and then it closed down again and it opened up and closed down again. And that was really hard. And then it was hard to get people to come back to work also. So we have so. When it came to our staff, I think we treated them right when, when we opened up and we had ours, they, they it’s not like they can get at other places. So we are able to consistently bring the our older staff back. And then when it came to the opening up and closing aspect, it was a blessing in disguise for me, kind of. I think the pandemic was a blessing in disguise for many entrepreneurs, where I was given the PBP money and I had to pay for my staff anyway, so there was no reason for me to be there to serve ten people, you know, ten delivery orders when my staff is there anyway getting paid. So I was able to, for the first time in my life, become an owner and try to step away from the operator operator side. And then as that grew, my staff grew too, because at that point it was understandable that we weren’t making a lot of money, but that the the business was steadily growing from ten or to go orders to 20 to go orders to seating, to dining inside. But you know, you have to be six feet away. So we maybe we only had 20 people dine at night, but that slow growth helped me feel comfortable about my staff taking over those responsibilities for me.

John Corcoran 32:05

It’s almost like a reboot.

Harold Jurado 32:07

Yeah. It was.

John Corcoran 32:07

Yeah. Like, you know, the like you see that with some restaurants, they do a slow start. Like they don’t announce that it’s open or they just put it on a social and they don’t do lunch. They just do dinner, or they just do lunch, or they don’t do dinner or something like that. Or they have a very limited number of tables that are available when they’re starting out. Something along those lines.

Harold Jurado 32:26

Yeah, I think I think the term that really helped me grow or helped me get through the pandemic was incremental growth. And that’s how we’ve been able to find success.

John Corcoran 32:37

Yeah. And tell me about Umami Hottie. Where did that come from? Well, first explain what it is.

Harold Jurado 32:44

So so Umami is a it started off as a chili oil brand. And now we’re moving into Japanese comfort food and retail. So after the restaurant started doing well last year, I started to travel a bit more. It was my 40th birthday so just wanted to use my passport more than I ever have, I don’t think. I don’t know the last time I actually went out of the country before last year. But then when I came back, of course, the bug, the entrepreneurial bug, you know, started, I started scratching at it and somebody reached out to me through social media and said, hey, we have these frozen ramens in Canada, and they’re doing pretty well. Do you think you could produce something like this in America? I would love to partner with you. At that point, I was I said to myself, yeah, if you guys can do this in Canada, of course we can do this in America. So it started with trying to figure out how to produce a complete frozen ramen, heat and eat for the public realized that that was super difficult. One it’s frozen. It’s heavy. Two, it’s super high, you know, high cost. And then three If I’m doing meat, then I have to get the USDA involved. So? So I figured why not start with something a little bit more approachable? So then we took our hot chili oil, which we have made in house since the beginning, and we started drawing that up. So then we started expanding that to three SKUs, because after meeting enough people, they said that retail wants to see three SKUs when they can. It’s a lot easier for them to have a brand that has multiple items instead of just singular singularly. And then over the year, it’s been about a year. It’s been yeah, just about a year right now, over the year, we’re definitely trying to get back into the frozen ramen, trying to figure out if we can find a co-packer for that and then eventually other items as well. And yeah, that stemmed from that stemmed from figuring out whether we were going to open up another restaurant and double our work, basically, Or try to create something in which we can scale, hopefully without as without as much manpower.

John Corcoran 35:03

You decided to put yourself in a different environment again?

Harold Jurado 35:07

Yeah. Yeah, it’s a different risk.

John Corcoran 35:09

Yeah. Yeah. Well that’s cool. Harold, it’s great hearing your story and sharing it with others, and I’d love to give people some info on where they can learn more about you and check you out and learn about Ramenwell and Umami Hottie.

Harold Jurado 35:23

Yeah. For the restaurant, if you want to order to go or make a reservation, go to ramenwell.com and for Umami Hottie, if you’d like to see what we do or if you’d like to order something for yourself, we will deliver at umamihottie.com.

John Corcoran 35:38

Awesome. Thanks so much.

Harold Jurado 35:40

Thanks so much, John.

Outro 35:41

Thanks for listening to the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast. This episode is powered by Rise25. Please subscribe and check out future episodes.