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:
- EO San Francisco
- EO Accelerator
- Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO)
- John Corcoran on LinkedIn
- Rise25
- Harold Jurado on LinkedIn
- Ramenwell
- Umami Hottie
Related Episodes
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…
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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.
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