Hugo López (38) came to his first job interview soaked in the rain. He was 17 years old, he had asked to borrow a motorcycle but couldn’t get a helmet and sent anyway. After a month of training, he ended up in the delivery position at the ice cream parlor. Munchis. And today he runs a hamburger restaurant chain with more than 40 stores and branches in Uruguay and Paraguay. A trip changed his life. But before he boarded the plane that took him to New York, a lot of water passed under his own bridge.
“I grew up surrounded by multi-tiered wedding cakes decorated with marzipan flowers. At the same time, my father’s precision in the details of European furniture could be felt,” he remembers his childhood.
After attending technical school in Victoria, he did odd jobs in a bakery and helped in the family carpentry shop. “I sanded furniture until it was perfect. I learned that it costs just as much to do something well as to do it badly,” he says.
Hugo never thought that becoming an ice cream delivery person would give him an opportunity: to learn the logistics of the catering business. “You didn’t bring a helmet,” the manager warned him. “But I need the job,” Hugo pleaded. And they gave him a test on the condition that he cut his hair a little.
At the headquarters of Temaiken They had set up a kind of ice cream parlor simulator, a small school with all the stands. “That’s where I acquired the first tools of my life that I later used to build the company. From food handling to the management system to cleaning procedures,” Hugo lists, pausing to recount the funniest step: “I had to get an exact quarter without weighing it on the scales. And I also had to remember the 40 flavors that were distributed without labeling,” he adds.
Operational excellence had just begun. He passed the theoretical and practical exams and started serving ice cream behind the counter. In his free time, Hugo checked the expiry date of the supplies, checked the stock levels and made sure that “things were going well. I capitalized on the experience,” says one of the partners today Dean & Denny’sthe hamburger chain that ships 700,000 meat medallions a month from the factory in the heart of Villa Crespo.
Without realizing that he was laying the foundation for his company, Hugo showed the entrepreneurial gene. He studied mechanics at the UTN. And he left. He switched to business administration, but did not complete his studies either.
As a real estate inspector, he examined real estate advertisements in a newspaper and traveled around the city on buses and subways. And then he tried his luck on the financial market. With Joaquín Rozas, the same friend who lent him the motorcycle for the interview Munchis. “Being a stock trader was a dream come true; I wanted to capture the adrenaline I saw in Wall Street movies,” he says.
Meanwhile, he added tools to his backpack: checks, payments, salaries, operations… For all logistics, the same question applied: “How do I do this?” Between comings and goings, Hugo and Joaquín opened a bar in Palermo, the furniture of which was made and painted in different colors in the family carpentry workshop. Belly He was one of the pioneers: in Nicaragua and Ravignani they took their first steps, unstable and on the verge of bankruptcy. Until Francisco Ribatto joined in with a tempting suggestion: “What if we went to New York and saw how the restaurant business was run?” A few days later, they started visiting hamburger restaurants: They sat down with the managers, took out a notebook and told them that they would be “doing practical work for the faculty. A TP. Since I didn’t speak English, I devoted myself to drawing the plans of the living room, the kitchen, the furniture, the paths of the employees. Everything,” recalls Hugo of this “educational” tour that took them as a survey through Brooklyn and the West Coast of New York.
One of the “Interviews for the TP” was crucial. In one of the branches of Shake Shacka legendary New York burger chain founded in Madison Square Park. “The two managers took great care of us, very warm and very nice. Their names were Dean and Denny’s. They were the managers, two incredible guys who unknowingly showed us the way. It’s a shame we lost sight of them. Today they would be proud of the little children who asked them a thousand questions.”
Upon their return, they borrowed money from friends and family and opened the first store in Honduras and Malabia, now the lung of Palermo Soho. “But no one left, we lost money every month, I had a thousand debts,” recalls Hugo, confessing how they reversed the losing streak: “We put an ad on Facebook, back then it was a very complicated process that required daily calls to the Silicon Valley bunker. It was an experiment that worked. After three weeks we arrived and there was a queue.” After three months, they opened the second location. And since then they already have 40 franchises and process 50 tons of meat per month. “I was a little unconscious, but it worked. If I hadn’t had the support of my parents, I wouldn’t be where I am,” concludes Hugo López, the young man who borrowed a motorcycle to deliver ice cream and ended up associated with one of the city’s most famous hamburger chains.
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