On growing up, food, family and taking risks together Raki Urbina Cebu Daily News
July 05, 2009
I’m honored to be with you today to share my humble thoughts and experiences with this fine mix of professionals in front of me. Truth be told, I was never an excellent student in college.
This is the closest I've ever gotten to a podium to speak about something. I may have had a few stints speaking in public before, but today is totally different. I should talk of relevance and practicality. I am tasked not to bore you with theories. Instead, let me convey “innovative and creative entrepreneurship” by telling you stories from my life and my family.
The first story is about connecting the dots. I was born much earlier than my mother's 40-week term. She had small pox and there I was, raring to come out. Doctors were quite worried that one of us would not make it. So here we are; we made it through the ordeal. Maybe there was a reason we both survived.
Cafe Laguna was the brainchild of my mom and dad. She thought of the business out of necessity. My father was a military doctor who had to be assigned in Cebu in 1975. He got all of us space in a C-130 plane. With P700 baon, a gas stove, a small sofa and four pieces of luggage, we set foot in Cebu for the first time. With my dad’s meager salary in the service, my mother decided to work in the housekeeping department of a hotel. Still unable to make ends meet to support five children, she quit her job and rented a vacant apartment beside our unit. Thus, our first carenderia was born.
Corny as it may sound, it was named Mother's Best Food and the logo was that of a nest and a mother bird with a worm in its mouth. We had three mainstays in our estante: bam-i (noodles), beef stew, and menudo. My mother went to the market daily and there she met our first suppliers. Soon after, we had a jukebox. Starting in the afternoon, the place was a hangout for drinking binges of tambays and military personnel. Oh, my sisters hated it when drunks tried to give us a hard time paying their bills.
All the siblings were studying at that time and would take turns manning the store. You can imagine the excuses we made to get away to do our own school activities.
Lunch in school had to be shared. I dreamed of the day I would have a stainless steel lunch box. Since we were all in the same school, our eldest, Jill, was tasked to bring the ulam (main dish) in a half-gallon ice cream container. The rest of us each had a pint-size ice cream container with rice. It was like a picnic everyday.
People started to take notice of the good taste and consistent quality of the food my mom was making. My parents got a loan from Pag-ibig and bought the apartments next door. Guess what my mother's dream was back then – to have a
restaurant with an air-conditioner, plain and simple.
Then Cafe Laguna in Lahug evolved. We didn't start out that strong. In the first few months of operation, we were eager and overjoyed whenever a car would park and buy dinuguan or puto bumbong.
Since we just lived upstairs, you could never be absent from doing your share of chores in the resto. A small makeshift room of my own was a big thing back then, but there was a catch. I would always know when it was early morning. When bulk cooking would start, my room would become so hot because the chimney of our huge wood stove ran through it. It was like a sauna every day. (How about that for a fire hazard?)
It ‘s been a long evolution since then. The family started to do catering and for years handled canteen concessions in San Miguel Corporation. I was in school. As my classmates excitedly planned trips and vacations, I would be so sad and jealous. I was expected to take the graveyard shift of our canteen as cashier. I did that every year.
I give credit to my sister, Grace, who is a doctor by profession, who was the first among the siblings to stick it out with the family's food venture on a full time basis. Eventually, she gave up her dreams in the medical field. After college, the rest of the children pursued careers of their own. Two of us joined the corporate world. Our eldest, Jill, had 13 years with Philippine Airlines in Manila and me, eight years in HR (Human Resources) for a bank. Though we had jobs, we still made time for the resto as part-timers.
Little by little, we gained loyal patrons and were also so thankful that executives of Ayala Center took notice. Braving the unknown to lease and pay for a space in a mall was the subject of long family debate. But as fearless and visionary as my Mom is, it was decided: We will do this. The second Cafe Laguna branch made us give up our canteen concession. (Yehey, no more graveyard shift for me!) On weekends when banks were closed, I would tend to our Ayala branch so my Mom could take her day off. So it was back to multiple jobs again.
Soon, I decided to leave the bank and go full time with the family. That made way for Laguna Garden Cafe, which has double capacity of our first restaurant in Ayala Center and was located just in front of each other. (Until now people ask us why we set up a branch so close by.)
Our first venture in property management came into place and we set up the food and beverage operations of the City Sports Club, which I headed. It was a first time for me. I employed an executive chef and three sous chefs to help me man all the food outlets of the Club. It was such a long journey of mixed experiences, guts, and sacrifice.
Then I started to ponder on it. None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But years later, it all came back to me. At the time, I did not have the slightest idea what I would be. All I wanted to be was a salesman for San Miguel Beer. I used to admire those guys in the delivery trucks wearing white shirt-jacks and denims. That was so cool for me then. I did apply for the job but they didn't accept me.
So what did I realize? At a recent commencement ceremony in Stanford University, I couldn't help but be touched by what Steve Jobs, the man behind Apple & Pixar said that day:
“You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever — because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.” (To be continued tomorrow)
