Building a Restaurant Empire with Janet Zuccarini
Hello our beautiful friends! We are back with another delightful and fascinating life story. Today we are talking to restaurateur Janet Zuccarini who stands out in the international restaurant industry as a woman and spectacular entrepreneur. The CEO and owner of Gusto 54 Restaurant Group, Janet credits her success to two passions: culinary and business. Tune in now and discover Janet’s incredible life story as she takes us behind the scenes of a notoriously risky restaurant business.
Janet was born and raised in Toronto, Canada. Her Italian father taught her German mother traditional Italian recipes and passed his own love for food on to his family. As a kid, Janet revealed her passion for food culture, eating healthy and making everything from scratch. Every summer she visited her uncles in a small farm in Abruzzo, Italy, where she had the most delicious farm-to-table experience.
At 18 years old, Janet moved to Rome–something she had been anticipating for a long time–to pursue her education, and graduated with an MBA in Business from Boston University. As a student, her love for authentic culinary and business craft blossomed. Staying in Italy for 8 years, Janet understood how to live her best life – she decided to move back to Toronto to pursue her two passions.
Her first restaurant business experience started with an unfortunate partnership. After living in misery for 4.5 years, Janet was able to extract vital life lessons from that bad experience and transformed it into incredible triumph in an extremely challenging and men-dominated industry. In 1996, she opened Trattoria Nervosa in Toronto’s Yorkville area, and has since gone on to build an incredible restaurant empire that has a unique vibe, good value and great food.
Many people in the restaurant business do not have a business background, and Janet thinks that is why she is still there decades later, launching one successful restaurant after another. Janet is married to her two passions–entrepreneurship and culinary–and she understands how to run restaurants by the numbers, combining cooking with innovative ideas and savvy business moves.
Led by a vision to set up the restaurant on her favourite street in Los Angeles, the iconic Abbot Kinney Boulevard, Janet was able to find the incredibly talented chef, Evan Funke, whose food was the best Italian cooking Janet ever tried. After overcoming all the obstacles the restaurant industry can create, the hard work was paid off. Since opening in April 2017, Felix Trattoria has been named the best new restaurant in America by Esquire magazine.
Janet’s formula to success is simple: she stays connected to her passions and spots the talented people with good work ethic and the right attitude that can take pride and ownership. She develops her team, grows together with it, and encourages everyone to have a great lifestyle and work on their passions. “As people create your success, they also become more successful. Treat them right, fair and reward their hard work”, she explains.
Janet is an adventurous traveller and has a unique pulse on the world of restaurants and food. She opens restaurants that provide innovative and delicious dining experience on a global scale, unifying exclusive concept, good location, excellent service, the right menu, reasonable price point and, of course, the atmosphere that makes people want to come back.
“I do not want my life just happening to me, I am creating it myself” – Janet Zuccarini
Hope you enjoyed this week’s episode with Janet, you can find out more about her here:
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Produced by Jason Sanderson - Podcast Tech
Show notes by Veronica Joce
