Perseverance and Adaptation: A conversation with entrepreneur Alfredo Angueira.

In this pandemic everyone has a personal story to tell. Alfredo Angueira’s is about how helping others became a way to survive. When he was about to close his restaurants he thought the logical thing to do was to share his remaining resources with those most in need, he never imagined that this gesture was going to become a new impulse to stay afloat.

Angueira was raised in The Bronx by a mother of Puerto Rican descent and a father with Venezuelan and Cuban blood. In his own words: “It doesn't get more melting pot than that.” After earning a law degree he decided to work closely with his community; appointments as Executive Director of the Bronx Empowerment Zone and the Legal Department for the New York Council on Adoptable Children allowed him to help families affected by HIV and get children out of the foster care system. Angueira also served on the staff of the Bronx District Attorney and The New York City Council among others.

At the same time he always wanted to get into the restaurant industry, so when he heard that his current partner Junior Martínez had signed a lease for a bar near Yankee Stadium and was looking for investors he took a leap of faith: “I had a very good career as an attorney and I was on an upward trajectory, but I always wanted to be my own boss. Junior told me about his project on a Saturday, and by next Monday I wrote him a check. We opened Bronx Draft House in April 2016 and I never looked back.”

The risk Angueira took by partnering with Martínez paid off. “I was scared to jump in the pool but I found out that as an entrepreneur those that are successful are the ones that jump in and figure everything out as they go along, because people in the industry are more inclined to help you if you are in the rail; if you are just writing business plans nobody will pay attention.” Today they own New York restaurants Beatstro, Bronx Draft House and Bricks & Hops; along with the catering company Hoodspitality.

These enterprises are also a celebration of their culture: “Even though we are not in the kitchen the culinary aspect is influenced by our origins. All of the dishes in our restaurants are either fusion, twist, or directly connected to Latino cuisine. We give our chefs guidance of what we want, so we are always evaluating and finding a happy medium between the dishes we love and those that are cost-effective.”

Everything was going well, and then the pandemic hit. “I am a news junkie so I was monitoring the situation in Wuhan. The news kept getting progressively worse with more and more deaths, and even then you keep thinking that it's not going to get that bad, because this is unprecedented, it hasn't happened in modern times.” New York was eventually hit… hard. “The streets were a ghost town, the whole fabric of the city was different. I would go to Midtown and there was not a soul in the middle of the workweek, everything was boarded up and it just didn't feel real, but we decided to keep the restaurants open as long as we could as a test of perseverance, because we knew how hard it would be to open back up if we closed.”

After a couple of months they were losing $8,000 a day and took the painful decision to close. 48 hours away from officially shutting down they had an idea that would change everything: “We had a ton of food so we decided to feed first responders, these people were working 18 hour shifts, so this was the least we could do.”

As they promoted this decision through social media people in need started lining up outside the restaurants. Every meal would come to about 9 dollars a person and donations kept them going. This caught the eye of World Central Kitchen (WCK), a non-profit founded in 2010 by celebrity chef José Andrés. Their method of operations is to collaborate with local chefs to solve the problem of hunger in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. “Through this partnership we were able to keep all of our staff employed and save our restaurants. If we had closed, this would never had happened.”

“WCK does incredible work, usually in developing nations and places that don't have infrastructure. But what happens when this is going on in the middle of New York City and you suddenly have one million people who lost their jobs due to the pandemic and are now food insecure?” With these unprecedented questions in mind Angueira and Martínez began working with WCK as a distribution site for frozen meals. They soon realized the importance of offering options that were culturally relevant. “The questions then became: How do I feed and sustain you, but also make you feel relevant as a person? How do I say I see you, and I understand you?” With this in mind they began preparing hot meals tailored to their community, and people would line up for hours in the cold. They were providing 10,280 meals a day at their peak.

Since WCK has programs all over the world eventually they had to move on and their collaboration started to scale down. But by then the partners had already learned how to feed people in mass: “We started with one business model and ended up with a completely different one, with challenges like how to feed 10,000 people in 24 hours.” This led them to a contract with The City of New York with the aim of feeding the elderly in need. Between WCK and this new contract they have well surpassed the distribution of one million meals: “I always tell my staff: success is one thing but living a life of purpose is another… We are at the cross roads of a successful business that is doing purposeful work and that is a beautiful thing.”

Angueira knows that the future holds new challenges but that they will be tackled based on this invaluable experience: “There are two main concepts that helped me throughout the pandemic: perseverance and adaptation. Because we persevered we got that opportunity to work with WCK, and through this opportunity we adapted our business model to the point where we now have a mass catering company that has fed one million people.”

Growing up in the Bronx was not easy. As a kid Angueira stood in line with his grandmother to obtain food aid provided by the government. Today it is he who is fighting food insecurity just a few blocks away from where his family used to live. “I am right back where everything started. So it is incredibly rewarding to know that I am giving back to my neighborhood. Everything has come full circle.”

Feature by Pablo Emiliano de la Rosa