Today we’d like to introduce you to Oscar de Armas.
It all started in 1996 when Co-founder Oscar de Armas moved to South Florida from Southern California. Shortly after acclimating himself and his family to their new home, they realized that the Mexican food being served in South Florida did not compare to that of the West Coast. Oscar and his wife longed to find a place that was close to what they considered great Mexican food but simply could not find one. As they traveled back and forth to Southern California they often talked about their desire to bring this style of authentic Mexican food to South Florida.
As destiny would have it, Oscar was traveling through an airport and ran into his lifelong friend Tim Dobravolskis who had established himself as a successful restaurateur. They spoke about Tim’s experiences and Oscar mentioned to Tim how he felt there was a tremendous opportunity to bring great Mexican food to Ft. Lauderdale. It turned out Tim was looking for a change of pace, and the two created a plan to get together and explore the potential in South Florida. Over the next year, Oscar and Tim looked for the best location and discussed their vision of a great restaurant.
Since Tim’s previous restaurant experience evolved around high-end restaurants, the two agreed to conceptually maintain the same quality of food and guest driven mindset, translated into a quick service, inexpensive, casual environment. To create a fresh, light Mexican dining experience, Tim’s inspiration came from the coastal region on the Baja Peninsula. In 2001 they opened the first Zona Fresca location in Fort Lauderdale.
As the business grew in popularity, Oscar introduced his close friend Martin Diaz-Yabor to Tim, and the entrepreneurial trio opened Zona’s Plantation location followed by the Pompano Beach location, the Coral Springs location, and the more recently, Miami location. During this time, the Zona Fresca success caught on and franchising also became available. Through this expansion, Zona Fresca is now open in the Ft. Lauderdale Airport, Delray Beach, Orlando – Winter Park, and Lawrenceville, New Jersey!
Through it all, The Zona Fresca motto has remained the same, to serve not your everyday Mexican food, but Mexican food you can eat every day.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
We are very fortunate to have an incredible team, both our partners, who each bring a unique mix to the table, and our staff. However, in the customer service industry, I would say that our biggest challenge has been ensuring that we maintain our value of providing incredible customer service and a consistently high-quality experience as we expand. We never wanted our restaurant to feel like you were walking into a fast-casual space. We want it to be a place you are comfortable to hang out, whether you are just getting out of school, work, or the gym. It’s important to us that each customer feels like they are valued, and that we care about their individualized experience.
However, when you get busy, or when you are training someone new, it’s easy to forget that not everyone is a regular and that not everyone knows that we are willing to customize our menu to their dietary or taste preferences. We want it to feel like you are a guest in our home, and we constantly work to reinforce how important that is. An additional challenge is to prepare food using all natural products, made fresh every day. Mother nature dictates much of the product that we use and as a result, we are impacted by a dynamic changing environment depending on rain, wind, and drought affecting availability and costs. We work very hard to maintain our quality and low price points.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
Zona Fresca is an award-winning, fast-casual, Mexican Food restaurant, with 6 locations in South Florida. We focus on high-quality ingredients and chef-driven recipes that ensure our customers consistently become raving fans! Our approach to quality ingredients, and allowing the flavor of food to shine, is not something that is typical in fast-casual restaurants. We believe that everyone should be able to enjoy quality food even if they can’t always afford a high-priced restaurant. We don’t believe that a menu should be a ‘one-size-fits-all” in fact, one of our most popular menu items is our taco plate that allows our guest to choose from any of the taco combinations. We don’t prepare our food in advance, like many other restaurants in this space, we prepare it to order, it is because we take such care in preparing our food that we are able to cater to different tastes and that is one of the ways in which we stand apart from other locations.
In addition, we offer eat-in, take-out, delivery, and catering! We understand that people’s lives are busy, so we want to provide our food in whichever way is most convenient to them. We have created delivery relationships with many of the top delivery services, and we also are excited to have just launched online ordering! As for catering, we have a variety of catering options, whether it is a small meeting or an event for over 1,000, we have catered everything from office lunches to weddings! In fact, because customer service is so important to us, we keep a dedicated catering manager on staff to ensure that every event has a top of the line experience.
What were you like growing up?
I grew up being a happy, competitive individual. I was always an entrepreneur at heart trying to figure out if there was an opportunity to better myself and as a result, I figured out that long-term successful transactions require the ability to make both parties happy. I have retained this mindset throughout my life.
Contact Info:
- Address: 244 Biscayne Boulevard
Miami, FL 33132 - Website: www.zonafresca.com
- Phone: 305-415-9662
- Email: Raul@zonafresca.com , Sara@zonafresca.com
- Facebook: Zonafresca
Image Credit:
Robert Giordano, Design215 Inc.
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