We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Adam Orman. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Adam below.

Adam , appreciate you joining us today. undefined

It’s not hard to innovate when it comes to thinking about restaurant labor. What’s been fun is to watch as one innovation rolls into another. None of them have been easy to implement or sustain but running a safe workplace with higher standards for pay, equity and benefits than is typical in hospitality is part of our mission.

We wanted to run a neighborhood restaurant where the staff stuck around to recognize our regulars and vice versa. To do that, we wanted to professionalize the jobs and provide stability that would appeal to a mature team that would appreciate predictability over cash in hand. We started by paying everyone higher than the federal minimum wage and implementing a service charge in lieu of a gratuity that we could share with the entire team. Over 9 years, that decision to do things a little differently has led us to create relationships with other progressive labor leaders in our industry nationally, to partner with city agencies and non-profits to provide meals for Austin’s food insecure communities, to co-found a non-profit Good Work Austin, that provides support for other local owners who want to create innovative wage models or benefit structures for their teams and host harassment prevention or anti-racist trainings, the sorts of things that had never been apart of the industry I grew up in.

We’ve added PTO, a four week predictive schedule, health benefits and subsidized counseling. To do any of this in hospitality requires creativity and collaboration. Our one slight innovation has led to restaurants working together which is a much more significant and satisfying change.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I started working as a server in New York in the late ’90s while I was getting an MfA in Film Production at Columbia University. I loved food & restaurants and was excited to get to know how they worked and loved a job, where like being on set, I was always doing something. It was active, social and involved so much problem-solving. While continuing to write and pursue a film career, I started to take my service jobs more seriously and began managing at Savoy, Peter Hoffman’s groundbreaking locavore destination in Soho. Peter cared about building community and celebrating cultural food traditions. I started to learn about sustainable agriculture and how our food choices mattered environmentally. We moved to San Francisco where the farm to table movement started but where there was also no tipped minimum wage and a battle to raise the wage even higher. That was where I started to think that the “way it’s always been done” was not the way it had to be. So, when we relocated again to Austin and I had the opportunity to open a restaurant with my business partner, Fiore Tedesco, we decided that we would make everything that we could in house (cured meats, fresh cheeses, bread & liqueurs), no one would rely on tips for the majority of their wage and there would be greater equity between what the kitchen and service staff earned.

We serve food from local farms filtered through an Italian lens and the majority of the menu is housemade pasta dishes. We have gotten notoriety, several awards from the local Chambers of Commerce, for our labor standards, but also for our food, earning the #1 spot in the Austin American-Statesman’s restaurant list in ’22. I’ve said many time, ‘they may come for the labor policy but they come back for the pasta.’

Have you ever had to pivot?

When COVID-19 forced us to close our doors in March ’20, we did not want to re-open to guests until we knew that we could do it in a way that would keep our team safe. At that time, we had just co-founded a 501c3, Good Work Austin, with a number of other business owners in Austin. Because of that designation, we were able to procure contracts from the City and County to pay restaurants to provide meals for the school district, for city-run shelters and housing communities. I administered a program that at its peak during a statewide power outage in Feb ’21, utilized over 60 restaurants and, over the course of two years provided over 2 million meals. This huge pivot into being a production kitchen that was making 10X as many meals as we typically would have made in a week and earning 10x less per meal made it possible for us to invite back any of our employees who wanted to work and to do it safely. We did not have to open our doors to guests until after the vaccinations had been introduced so we could slowly and deliberately become a restaurant again. We still provide 6 meals/week to a transitional shelter from both L’Oca d’Oro. Providing meals for folks who can’t pay is an important part of who we are and something that we involve the whole staff in to let them use their cooking and serving skills for the good of the community.

How’d you meet your business partner?

Fiore and I met at a party for a bunch of parents with kids the same age that was at the house of my wife’s oldest friend. Our kids were 2 & 3 at the time. We had both spent time in NY restaurants and had moved to Austin with young children because our wives were from here and there was family. He was at the now famous Franklin BBQ at the time and I was being a stay-at-home dad. I’d say I was taking time off or in between jobs but that’s not true. Being a dad was full-time. Fiore overheard me talking about restaurant work and he asked if I’d want to talk about doing pop-ups at Franklin on Sunday nights. He needed someone to run service. We met and talked about what a music-themed dinner would look like, how we’d serve, promote, etc but we mostly talked about basketball. He’s a Knicks fan. I’m a Sixers fan. And we got along anyway. Six months later we staged our first pop-up, a Pixies themed dinner on the night of the Super Bowl (brilliant PR move on our part which would foretell a career of questionable choices). We continued to do these almost every other week in 2013 as well as house parties, weddings, a Torah-themed dinner with a local synagogue. After assessing each other’s flaws and realizing we could work together, we started looking for the space that would become L’Oca d’Oro. We’re still friends after another restaurant opening, more children, a global pandemic. Business has never been easy. The relationship needs almost the same maintenance as my marriage but that is a good thing. There’s too much money & ego tied up in a business partnership to take it any less seriously than you would take the relationship with your spouse and I’m glad we took some time to “date” before “moving in together”.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.locadoroaustin.com, www.bambinoaustin.com
• Instagram: @locadoroaustin, @bambinoatx

Image Credits

christian remde
nitya jain
jody horton