We recently connected with Fiore Tedesco and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Fiore thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s start with a story that highlights an important way in which your brand diverges from the industry standard.

My partner Adam and I opened L’Oca d’Oro together in 2016. We had a pretty idea of what we were and apprised to be from a food & beverage perspective but what what most clear to us was that we wanted to make a labor model that fully embraced our team as a group professionals that would offer a workplace and benefits that you would often see in most industries outside of hospitality. For generations, the hospitality industry has been kept (by regressive labor/wage laws and national lobbying funded by corporate owned fast food giants) in a bubble several notches below that of workers in just about any other kind of workplace. Once we decided to open, our first mission was how to create a labor model that did away with the archaic and regressive system of tipping, and how to fund health care, mental health care, revenue sharing, retirement plans, and progressive PTO beneifts.

We stuck to our guns and there were lots of growing pains. By year three we had gotten good at it, and started a non profit (Good Work Austin) in part to provide resources to other business who wanted to join us in making a hospitality community that all of our collective employees deserve.

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?

My grandparents were Italian immigrants. My grandmother’s parents were bakers 4th generation bakers. By the time I was born we had a deli , a pizza joint and a bakery that my cousins operated. As a family, we used food as a mode of communication. This was very helpful as I was born deaf and was able to find solace and a pathway to communicate and understand my family very early on despite lacking verbal and auditory skills. I was at my grandmother’s hip in the kitchen very early, it was where I was most comfortable. I worked in the deli, the bakery and another restaurant all through high school. Working in kitchens helped guide me through a challenging childhood, getting my hearing and a decade in speech therapy. It is a place I discovered confidence and had a voice. By the time I was done with high school I thought I was done with cooking, that it taught me what I needed to learn to go out in the world. I sincerly thought I was going to be a professional tennis player and once I retired I was going to start a clinical psychology practice. Ha!

I ended up dropping of of school after a year, went on to work in retail interior design, had a design director position at 19 started my first company at age 2o. I folded the company at 22 and spent much. of the next several years on tour playing drums in punk bands. It was on tour in Italy where I rediscovered my love and passion for cooking in such a deep visceral way that I needed to transform my life to make cooking my career. Fast forward too many years to comfortably mention and here I am 7 years into being the chef/owner of a great restaurant that I am eternally proud of, and about to open two more restaurants in the next year.

Bouncing around some many different jobs and career paths experiencing a great deal of early failure are the things I am most grateful for. The biggest failures are where I’ve learned the most about myself, my resilience and where I developed very articulate problem. solving skills. My shoulder fell apart playing tennis I found what to do next. My design business failed I went back to the drawing board again. I’ve been homeless twice. There is not much I’m am scared of and not many challenges I feel nervous about taking on. I learned to be aggressive and pursuing whatI believe in and to work without fear of the result.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

I had to learn to not judge or make assumptions by my first impression of an interaction with someone. The narrative I had told myself for a long time was that with my early disability came a better understanding of reading faces and understanding people based on their reactions / movements. While I may have some slightly heightened abilities in this area, I was mostly doing myself a disservice and robbing myself the opportunity to communicate with curiosity and learn about someone.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

Shortly after gaining the ability to hear I decided I was going to learn to play the drums. I had always been able to feel the rhythm in songs , felt the slight vibration of the speakers at home, but once I could hear was able to understand music and how the rhythm and drums fit in. I was very wary of being categorized as handicapped and worked hard to find lanes and avenues to express myself to transcend any labels. I got into a jazz conservatory at 12, studied throughout my primary eduction in a performance arts program and then spend most of my 20’s as a touring musician. My curiosity and desire to achieve enabled me to perform in 25 countries opened a world of life experiences to me that I am eternally grateful for.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.locaodoroaustin.com
• Instagram: @tedescofiore @locadoroaustin

Image Credits
Louis Lucas