We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Gabriel Toma a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Gabriel, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Before we get into specifics, let’s talk about success more generally. What do you think it takes to be successful?

We’ll start with a great Plan, Focus, Determination & Sacrifice and what we mean by that is, in order to be successful it takes everything you’ve got and a business plan along with the traits mentioned above are crucial.

Knowing the industry your in and adapting to the market are also key ingredients.

To put all this in perspective Miguel’s and I partnership started this with the understanding that we were going to sacrifice a lot of time away from our families and friends in order to overcome the obstacles that this pandemic has brought upon most small business.

We were definitely not afraid to be aggressive with it, though.

This partnership, which started off as a friendship, gave us the determination to serve those in our community in such a short amount of time. Being in the food and beverage industry has definitely tested our knowledge and skills and we have come to the conclusion that in order to be successful we needed to adapt to the ways of convenience and safety for our customers, in addition to serving quality dishes with speed and accuracy.

Gabriel, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

.We both got into the food and beverage industry at a very young age working in restaurants starting as busboys, servers, cooks and then moved into management. We had said to ourselves that one day we will own our own restaurant and turn it into a successful franchise, which we are doing together 20 years later.
We are delivering a fresh and authentic approach to Mexican cuisine by #bringing freshback with grilled to order tacos, burritos, quesadillas and burrito bowls to our guests here in Houston, TX.

We are changing the way Mexican food and drinks are served by incorporating a drive-thru option for our guests, making it convenient and adding a Michelada & Margarita Bar to our Cali-Mex fast casual concept

Nothing is better than crafting our delicious fresh, made from scratch-burritos, tacos and quesadillas while providing the convenience to order online, over the phone, dine in or pull up to the drive-thru window.

We definitely take pride in everything we do and we are focusing on providing a great environment and training for our team members, where they can grow. We hope that this will deliver to our patrons a great customer service experience and food consistency in quality and taste.

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

Absolutely. This pandemic has really tested our resilience. Considering that this is our first brick and mortar that we are opening together, it has definitely challenged our skills and brought out different versions of ourselves, both good and bad. We can attest to a clear development of character in all of this.
Before we opened the restaurant, and before we even knew each other we both started our individual businesses out of a 10×10 canopy, cooking food in the 100 degree Texas weather.

During the shut down of the pandemic, instead of closing down our businesses we pushed forward and adapted to the new normalcy. We became resourceful, inventive and we survived while giving each other moral support. When other businesses were retracting or closing down we felt that this was an opportunity for us to persevere and grow – together.

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

We did not have the money to open the restaurant and yet we made it happen. We collected our extremely small savings and also took advantage of a few free interest (for a determined period of time) credit cards. Managed to finance our kitchen equipment and take out small personal loans. We talked to the right people and asked for their support and their help. We realized that the sooner we opened the quicker we’d be able to to tackle any expenses and cover costs. We were determined to open our doors after receiving much excitement from the public about our food and concept.

Contact Info:

• Website: WWW.THEBURRITODISTRICT.COM
• Instagram: @BURRITODISTRICT
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/burritodistrict
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/search?find_desc=BURRITO+DISTRICT&find_loc=Houston%2C+TX