An Interview With Martita Mestey
Reduce the use of preservatives. Food should have natural ingredients and should not be chemically preserved for long periods of time.
In this interview series, called “Chefs and Restaurateurs Helping To Promote Healthy Eating” we are talking to chefs and restaurateurs who are helping to promote and raise awareness about healthy eating. The purpose of the series is to amplify their message and share insights about healthy eating with our readers. As a part of this series, we had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Doug Mathieux.
Doug Mathieux is owner of Artesano, a popular Latin food restaurant in San Francisco. He has been in the restaurant business for nearly 20 years, and thrives on using his French and Brazilian background to create new food and menu concepts in an ever-evolving industry. Outside of the restaurant, Doug enjoys hiking, traveling and of course, trying out new cuisines.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Our readers would love to ‘get to know you a bit. Can you share with our readers a story about what inspired you to become a restauranteur or chef?
Well, two things inspired me to start my restaurants. (1) This probably sounds obvious, but I love to eat and I love to experience new types of food. And (2) I always wanted to start my own business because I found it difficult to be 100% dedicated and passionate about someone else’s business, especially when I didn’t always agree with the decisions being made. And as a mid-level manager in the corporate world, my power to change things was somewhat limited. So these two passions came together and starting a restaurant seemed like an obvious choice for me. If I knew then everything that I know now, I might not have done it since the restaurant world is so challenging. But in the end I have been fairly successful with my restaurants so it’s been a mostly positive experience.
Do you have a specific type of food that you focus on? What was it that first drew you to cooking that type of food? Can you share a story about that with us?
I was inspired to open Artesano after living in Brazil for 4 years. I discovered Latin American cuisine while living there and I wanted to share this experience with Americans who haven’t had the chance to explore South America. Grilled meats, rice, beans, plantains and vegetables are a part of the great food culture there. And it turns out that much of this food is healthy too, without even trying to be. Traditional Latin American cuisine doesn’t require a lot of caloric sauces added on top of dishes, and much of the food is gluten-free. It’s no wonder Artesano became popular with gym rats and people seeking wholesome food in our neighborhood.
Can you share the funniest or most interesting story that has happened to you since you started? What was the lesson or take away you took out of that story?
When I opened my first restaurant, I didn’t realize that good food is only half of the story when trying to please a customer. It’s certainly a very important factor, but the overall experience that you offer to your customer, other than the food itself, is just as important. You need happy, friendly employees, and you need to listen to the customer and genuinely care. If you serve great food with a crappy attitude, the customer will have a mediocre experience, and won’t enjoy the good food you are serving, and all of your hard efforts on the dish will be wasted. On the other hand, if you make a mistake with a customer’s dish but you communicate openly with your customer and handle the issue with a smile and sincere caring, the customer will usually still come away with a positive experience in spite of the mistake. Customers who are looked after and are well taken care of are much more forgiving, and this is true 100% of the time.
This is why it’s critical to hire a team with a great attitude who can “mimic the owner” so to speak, and offer a great experience to all customers. I will often choose a less experienced person with the right attitude, even thought they will require more training versus an experienced hand with poor customer service skills.
I recall one particular situation when we promoted a new prep cook to work the line. One of his first nights on the line, things got really busy and we ran out of salt on the line. So he went to the back to refill the salt container and he somehow, I don’t know how this is even possible, but he refilled the salt container with sugar. He then prepared someone’s dish with sugar instead of salt. Obviously, the dish tasted terrible, and the customer was angry, but my front-of-house assistant manager was fantastic and handled the situation perfectly. He figured out what happened, apologized, and had the kitchen prepare the dish again, as quickly as possible. He was sincere and caring, corrected the problem, and made the customer happy again, even offering a free dessert. In the end, the customer was genuinely happy with how the situation was handled and was even laughing about what had happened with the new line cook who came out to personally apologize also. The situation was handled perfectly and I didn’t even need to come out myself at all, though I did anyway at the end before the customers left.
None of us can be successful without some help along the way. Did you have mentors or cheerleaders who helped you to succeed? Can you tell us a story about their influence?
My mentor in the restaurant industry is a genius in creating fantastic food with new twists that captivates people’s interest. His name is Pascal Rigo and he is well known for his French corner bakery concept in the San Francisco Bay Area. Pascal was my partner in my first restaurant business, a French family restaurant named Rigolo. He came up with a French “pizza” made with a special “pâte Brisée” dough that he worked on and perfected in his main bakery before rolling it out to Rigolo. It was a great twist for a new type of pizza with a sweeter, delicious pastry type dough. It was so good that our new “Smoked Salmon Pizza” landed my recently launched French café on the cover of San Francisco Magazine!
A great cheerleader I had along the way was my wife Laura, who is a PR executive. She took on my restaurants pro bono as side projects to her usual paying customers. She enjoyed working with small business, and she encouraged me and helped boost our image with local media and our neighborhood communities.
In your experience, what is the key to creating a dish that customers are crazy about?
To create a popular dish, start with simple, wholesome ingredients, and then add a unique twist to make your new dish just a little bit different from everyone else’s takes on the dish. If you can make something delicious and memorable without packing in too many extra caloric ingredients, you are on the right path.
One thing I learned early on is that you can never predict which dish will be the most popular. I started off thinking that I knew which dishes the customers would prefer. I thought, “Oh, customers will like the feijoada because it’s a traditional dish that’s very popular in Brazil, and they will like such and such less because it’s more simple, etc.” But I quickly found that’s not how it works in practice. Now I know I have to try different dishes as specials, and let the customers vote with their dollars to see what becomes popular.
I remember one particular time when, at the end of a shift, I had some leftovers sitting in front of me. I had our Latin meatballs, some of our chipotle tomato sauce (that we served with our plantain chips at the time), and a batch of sweet plantains. So I threw those ingredients into some of our leftover sandwich rolls, and I toasted them on the griddle. After covering the sandwiches and letting them get nice and hot, I cut them in half, and passed the half sandwiches out to my staff. They turned out to be absolutely delicious, a great randomly invented sweet and sour type sandwich and everyone loved them! So we ran the sandwich as a special for the next month.
Personally, what is the “perfect meal” for you?
That answer has evolved for me over time. Now that I am middle-aged, my body is pushing me towards a more balanced diet and less heavy foods. A perfect meal is something that tastes great, is made with simple wholesome ingredients, and is something that won’t leave you overly stuffed. I believe more than ever in controlling portion sizes, and not just because of the recent high inflation (although controlling food cost is very important for restaurants). We have to control portion sizes because our culture seems to promote overeating and I’d like to help people get away from that, and get used to eating proper portions of healthy food.
I grew up in post-WW2 France in a family where I was taught that you were lucky to have plentiful food and you had to eat every bite on your plate. So I used to feel compelled to overeat, but I’ve finally learned to avoid this instinct. Now I made an effort to control portions and not overeat.
Where does your inspiration for creating come from? Is there something that you turn to for a daily creativity boost?
I have three sources of inspiration for creating: reading, eating and listening. I enjoy reading about trends in the food world and this gives me ideas. I also make it a point to try a new dish once a week, and often more than once a week. This can come from eating at another establishment, or from having fun and experimenting in the kitchen. Some great ideas have come from randomly throwing together leftover ingredients, like Artesano’s meatball sandwich that I mentioned above. Finally I like to give creative leeway to my team members, so I let them experiment and I listen to their ideas. Many of Artesano’s best culinary ideas have come from my staff, and I think that’s a great thing to keep them motivated and passionate, and to increase the number of great dishes that we come up with for our customers.
Are you working on any new or exciting projects now? What impact do you think this will have?
We are actively developing Artesano’s catering business. It’s a part of our business that started growing organically on its own from customers telling me that they wanted our food at their private events. After customers expressed this interest, I threw together a catering menu with platters of our most popular dishes, and our catering started growing through word of mouth. Pretty soon we were discovered by the downtown San Francisco corporate market, and the business grew more. We were very excited about our new prospects, and then Covid hit in early 2020 and the catering business completely collapsed overnight. However, in the last few months, catering has finally started making a comeback and we are getting a few orders a week again. I’d like to focus on this growing part of my business, and make our healthy Latin fare available to the corporate and private event market throughout the Bay Area. We will get there, one happy customer at a time…
You are currently leading an initiative to help promote healthy eating. Can you tell us a bit about what you and your organization are trying to change in our world today?
I addressed this question a bit in my answers above, but to summarize I am trying to promote healthy eating with delicious dishes made using wholesome simple ingredients that don’t need extra caloric sauces. I want to let the great flavors of our dishes come out of the key ingredients themselves, we don’t want to disguise the flavors. I also want to promote proper healthy portions, versus overeating. Some restaurants try to make up for mediocre dishes by giving you more mediocre food, so that the sheer quantity will satisfy their customers. This is 100% the wrong approach, and the opposite of what we are trying to do. Finally, I’d like to spread our philosophy about healthy food to the catering market to reach more people, both with private events and through the corporate market.
Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about this cause?
If you had told me 10 years ago that I would be inspiring people to eat healthy, I might have been surprised. It’s something that occurred naturally for me, on its own over time. I didn’t initially make a conscious decision that I wanted to focus on healthy eating. But through my travels and multicultural experiences, I discovered that much of traditional Latin food (though not necessarily the Americanized versions of it) is somewhat healthy to start with, or at least not unhealthy. Traditional Latin cuisine from Central and South America uses wholesome ingredients and doesn’t add a lot of extra caloric ingredients in the dishes, unlike the French cuisine that I grew up around. Much of the Latin food is also naturally gluten-free. After opening Artesano, I noticed that our food was perceived by our customers as being healthy. We noticed that we were attracting gym rats who were in good shape and looking for healthier eating options. In fact a couple of local gyms were among our first catering customers, telling us that they wanted our healthy meals for their events. We hadn’t started out trying to make a healthy menu, but we realized that our menu was healthy just by the nature of the food we were serving, so we built on that and started promoting and focusing on this more.
Another thing that happened is that as I grew older, my body started craving different foods. In my younger years, I would eat heavier, more caloric foods, and more sweets, but as I aged more my body craved a more balanced diet and healthier options, and smaller portions. As I started to focus more on this, I realized that eating good food, being satisfied from a good meal, and eating healthy was not mutually exclusive. So I became more passionate about the topic and decided that I could keep serving great food that my customers loved, while at the same time focusing more on making our dishes as healthy as possible, and trying to pass on some of my newly acquired knowledge to my customer base. And it seemed to work as word spread around San Francisco about our delicious and healthy menu.
Without saying specific names, can you tell us a story about a particular individual who was helped by your cause?
Great question, and yes, I have a good story. I had an elderly customer at my other restaurant, a French café, who loved our food. She was a regular and came by 3 or 4 times a week, sometimes more. She was picky and demanding, but also kind and fair in her opinions. She developed a strong bond with me and my staff. When I opened Artesano 9 years ago, I told her to come try us out. She politely explained that she wasn’t fond of Mexican food. I explained to her that Artesano was Latin food without a focus on Mexico. I also told her that Mexican food in local restaurants in Mexico was quite different than the TexMex food popularized in the US. I explained that with Artesano we had picked some popular culinary themes that are popular throughout Latin America, including grilled meats, rice, black beans, vegetables and plantains, and we had built a delicious and healthy menu around these themes. She listened and seemed intrigued but wasn’t sold. Finally, I gave her a $25 gift card and told her to come visit Artesano on me. That pushed her over the edge and she finally gave Artesano a try. I told her to let me know when she was going to come in. When she finally came in, I had her taste many of our most popular dishes. In the end, we knocked her socks off and she absolutely loved it! She said she had no idea Latin cuisine could be so good. I also pointed out to her that it was made from simple wholesome ingredients and the dishes were lower in calorie count vs the food she ate at my French café. After that day, she became a regular at Artesano, eating there more often that at my French restaurant, and she was grateful for the discovery and her healthier eating.
Are there three things the community/society/politicians can do to help you address the root of the problem you are trying to solve?
- Reduce the use of preservatives. Food should have natural ingredients and should not be chemically preserved for long periods of time.
- Grow food in smaller batches to help the US return closer to farm to table supply chains (like they still have in many parts of Europe and Latin America).
- Get rid of high fructose corn syrup in the US, and lower tariffs on imported cane sugar to help make that happen (and stop putting corn in fuel for vehicles as this drives up our food costs in the US, and displaces other crops).
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Started as a Chef or Restauranteur” and why? Please share a story or an example for each.
- “Don’t start a restaurant!” I didn’t realize what a challenging industry this can be. For the size of the business, it has so many employees, so much equipment, so many rules and regulations, so many picky customers who think they are food critics when they post reviews. It’s certainly not the easiest business, to say the least. You have new challenges tossed your way every year, so you need to constantly adapt to survive. For example, about 10 years ago San Francisco passed yet one more expensive labor law that applied only to businesses with 20 or more employees. This forced us to rethink our operation to shrink our employee count below 20. We outsourced the nighttime cleaning work to a third party janitorial crew. We also reorganized our operation; we stopped having a day crew for lunch and a night crew for dinner. I decided to allow my employees to work double shifts, if they wanted to. Since most of my employees previously held 2 jobs because they needed to make more money, they accepted the offer after we discussed it and figured out agreeable terms, and they all quit their other jobs. So I ended up with employees who were more dedicated to Artesano. I actually lowered their base hourly pay a little bit, but then allowed them to work up to 12 hours a day (up to 4 hours of overtime), which gave them a higher weighted average hourly wage. So in practice, they ended up with a good raise in their hourly pay, and on top of it I could now guarantee them 2 days off a week, whereas before with their 2 jobs they were lucky to get even one full day off a week. It ended up being a win-win situation, since I now had much more dedicated employees and lower employee turnover, and I managed to get below the 20-employee threshold to prevent the extra expenses of the new SF laws.
- “Don’t get worked up about online customer reviews”. You have to read the online reviews, and you need to learn from them (when they are reasonable). You should also try to respond to them, but it’s critical to learn not to get worked up about them, otherwise, you will constantly be stressed out by the wannabe restaurant critics. I find that the anonymity of online review sites makes people much more critical than they would be in person. Customers will say things on Yelp that they would never, ever, say to me face to face in person. They get to hide behind their screen name and be mean without anyone knowing about it. When customers talk to me in person, looking at me in the eyes, they always at least try to be more fair, and are willing to listen to my responses. I once was in the office at Artesano reading and answering Yelp reviews. Suddenly I saw a brand new review pop up. This newly minted Yelp restaurant critic said: “My salad was terrible, it was the worst salad I have ever had in my life!” This person didn’t give details as to what had made this salad the worst ever, so I got up and went into the dining room. There I saw a customer on her computer and she had a half-eaten salad on her plate. So I decided to take a chance. I went up to her and said: “Hi, my name is Doug and I’m the owner of Artesano. I just read your review on Yelp and I was hoping to find out what we could have done better with your salad.” She immediately started squirming and looked very, very uncomfortable. She stammered and said something to the effect of: “Oh, well, uhhh, it wasn’t that bad, it’s just that, well, uhhh, I don’t know, it wasn’t my favorite, that’s all.” So then I answered: “Oh, I’m glad to hear that, I’m just a bit confused because you said it was terrible and the worst salad you’d ever had, so I just wanted to learn from your criticism and try to make things right regarding your poor experience.” She looked even more uncomfortable now, and said something like: “Oh well, uh, I guess I was exaggerating a little, I wasn’t expecting you to come up to me”. I told her I was glad she cleared that up and that if she was willing I’d love to have her correct the review. She assured me she would, but she never did….
- “Always Buy Heavy Duty Equipment.” There are 3 levels of commercial restaurant equipment available for purchase: light duty, medium duty and heavy duty. In the beginning, I would try to save money by buying “medium duty”. My rationale was that the medium-duty seemed plenty good and I could save some money, after all this stuff was so much more durable compared to home cooking equipment, so I thought it was fine. Big mistake! I now know that if any equipment can be broken, it will be broken, it’s just a question of when. Daily usage in a busy restaurant with busy employees working fast beats the crap out of equipment. You can’t compare this kind of usage to cooking at home! I learned the hard way to always buy heavy-duty equipment, you will save money in the long run (actually even in the medium term). I started learning this lesson after my 6-burner medium-duty stove started having problems only a few months after I opened it. This was followed by my light-duty fryer breaking, and then the cheap slicer, etc. After the slicer broke, I vowed to only buy heavy-duty equipment and I’ve never looked back.
- “Always call references.” I used to think that I was a good judge of character so I could choose whom to hire without calling references. Well, it worked for a while, but then I learned. Some people are very smart, and good at giving the right answers to questions you ask them, but this doesn’t make them good employees. Some employees are good liars, better at lying than I am at judging character apparently! I hired a smart, experienced guy who impressed me in the interview, only to realize several months later that he was stealing from the cash register. And since he was so smart, he stole in a creative way that took me a long time to figure out. Only after I got suspicious did I finally call his references to check up on him. It turns out his previous employer suspected him of devious acts also, though they didn’t give me details for their own liability reasons, they just answered in a way to make me understand that there were issues. Had I been smart enough to call his references up front, I would have never hired the guy. Most times, past employers won’t come right out and speak too badly of their past employees, since they want to avoid liability, but you can read between the lines by their short answers, and by the fact that they don’t praise the past employee. These short answers lacking details tell you everything you need to know, that there were problems. A well-appreciated past employee will always get detailed praise from their former employers, that’s certainly what I do when I am called for a reference.
- “A good attitude and an open mind is more important than experience when looking for new employees”. I used to try to hire employees with more experience. I figured it would make things easier as we wouldn’t need to train them much. I also thought I could learn a thing or two from an experienced employee. But after a couple years I learned that even though a restaurant is a restaurant, every operation is different and has its own particularities. Moreover I run my operation better than most other restaurants, so I need employees who work at a higher level than average. I also realize now that some experienced employees are resistant to learning new ways, they can sometimes think they know better when they don’t, some can thus have bad attitudes. On the other hand, a new employee with less experience starts with a clean slate and no bad habits. He or she is excited for a new opportunity. So now I look for a good attitude and an open mind, and I value this more than a lot of experience. I don’t mind investing time in training the right employee with the right frame of mind. This doesn’t mean I won’t hire an experienced employee; I certainly will, but only if they also have the right attitude.
What’s the one dish people have to try if they visit your establishment?
That’s a tough question, we have so many dishes that I love! But if I had to pick only one dish, I would probably suggest our famous Lomo Saltado. It’s a very popular Peruvian dish, it has a great backstory, and it has now conquered the picky tastebuds in San Francisco. This traditional dish is a fusion of Peruvian and Chinese cuisine. Lomo Saltado mixes Peruvian and Chinese ingredients to create tantalizing flavors, and I think its popularity is due to its unique flavor profile.
The two main elements of Lomo Saltado are rice and steak. The beef strips are marinated in soy sauce with various spices and a dash of vinegar. The other essential ingredients are onions, tomatoes, red bell peppers, and cilantro. It’s essentially a steak stir fry that we prepare in a wok. We serve it mixed with fresh-cut French fries on top of our Brazilian-style white rice.
When I first heard about Lomo Saltado I thought it sounded odd. Latin food prepared with soy sauce? My chef Joel Rodriguez insisted the potatoes required for the traditional dish should be our fresh-cut French fries. I was resistant, I told him the fries would get soggy (and they do, to some extent). But Joel prepared his version of the dish for me and I was hooked. It may sound a bit strange at first, but the taste combination is to die for, and it’s now one of my very favorite Latin dishes of all time.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we take them. ☺
Anthony Bourdain, who has sadly left the world. I love watching his popular TV show, and I share some of his biggest passions: eating; discovering new foods; traveling; and discovering new cultures. In my opinion, Anthony had the best possible job in the world, and I would have loved to go on one of his many fascinating multi-cultural international trips.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
The best way for your readers to experience what we are trying to do is to come into Artesano and try some of our delicious healthy dishes. Descriptions can’t do justice to the tantalizing flavors. We can be found in person in the Dogpatch neighborhood of San Francisco at 2335 3rd Street, online at artesanosf.com, and check us out on Instagram and Facebook — @artesano_sf. And of course call us at 415.221.5500.
This was very meaningful, thank you so much. We wish you only continued success on your great work!
How Chef Doug Mathieux Of Artesano Is Helping To Promote Healthy Eating was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.