It was time to go back to their beginnings in seafood with a new name. Forty more locations in L. Passing the baton: Rubio lives in Encinitas with his wife of 26 years. He has two adult children, one of whom may follow his father into the restaurant business.
Rubio gave his son the same advice his own father gave him more than 30 years ago — get management experience. He also added something new — get an MBA. Samantha Masunaga is a business reporter for the Los Angeles Times. SpaceX crew launch marks space travelers in 60 years. Hot inflation report slams bond market, sends stocks lower. Justice Department sues Uber over wait-time fees charged to disabled passengers.
Not knowing whether the business would take hold, the Rubios started out frugally. In order to save money while learning and building the business, Ralph elected to move back into to his parents' home. The careful start soon paid off. The fish taco became a favorite treat for the crowd of young surfers in the neighborhood, and the initial unit's success soon encouraged expansion plans. In fact, from the outset the Rubios began reinvesting the company profits, building a chain, first in San Diego, then beyond.
However, expansion was slow and cautious at first. It was three years before the company opened its second restaurant, located on College Avenue near San Diego State University. In the next year, , it added another unit. By that time, Ralph Rubio had moved out of the kitchen.
Though he continued to do his own marketing and advertising, his principal concern was management, making sure that the company in its growth made the right decisions. In , the company added three more Rubio's Deli-Mex restaurants, as they were then called. Although the chain was still relatively small, consisting of just six units, it had started moving into new market areas.
Rubio's opened one of its units in San Marcos, an inland community that provided a test of the company's chance of catching on in a locale where residents had no knowledge of Baja cuisine and demographically differed from beach areas where younger and more active people tended to congregate, a group more willing to try novel foods.
Believing that the San Diego market, though very profitable, was almost saturated, Ralph Rubio had adopted a strategy of opening additional units first throughout San Diego County and then in North County, Orange County, and Los Angeles, which offered a much larger market potential than San Diego. Original plans called for buying land for the new units, but Rubio felt that commercial property in promising locales often sold at prohibitive prices, which forced the company to continue leasing land at its new sites.
Initially, Rubio's tried to finance its expansion from its profits, but when its rate of growth picked up, it had to rely on bank loans. That slowed growth somewhat, as did the recession of the late s. Growth of Rubio's in the s greatly accelerated, particularly between and At the end of , the chain consisted of 16 restaurants employing about people. Also, they were still wholly under the family's control, but continued growth was clearly going to make a strict family-management impractical if not impossible.
When the chain grew to 26 locations, during , the company began extensive recruiting outside the family. Over the next four years, the company worked to put together a strong executive team and solid board of directors. Ralph Rubio remained at the company's helm as president and CEO, and after his father's retirement in , he also became chairman of the company's board. Many new members of the team brought important experience from their previous work at other fast-food and other retail chains.
They included chief operating officer, Stephen J. Sather; chief financial officer, Joseph Stein; chief marketing officer, Bruce Frazer; and director of real estate, Ted Frumkin. Among other things, they faced some stiffening competition from other chains. At least in Southern California, the fish taco was becoming popular enough to attract tough players, even the fast-service, Mexican-food giant, Taco Bell, which started offering its own version of the famous fish taco in mid-decade.
One wall of the waiting room has a blue-lit tank populated with tropical fish. While a freshman in Zura Hall at San Diego State University in , Ralph was invited by some upperclassmen on a trip for spring break. When they arrived at a little fishing town outside of San Felipe, makeshift stands everywhere were selling fish tacos—beer-battered and fried whitefish, served in a corn tortilla with cabbage and crema and salsa and lime.
He and his friends ate them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner with ice-cold Corona whose distributor was four doors down from their favorite stand. Every year they went back and did it again. Look at all these college students loving the experience. Ralph felt if he could open a fish taco stand in the US near college kids and the beach, he might not need his backup career plan—becoming a teacher, like many of his relatives.
He asked Carlos, the cook at his favorite fish taco stand, if he wanted to come to San Diego. Carlos said no, not really, thanks. Thank god I kept it. It was obviously important to me. Again, Ralph did as his dad asked. Mickey yelled at him—called him a rude young punk—and hung up. Later that night, Mickey called back in tears. He needed the cash, and agreed to sell. Over the next few months, the entire Rubio family—Ralph, Ray, mom Gloria, and siblings Gloria, Robert, Richard, and Roman—painted tables and signs and built a fish taco stand.
There was a line out the door. None of us had made food to scale. Probably half the orders I made were mistakes. I had to give people money back. It was a disaster. I was almost in tears. All the testing we did, 75 percent of people who tried it ordered it again. Ralph still has the sales charts from that first year, and he says the line goes up steadily every month. Nowadays, Instagram and Facebook are indexes of what the world eats, shown in high-resolution photos, often with recipes.
Food discovery has become a global obsession. This second-by-second archiving means there are very few dishes in the world, even in the most remote villages, without a hashtag. In , however, the internet was still futurist babble.
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