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Frank Neri was shutting down his first restaurant, Pez, when he received the e-mail.
It was a Monday when he introduced the closure. Two days later, a message got here in from the Michelin Information asking for photographs, chef particulars and a full description of the restaurant.
“We did not get a star,” Neri says. “However we made the record. And we had already closed.”
The irony wasn’t misplaced on him. After years of pouring his coronary heart into Pez, a Baja-style seafood idea rooted in advantageous eating, the validation got here just some days too late.
“The media jumped on it,” he says. “The story turned about how we closed proper earlier than the record got here out.”
However the expertise gave Neri readability. He had chased perfection and ambition, and he discovered simply how fragile an awesome restaurant may be. That lesson stayed with him. So did the necessity to evolve.
“I used to assume advantageous eating meant success,” he explains. “Now I do know it is about doing one factor very well, preserving the crew small and staying centered.”
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Like many others within the hospitality world, Neri needed to study in public. He made robust choices, weathered shutdowns and leaned on a WhatsApp group of native Miami restaurateurs to share methods and vent frustrations in the course of the pandemic.
The group, which he jokingly refers to because the Cuban Mafia, included a number of the metropolis’s most influential operators. “Sooner or later they’d say, ‘Tomorrow we’re speaking to the mayor, we’re pushing for full capability,'” Neri remembers. “After which it might really occur.”
These onerous classes reshaped his method to the enterprise. It turned the start of El Primo Red Tacos.
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The birria taco increase
When the pandemic hit, Neri had a alternative. Slightly than double down on massive eating rooms and complex menus, he simplified. He took a slow-braised beef birria recipe, one he had been serving quietly for brunch, and turned it into the centerpiece of a stripped-down popup. Birria solely. Takeout solely. Twenty hours per week.
Inside days, folks had been lining up across the block.
However the transfer wasn’t simply reactive. The muse had been laid years earlier, throughout a visit to Tijuana in 2012. Neri remembers the precise date, July 28, as a result of it modified the best way he thought of taste.
“I had this tostada with yellowfin tuna and machaca,” he says. “I would educated in France and Spain, however this was one thing else. A taste explosion.”
It wasn’t about copying that dish; it was about chasing that feeling. The influence of daring, surprising taste combos impressed Neri’s method to tacos. He needed to create one thing equally memorable, however rooted in his personal voice and imaginative and prescient.
Years later, when no person in Miami was doing tacos the best way he remembered, Neri gave town six months to get it proper. When nobody did, he launched his personal idea: El Primo Red Tacos.
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Now situated in downtown Miami, El Primo Red Tacos retains the menu tight and the main focus singular. The specialty is birria, and all the pieces revolves round doing it proper. “We specialize. That is what we imagine in,” he says. “Specialize, good it and that is it.”
Even the recipes are private. Neri’s mother-in-law helped form the unique birria mix, which he fine-tuned with care.
Neri presents his recommendation with the identical readability that got here from hard-won expertise. Take small steps. Keep away from bloated menus. Deal with what you care about most. That mindset did not simply assist him rebound; it gave him a brand new blueprint for development.
Failure did not finish his profession. It set the stage for one thing extra centered, extra intentional, and extra profitable. “We’re pleased with our meals,” Neri says. “Everyone does birria now, however not all people does it properly. No person does it like we do.”
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Frank Neri was shutting down his first restaurant, Pez, when he received the e-mail.
It was a Monday when he introduced the closure. Two days later, a message got here in from the Michelin Information asking for photographs, chef particulars and a full description of the restaurant.
“We did not get a star,” Neri says. “However we made the record. And we had already closed.”
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