Grow Your Business

“Money never starts an idea. It is always the idea that starts the money,” goes a quote by  American politician Owen Laughlin. Larry Cortez, a confessed bookworm (his current read is The 50th Law by rapper 50 Cent and Robert Greene), may not have come across that line in the hundreds of volumes he’s read, but he sure swears by it. He presently has a string of 20 restaurants, all founded with longtime friend and coworker Chef Mau Arjona, to prove it.

Cortez and Arjona are managing partner and executive chef, respectively, of the Chefs’ Quarter Group of Restaurants, which counts Chefs’ Quarter Restaurant and Wine Bar, Old Vine Grille, Kusê, Uncle Cheffy, Beurre Blanc, and Larry and Mau Diner among its growing roster of affordable dining brands.

Each brand is a practice in what Cortez calls “creative imitation”—taking something that’s common and tweaking it just enough to make it different. For instance, they will turn a typical burger-and-fries fast food restaurant into one that also offers slow-cooked steaks and salads, as the case with Larry and Mau Diner, which recently opened near the SM Mall of Asia in Pasay City.

At Uncle Cheffy, a binagoongan (pork with shrimp paste) dish, usually served with a bit of sauce, will be prepared dry and tossed into a salad. Pizza can also be made using puff pastry crust—thus the crumbly delicacy served at Beurre Blanc, their French-Mediterranean fine-dining place at Resorts World Manila.

How are they doing this? Not entirely with their own money. Although they are the majority owners, Cortez and Arjona have silent partners who provide added financial muscle. Meanwhile, the tandem applies a combined four decades of fine-dining expertise to make sure each restaurant turns a profit.

Cortez spent 23 years as a busboy, waiter, and restaurant manager, Arjona 25 as a restaurant dishwasher, kitchen assistant, and eventual executive chef. Seventeen of those years were spent together in fine-dining restaurants working under famed Chef Billy King, who first hired Cortez at Prince Albert Rotisserie at Makati’s Hotel Intercontinental.

When King moved to the now defunct Truffles in Greenbelt, Cortez came with him, and there met Arjona. That started a relationship that, nearly two decades later, is earning them a nice sum of money for their own ideas.