Like many of the characters in our food stories, Julio Cancho has also dedicated his life to a career in the food service industry. A natural from Peru, He recalls his arrival to the United States and how he never thought he would find his passion doing dishes in a restaurant at age 16.
The Passion of the Cook
At the age of 21, he made a decision to work towards his own personal dream. He desired that one day he would have his own name by the door of a restaurant that read “Julio Cancho, owner and permittee” from that day on, He set himself a goal to learn the ins and outs of the restaurant business. Starting a new phase of his career, he worked at countless different restaurants all around Connecticut, from pubs and bar’n grills to fine dining restaurants and back, within the span of ten years he learned the good, the bad and the ugly sides of the restaurant business.
How to Succeed on the Climb to the Top
The food service industry is a very grueling, difficult and economically low rewarding career. In the U.S. it generally relies on underpaid and undocumented workers who take on these jobs because there is not much more available to them, because of this they are often treated as easily replaceable and are often denied higher pay and other benefits. Julio experienced all these hardships during his career and knew when he had hit a roof at any job, he took all the best experiences and put them to good use when he began preparing for his business venture.
While other businesses have achieved success on the hard work of poorly rewarded employees. Julio, now a business owner, has embodied a fair set of work ethics and business policy which has allowed him to build a reliable team of workers he can trust blindfolded to deliver the exact standard of quality he would serve and expect as a dinner, and in return he rewards each of his team members with a full-time schedule that is open to negotiations for personal time off requests, and most importantly with a living wage above the minimum required by the state befiting to their professional experience and needs.