Restaurateur
(1962– )
I started helping my father sell fish on the street near Westchester Avenue and the Bronx River Parkway when I was about sixteen. He went to the market early in the morning and then we set up the outdoor fish stand where we sold shrimp and lobsters. We always bought a lot because my dad was saying, “Make the money on volume. You buy it and you make a couple of dollars, all on volume.” After a couple of years we weren’t allowed to sell there because we created congestions and didn’t have a license for that corner. So we went to the Cross Bronx Expressway and Webster Avenue underneath the highway. We created chaos there, too, with single parking, double parking. Neighbors complained. Other businesses complained. So then we moved to the side of the highway. We rented the property and built a shack that you could close. A typical wooden shack like you’d see in Puerto Rico on the side of the road. It was small, and they couldn’t kick us out there because it was private property.
My dad taught me from an early age, You buy, you sell. You make a couple of dollars, you don’t hold on to what you buy. You sell. Flipping. So my friend David’s father, he had a used-car dealership license, which allowed us to go to car auctions at an early age. Between working with my dad with whatever money I would make, I’d buy a car and put a “for sale” sign on it. I would have two or three cars at home as well as at work. I’d buy a car for maybe a thousand and then sell it for fifteen hundred, seventeen hundred, so by the time I was nineteen I had about a hundred cars that I had bought and sold. It was about buying, selling, and a quick flip.
At one point, I would have five or six cars of my own. My own car went from being a thousand-dollar car to a two-thousand-dollar car so that eventually I was driving a sixteen-thousand-dollar car, a twenty-thousand-dollar car—my own personal car. I’d always have a “for sale” sign on it. It didn’t matter if I sold it. I had a resale certificate and would just go to an auction and get another one. Between seventeen and twenty years old I was always driving something, advertising it, and selling it.
My earlier dreams were about baseball. About being a baseball player. My uncle was a Major League Baseball player. Ellie Rodríguez. He played for about twelve years in the major leagues. Actually, I went to Puerto Rico for a year to learn from him, but I wound up staying with my grandfather instead. The one bad part about baseball here is that it’s seasonal, where everywhere else it’s like ten, twelve months. When you’re working and your job is six or seven days a week, Saturdays and Sundays, you can’t really go to play baseball—so that changed my mind about it all.
I was lucky and more fortunate than a lot of guys because in the early eighties a lot of them were hustling and doing bad things. There were a lot of drugs. There were the empty buildings, the robberies, crack cocaine. And a lot of them went to jail and a lot of them got into a lot of trouble. I saw like the friends of the friends, while you only made a few hundred dollars a week and they were making thousands, but I’d still see them coming to our place to get lobster and shrimp. In the restaurant business, the greatest part is that everyone has to eat. Everyone has to eat and drink and socialize no matter what their walk of life. When it’s dinnertime, you have to eat. You can’t exclude yourself. Then a week later, I’d hear that this one went to jail and that one got killed, so the more stories I’d hear, and I heard more bad ones than good, it encouraged me to stay working. I realized that at any given moment what was really going on in the street was Russian roulette. I didn’t want to be part of that.
My very first job in a restaurant was as a dishwasher. I thought that it was a lot of fun because you had to keep clean and organized. I also started working in a kitchen as a line cook/prep guy/expediter. I knew that whatever I did, I did with pride and that I was going to be good at it. No one was going to do a better job than I did. If I was going to make a delivery, I was going to be on time. I was going to be the best.
Some people have eyes, but they can’t see. I built Jimmy’s Bronx Café, which was a forty-eight-thousand-square-foot restaurant, which wound up probably being the largest Hispanic restaurant/lounge/bar in America. Before it was built I would tell people what my plans were. That I had a vision for what it would look like, but people—they all thought I was crazy. I couldn’t borrow a dollar from my friends. I had used up every penny that I had and all the banks had turned me down. A former baseball player, Ruben Sierra, who was an investor, had pulled out of the deal. After Ruben pulled out and left me to hang and dry, I had no choice but to continue. All the money I have is in this deal. I’m already building. I’m putting forty guys to work every day. I’m already in. All my money, all my cash and credit is in. If I quit, I sink. Either sink or swim. So I kept building. I was looking to borrow money and I need a million one to buy the property and the broker Lenny Katz came to visit me. I was walking him through the space, showing him what I was building, and he said, “Let me see your family.” So he went to my house and he met my wife and kids on Mosholu Parkway and he said, “I’ll get back to you.”
The next thing, his uncle Leon Katz, who used to be a councilman, came. I gave him a tour of the space, and he met my family too. He called me back and said, “I’m going to give you the money, at twenty-four percent. And the reason it’s twenty-four percent is that you’re building and improving someone else’s property. It’s not even yours, but I know that you’re not going to quit. You’re going to make this project win.” I had told Leon, “I can’t quit because this is all I have,” so I kept building. Probably a year and a half later I was able to pay him back. You know twenty-four percent is a high interest. It was the highest you could charge, but it didn’t matter because at the end of the day it was sink or swim. The restaurant was a big success and I paid him back everything that I owed him.
The saddest part is—and I’m so upset about this—that you send these kids to school and you spend thirty, forty, fifty, or two hundred thousand dollars on their education, and the first job they get out of college they get stuck with because they think, What if I quit this job and I can’t get another job? The biggest fear in people that teach us, the educators, is that you’ll be left without anything if you don’t settle for what you now have. That’s wrong. If you fail, it’s okay. It’s not failing. It’s just a test. So you take another test. Your whole life is going to school. When you stop being educated by the educational system and you walk into life, you don’t realize that that’s part of another educational system and that you have to continue to grow and evolve on a daily basis.
I’m still learning and I’m never going to stop learning, because in the restaurant business I consider myself a freshman in college. After thirty-five years! I still have to earn my associate’s or bachelor’s degree. I haven’t even gotten my master’s yet. In the past, I failed three times. After the fish place on Webster Avenue I bought a restaurant in New Jersey and I failed. I had an auto shop on the Grand Concourse and that didn’t work and then a car wash and that didn’t work out. I didn’t succeed in any of them. Each business, even though they didn’t work out for me, I didn’t quit. And when I started Jimmy’s Café, that was even a bigger project than the first three, but I don’t know how to spell fail. When I started the Café I said this is going to be great, and after the success of Jimmy’s Bronx Café I started Jimmy’s Downtown and Jimmy’s in Harlem.
I’ve been to the White House, and I’ve met Bill Clinton. I had dinner with Fidel Castro from Cuba, and had a dinner party for Tito Puente’s birthday. I never got my high school diploma and I didn’t go to college, but I’m still learning in the college of hard knocks. You can achieve or attain anything you want, but believing is half the process. And you have to surround yourself with people who will help you move forward and not keep you back. I was fortunate as a young man to have met people who could guide me. It’s very important to have people you look up to. To admire their work and learn from their hard work. You get out what you put in. If you put in apples, don’t expect oranges. You’re not going to fool anyone.