I Wanna Be That Guy

As told by Cynthia Conti Chabre.

I was a hair stylist for years doing really well, but then my back began hurting me. I was diagnosed with an autoimmune spinal thing. I quit doing hair with no idea how I was going to make money. All I knew was that standing all day was killing me.

I always wanted a restaurant, but when I saw a restaurant rescue show where people were losing millions, I said, “That’s not happening.” One day we were in Napa and saw this guy making breakfast pizzas at a farmer’s market. Oscar, my husband, turned to me and said, “I wanna be that guy. Look how much fun he's having.”

We're not big researchers or overthinkers. The next week, we bought a pizza oven for $25,000. Took the money out of the 401K. We were now starting over with a lot invested, but the fear of failure was not there. We were used to having parties with 100 people or more, so we weren’t worried about serving large groups. Failure? “What's the worst that can happen? We'll have a pizza oven in our backyard.” 

When the oven arrived from Italy, we had a pizza making lesson from the guy. We started practicing in our backyard. Having people over and seeing what pizzas worked. I was keeping it somewhat traditional with a few different flavors. California chicken. Fig, prosciutto and gorgonzola. Pear and brie. My “A Taste of Spain,” was roasted red pepper, Manchego cheese, chorizo and sauteed onion. Popular ones were our margarita and harvest pizza with roasted butternut squash, mushrooms, and Boursin cheese.

Two or three times a week I would drive to Oakland at four in the morning to go to the family farmer's market. And I would get the flour from an artisan family business in South San Francisco.

I didn’t buy anything out of a jar. I roasted the peppers. Sliced the meats with my Cuisinart. Shredded my cheese. Cooked all the vegetables before they went on the pizza. 

Nothing prepackaged. We made salads. Beet with goat cheese and pistachio. Caesar. Spinach, mushroom, and bacon. I roasted my beets, made my croutons, and created the dressings. 

We named our company Tutte Al Forno. Oscar’s brother had just started a website search engine optimization company. We got corporate jobs immediately. The gentleman who created SanDisk was a first. Then the lead lawyer for Intuit hired us. We catered for Google. A medical gentleman, who designed a pill that goes through your body like a camera, hired us. He even had the Salisbury Cathedral choir in his backyard. We also catered at Stanford. We did a job for SAP (Systems, Applications & Products in Data Processing). It’s a huge event with 120 college graduate interns from all over the world. That paid $10,000. Another big job was at a winery. It rained. The oven was half in the winery and half covered under a canopy. Oscar used a broom to push up on the canopy to dump water out.  It was crazy because when you’re making pizza, the dough has to be dry. 

At the corporate events, there would be food trucks. People had to stand in line and order at the trucks. We were ready with five different pizzas. No ordering, no waiting. At one event Narsai David, the godfather of California cuisine, complimented us.

Someone suggested, “You guys should do a Taylor Family Foundation fundraiser. We did that for years. We would make 156 dough balls for that day. Some 1,500 people would show up. We got jobs from that exposure. These were people donating big money, $150,000 to $300,000. Singer k.d. lang was there.  It was that kind of event. Every year we also did the Northern Light School with Vida Blue, the baseball player. 

All this time, Oscar had been working at a utility company and was ready to retire. I am thinking, this is awesome. We can really kill it with the corporate stuff and work more. He retires and now he's in my world. He had never done the emails, driven to the farmer’s market, cooked all the vegetables, or packaged the food. He'd say, “Let's go golf.” I'm like, “No! We have to do this.”

He said, “Are we making a million dollars this year?” 

I looked at him like, no. 

He said, “This is way too much work.” 

I said, “This was your plan! You wanted to be that guy.”

Pow! A new starting over for us–beginning our retirement years. It made me sad because I had aspirations of bigger and bigger. I believed we could build up the corporate events. But it really was hard work. It was time. We both agreed.

Sometimes I just don’t know when to stop.