John Tunney III
John Tunney III
Editor’s Note: John Tunney founded Besito Mexican restaurant, with four locations in the Eastern U.S., in 2006. In this interview with publisher Ed Avis, Tunney explains how he got into the business and what makes Besito successful.
I didn’t come from means. Nobody in my family was in the restaurant business. When I was 15, I saw a car drive by and inside was this guy with a beautiful girl. I said to myself, ‘I need to get myself a car.’ I went to a local restaurant — the Three Village Inn — and applied for a job as a dishwasher. Combined with money from selling seeds door to door, I bought my first car… and I never left the restaurant business. Since then, I’ve worked in a variety of restaurants, both front and back of the house. But in 1993, I took the leap to proprietor. I opened a catering facility in Oheka Castle in Cold Spring Hills, New York. From there I opened Carltun on the Park, a catering facility with formal gardens for special events. Then, I left New York to open a restaurant in Caesars Atlantic City and one in the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. I sold that group in 2001
Along the way, starting at 18, I fell in love with Mexico, especially the food, the smells and textures. The passion the Mexican people have for making food is extraordinary. I traveled to Mexico many, many times… early on I was hooked. But in 2006, I was finally able to indulge my love of Mexican cuisine by opening Besito. I designed the restaurant, built it and operate it now.
When guests walk into Besito, my goal is for them to feel transported. To smell the aroma of chiles and salsas because everything is prepared authentically right there. To feel the warmth in the restaurant, from the ceilings made of eucalyptus poles to the lighting to the music of Mexico. There are no televisions in the restaurant because I truly believe that when you come to eat and enjoy the people in your company and the culture and the food, you don’t need the distraction of television. It takes you out of the experience. You already have screens everywhere, including in your hand, so I don’t need another screen in my restaurant taking away from the ambiance. What happens when people come into Besito is they forget the news and enjoy the company of the people at the table. I think that makes this place a real respite.
The cuisine is grown out of Arellano's recipes from his grandmother and from growing
Besito Mexican Restaurant
up in Mexico. Carlos Arellano, our executive chef, grew up in Oaxaca and he has a great team. Over time we’ve developed an incredible Enchiladas Suizas, Sonoran Ribs and Arranchera which are now are some of the most popular dishes – they are among the items we can’t take off the menu. Whenever I’ve tried to take some of those items off the menu, I get emails and letters and phone calls saying “Where did it go?” and “When is it coming back?” To keep things authentic and consistent, I’ll try to eat the same dish for four months in every Besito location. I also sit down with our chefs seasonally to make certain that each creation tickles my senses. If something gets boring, you have to do something with it. And the easiest way to see this is to hang with the dishwashers at night and to look at the plates coming back. If everybody is leaving something from a menu item on the plate, we don’t need that in the dish. Or if I see plates from a certain dish always scraped clean, I might add a little more sauce to the dish. When the manager walks around the dining room asking customers how everything is… they’ll always say it’s great. But the truth is with the dishwasher… it’s in the plates.
My time in and around Besito is very important. The failure rate of restaurants is gigantic and one reason is that you’re only as good as you are on any given day. The day we celebrated our “excellent” rating from the New York Times, I said, “We’re just getting started.” Today we have four locations of Besito. We opened the newest one in 2017 in West Islip, New York and we were fortunate enough to be booked for two months before we opened it.
A few years ago we were approached by the founders of Outback Steakhouse – they felt we were the next big thing. So we opened a couple of stores together. But Besito is a very complex restaurant to open and run because of the authenticity. We have 26 salsas, and some of them have 30 ingredients and take a full day to cook. So it’s difficult to open a couple of hundred Besitos. In the end, we all decided to end the partnership and to focus on keeping it local and doing it the right way. All of our food is made in each individual restaurant – there’s no central commissary or anything like that. If you start freezing and shipping things, it’s going to be a very different experience from going into somebody’s casita and having a meal. And I want to stay as close to that as possible.
The restaurant business, the customer experience, is very important to me. I’ve never been the guy that’s willing to take the money and run. For instance, we use a tremendous amount of avocados because we make guacamole tableside, so we have a ripening room to make sure the avocados are perfect. When produce prices spike, I don’t raise prices – that’s just the cost of doing business. It all comes out in the wash in the end. My prices have changed very little since 2007. Another thing I’m immensely proud of is that we have a very low turnover rate. In fact, I have a good many people who have been with us since day one. When I look for people, I look for one thing: nice people. Then we teach them what we need them to do. I don’t look for the maverick or someone who claims to be the best of everything. You can teach people just about any job in the restaurant, but you can’t teach them to be nice.
There are a lot of examples of people coming up through the ranks of the company. Our top guy is Jose Reyes. I first met him in 2001 when he was a bus boy and didn’t speak any English. He came to me one day and said, “I want to be a DJ and do parties.” But I saw in Jose that he was a natural for hospitality. So I made him a promise – give me one year and let me work with you; if after one year you don’t love it, I will buy all your equipment for your DJ project. He stayed… and now he’s the general manager of the whole company.
With the success of Besito, I wanted to give back not just to the people who make our company successful like Jose and Carlos, but to the culture itself. A few years ago, we discovered Feed the Hungry in rural San Miguel Allende in Mexico. I spoke to the chairman of the group and he told me stories about children walking five miles to school and back and there were no food programs at the schools. How does a child learn if they’re hungry!? It struck me deeply. So we went into a partnership where we build kitchens on the school properties and donate funds to maintain them and provide food. Through that program we provide 4,000 children with a hot, nutritious meal every school day. And for many of them, it’s their only meal of the day. We are all very proud of that partnership.
I’m also proud of our business partnership at Besito. My partner, John Rieger is one of the nicest people I’ve ever known… and one of the smartest. He handles the financial and legal side and I do development and build and operate. We both recognize each other’s talents. We both want to ultimately do good by our people, by our community and by the world.
I think our guests know that… they feel it. Besito has been the #1 Diners Choice in the Tristate area every year since 2009. We are on the OpenTable list of 100 hottest restaurants in America and we have a New York Times “excellent” rating. We work hard for those accolades… all of us. And we love it. Hostmanship, hospitality, is a choice. And if you make that choice, be all in and be the best at it.