Today we’d like to introduce you to John MacKinnon.
Hi John, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
For more than 3 decades, the Central Coast has been both my home and the place where I have built my career in the restaurant business. I grew up in Southern California and moved to the Central Coast in 1989. For the past 33 years, I have been a partner and creative chef at the Moonstone Beach Bar & Grill in Cambria; helping to build it into an iconic destination along the Central Coast.
A few years ago, my wife and I decided we wanted to create something of our own in SLO. We love the area and I’m intrigued with the fast-casual concept – the idea that food could be convenient and affordable without sacraficing creativity, technique or quality. That idea ultimately became Todo Bueno.
From the beginning, my goal has been to offer cutting-edge, upscale Mexican Cuisine at an affordable price. I take familiar foods – tacos, burritos, bowls, and even burgers – and approach them a little differently.
Mexican cuisine has a wonderful tradition of taking less common cuts of meat and transforming them into dishes with tremendous flavor. I’ll let you in on a little secret, those cuts of meat do have more flavor at a little better cost. I embrace these same principals at Todo Bueno but we use some different cooking techniques. Our beef, pork, chicken, and mushrooms are cooked at high heat in a 125,000 BTU wok. The intense heat concentrates all the flavorful spices with the meats and results in a rich explosion of flavor.
The same attention to detail goes into our eclectic mix of gourmet burgers. We use 1-inch-thick stainless-steel griddles to maintain a constant high heat to sear all the flavor into our specially seasoned burger patties. Our perfect balance of meat-to-bun ratio together with high-quality ingredients have our customers raving that we have some of the best burgers in town.
I always tell my customers I’m a proud obsessive-compulsive restaurateur. So, you can be confident that nothing you eat at Todo Bueno hasn’t been completely over thought. Todo Bueno gives me the opportunity to make something familiar taste amazing.
As our name translates simply to “All Good”, we also try to “Do Good” in the SLO community. Every month we partner with a local charity to do an all-day 10% profit share. It’s been fun to partner with some really amazing charities and local schools.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Of course owning a small restaurant isn’t all woks, burgers and happy customers. There are also the less glamorous ingredients in the recipe – a prodigious assortment of county fees, the ongoing adventure of finding affordable parking, and credit card processing fees that seem to have developed an appetitie of their own. Then there are the regulations – by some estimates, small businesses like ours must navigate a web of more than 300,000 federal, state, and local rules and regulations. Some days it feels like we need a second kitchen just to cook up the paperwork. Add rising food costs, labor costs, rent, insurance, utilities – all apparently engaged in a friendly competition to see which can increase the fastest – and you begin to understand the challenges of running an independent restaurant. It often feels as though everyone gets a bite of the burger before we do. Our challenge is to absorb as much of those costs as possible without continually passing them along to our customers. After all , the goal at Todo Bueno is to serve creative, high-quality food at an affordable price – not require financing to order a burrito,
Do you have recommendations for books, apps, blogs, etc?
I run 2 restaurants, who has time to read? I think the last book I read was Jonathan Livingston Seagall.
Of course, I listen to Up and Adam
When I have some free time, I enjoy listening to music on Spotify.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.TodoBuenoSLO.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/todobuenoslo
