Big Burrito Restaurant group's impact on the local dining scene goes beyond Mad Mex and its spinoffs
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Tom Baron and Juno Yoon at a sidewalk table of their Caribbean-style restaurant, Kaya, in 1995. -
Big Burrito executive chef Bill Fuller shows his cooking to first graders of Helen Faison Arts Academy at their school garden in Homewood 2007. -
Interior of the most recent Mad Mex on Highland Avenue in Shadyside.
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In 1993, two young men from out of town decided to open a mass-market, purposefully inauthentic Mexican restaurant in an Oakland storefront. They brought in an architect friend to design it, drove across the state to stock it with interesting beer, and looked to New York's most popular Mexican joints to inspire the food.
The restaurant was Mad Mex, and Tom Baron was one of its founders. Today, he's the president of the Big Burrito Restaurant Group, which owns and operates Casbah, Soba and Umi in Shadyside, Kaya and Eleven Contemporary Kitchen in the Strip District, 10 Mad Mexes throughout the region as well as a catering company. This fall, they'll open another Mad Mex north of Philadelphia. The company employs approximately 850 people, and the restaurants feed tens of thousands every year.
Over those two decades, Pittsburgh has developed a restaurant scene, still tenuous, but increasingly diverse and relevant. That scene owes a tremendous debt to the company that decided Pittsburgh could support "big, fancy" restaurants offering something new.
From the beginning, Mr. Baron and his high school friend and business partner, Juno Yoon, wanted to do something different. Mr. Baron had been living in Pittsburgh and running Wheel Deliver. The sale of that company partly funded their early restaurant ventures. They took "eating trips" home to New York for ideas and inspiration.
"Mad Mex was meant to be a party," said Mr. Baron, "a fun atmosphere where you could have dinner and a bar scene at the same time." Although he had worked in restaurants since he was 14 years old, at some of them with Mr. Yoon, neither of them expected how quickly the concept would take off. Mr. Baron particularly remembers an early customer comment: "It's different every time I come here, but it's always good."
In later years, consistency would become a cornerstone value, but in the beginning, they were riding the wave of success and wouldn't stop opening restaurants until they ran out of money. Mad Mex North Hills in Ross opened in October 1994, a year after the first store. Six months later they opened Kaya in the Strip District, quickly followed by Casbah in Shadyside.
First Published August 25, 2011 12:00 am
