The idea for Chipotle is a sort of combination of food borrowed from Stars and sort of a technique and a service format borrowed from the taquerias.
Stars was really good training. You know, we would come in at noon, and, you know, we would learn at that time what we were going to cook that evening. And, you know, there wasn't a set menu per se.
Chipotle was wildly successful, and I thought, 'Well, let me open one more.'
Chipotle is based on a very simple idea: We start with great ingredients, prepare them using classic cooking techniques, and serve them in a way that allows people to get exactly what they want.
We have two day-parts, lunch and dinner. We don't have breakfast. We don't have drive-thru. We don't have late night. We don't have 24-hours.
From the very beginning. I didn't know what the fast-food rules were.
Chipotle is really showing that there's a better way to do fast food.
We want to make the old fast food model irrelevant. We want to make great ingredients and classic cooking techniques accessible to everybody.
For too long, great food has really only been available in high-end restaurants and specialty food markets, but Chipotle is making the same gourmet quality food available and affordable so everyone can eat better.
I am deeply sorry that people got sick from eating at our restaurants. It's the worst thing that can happen.
Certainly, in college, I had no idea what I wanted to do, I studied art history and had a great time, but I didn't have any sort of career aspirations.
I was always interested in cooking; it was always a hobby of mine.
I was so terrified that the business would not do well and that there would be no way that I would be in a position to pay my dad back this $80,000. At Stars, as a line cook, I think that I was making $10 or $12 an hour. So $80,000 - to have to pay that back was incomprehensible.
Being in compliance with industry standards is less than 5 percent of what companies need to do to make food safe. Company after company finds that out after they have events.
We want to show all of our customers that the industry standards that we had been employing before - which are considered great standards - were not good enough.
We can assure you today that there is no E. coli in Chipotle. We have thoroughly tested our food, we have thoroughly tested our surfaces, and we are confident that Chipotle is a safe place to eat.
I started Chipotle with the idea to create an experience that's fast - and not fast food.
We have tacos and burritos and things that sound Mexican. But to me, it's about great-tasting food in an atmosphere sympathetic to the food, prepared freshly and served to the customer in a way that's customizable.
After operating in three diverse markets, we have determined ShopHouse hasn't demonstrated an attractive unit economic model.
We have a terrific team, and our managers are terrific managers, but we have made it too complicated for them and too complicated in a way that they just can't do an excellent job in many cases when it comes to the customer experience.
