More Than A Restaurant
How the Grazianos Built a Lasting South Florida Legacy
“Give Your Customers the Best You Can Give Them. Anything I Wouldn’t Eat, I Wouldn’t Serve to My Customers…”
Mario Graziano, Founder of the Grazianos Group, Which Brought the Asador Argentine Grill to South Florida (Shown Above)
The year is 1990. Fewer than 5,000 Argentines live in Greater Miami, most of them on Miami Beach. There are only a couple of restaurants in the area that serve Argentine fare, and none of them have an asador, the traditional Argentine grill with a height-adjustable grate (also known as a parilla) to control the live-firecooking. But all of that is about to change, with the imminent arrival of the Graziano family.
“You could say the first restaurant was a parking lot on Coral Way,” says Leo Graziano, who was then 20, perfecting his skills at butchery under his father Mario’s tutelage. “We had a big, long table that we put outside, and people would sit on Coca-Cola crates.” The Grazianos, who had just opened their first butcher shop inside the adjacent building, were experimenting with an idea a nearby cafeteria had brought to them – hosting barbecues outside the shop on the parking lot asphalt. That friendly community event, permeated with Argentine accents and featuring a sun-sweaty Leo and his father (the patriarch of the Graziano family) cooking authentic Argentine meat on the grill, was the precursor to what is now a small empire stretching across Miami.
Did Mario, who comes from humble beginnings as a butcher in Argentina, ever dream he would see the success of a string of four restaurants and eight mercados, all with his name emblazoned on the front? “No,” he says simply – an answer even I don’t need translated with my primary-school Spanish education. I’m having lunch with the whole Graziano clan when I get a chance to speak with Mario. Crowded at a long table at their market inside the LifeTime building on U.S.-1, with the family chattering about their kids, their athletic endeavors, and the Italian foreign exchange student that Cecilia is hosting (who, she enthuses, has finally expressed long-overdue admiration for her cooking), I have to lean in to hear Mario. His granddaughter, Melissa, director of marketing and development, is translating the parts I don’t catch. “He was doing well in Buenos Aires,” she explains, “but he never thought the success we had over there would translate to the U.S.”
Born in 1944, Mario was 18-years-old when he opened his first butcher shop – really just a stall in his parents’ grocery store in Buenos Aires. Trained as a mechanic, butchering was out of his comfort zone, but a natural addition to the store. He was a good salesman and a quick learner, and by age 22 he had opened his own store, separate from his parents’. Two years later, he opened another, and then two years after that, another. Like clockwork, every two years or so, there was a new butcher shop, until finally there were 11 spread across the city. His trucks dotted the roads of Buenos Aires, delivering meat not only to families, but also wholesale to other businesses. His daughters, Carolina (now vice president of imports and exports) and Cecilia (vice president of human resources and administration) manned the registers after they got out of school, while Leo (now CEO), spent most of his time in the backrooms, learning how to perfectly cut a slab of meat.
“When I was 15 or 16, I started going out… and my dad said, ‘Okay, but you have to be here making chorizo at 5 am,” Leo remembers. “In Argentina, you stay out until daytime because you don’t want to take public transportation at night, so at five I’d come home and start sleepily making chorizo. He’d keep me there for half-an-hour and then say, ‘Okay, now you can go to bed.’”
Leo’s stories, which I listen to attentively over bites of mouth-watering steak, illustrate two things: first, the incredible sense of discipline and care for the family business that Mario has instilled in now three different generations; and two, the dangers of living in Argentina in the 1970s and early ‘80s during the “National Reorganization Process,” when right-wing forces staged a coup against President Isabel Perón and began systematically hunting down anyone remotely suspected of left-wing activism. Over 30,000 people disappeared during this time, when crime was rampant and missing persons couldn’t be reported for fear of retribution. The Grazianos’ trucks full of meat were regularly robbed at gunpoint, and Mario’s house was broken into when the children were teenagers. “It was no longer a safe environment for a family,” he says. So, he moved the family to South Florida, leaving everything behind for a chance at a safer life.
The family first moved to Fort Lauderdale in 1983, then returned for six years (when Argentine democracy was restored) before officially settling in Miami in 1989. That year, Maria, Mario’s wife, found an ad for an available retail space in a newspaper. The first butcher shop opened on Coral Way and 87th Avenue in 1990, sparking the kindling of what is now called The Graziano’s Group.
As it had been with the butcher shops in Argentina, new restaurants and mercados
began opening steadily in roughly two-year cycles. The small Coral Way location was replaced by a market on Bird Road and 92nd, then a new location opened in Hialeah, and, in 2006, the first two Coral Gables locations: the mercado on Galiano Street and the full-service restaurant on LeJeune Road at Giralda Avenue. These were soon followed by locations in Weston, Doral, Aventura, and, two years ago, a third Coral Gables spot in the LifeTime Building on U.S.-1. In 2018, the Group also opened Lucia, a Neopolitan pizza place grounded in the family’s Italian heritage, on 72nd Street.
Leo credits the Gables mercado with being the first to introduce the concept of a combined market and restaurant. “When we first opened the mercado here, it was supposed to be just a butcher store with groceries and wines and a bakery. But we noticed a lot of business-people wanted sandwiches and food, so that’s where the concept of the mercado with the dining came,” he says.
Today, Gableites can stop into the Galiano Street location for just that: fine Argentine wines, light bites, and an alfajor or two. For a more traditional dining experience, the Giralda-LeJeune location offers up lunch and dinner every day – with a brief hour-and-a-half respite from 3:30 to 5 pm on weekdays, reminiscent of the old days when Mario would close the butcher shop to have lunch at home with his family.
Throughout the process of expansion, every member of the Graziano clan has remained integral to the Group. Leo’s two grown sons, Marcos and Nicholas, act as director of restaurant operations and the general manager of the Coral Gables restaurant respectively. His daughter, Melissa, is director of marketing and development, a role she only stepped into after beginning her career in the corporate world. “I knew she’d come back,” says Leo confidently.
Melissa’s son, now 10-years-old, is growing up in a similar world, one where his mother has to explain to him that no, you can’t just walk into any restaurant’s kitchen like you can at Graziano’s. He’s now part of the third generation that has grown up toddling into kitchens, learning how to properly cut and cook a steak, waiting tables, and providing touch of family charm at the market register.
For her part, Melissa is grateful for the dynamics of the family business, where “everything is in the best interest of the company, and everyone has their own opinion.” With so many personalities and generational differences, there are bound to be a wide range of ideas, but both Leo and Melissa emphasize this as a strength. “You’re talking Millennials all the way to Boomers, but everybody comes with their own level of expertise,” she says. “At the end of the day, the root of it is all passion and care for the legacy and story of the family.” The butchering, however, she leaves to other members of the clan. Mario, now 82-years-old, is still regularly present at the restaurants, helping cut beef and teaching others – like grandson Nicholas, who expertly cuts our filet table-side – to do the same. Leo, constantly in motion, sits at our table for no more than a few minutes at a time, getting up to check on our steaks, adjust nearby table settings, and disappear into the kitchen. He and Nicholas debate briefly over who should cut the steak, before – like his father before him – Leo agrees to allow his son to serve us, though still with an eye on his technique.
The Group now boasts two on-site asadores, the only two in the United States, including one at the Coral Gables restaurant. They use quebracho wood imported especially from Argentina for the fire, because of its high density (quebracho is derived from the Spanish phrase “axe-breaker,” and can only be cut with machinery). It burns at a specific temperature, creating low, tame flames and lots of embers, perfect for the slow-cooking Argentine method. Most of the meat itself comes from Argentina too (the bone-in cuts are American because of federal import regulations), specifically from Logros, a family-owned cattle farm where all the cows are grass-fed and free-range. Importantly, Leo adds, “they [the farm] own the whole process,” meaning that all the cattle are slaughtered at the same place they are raised. “There’s no big truck that comes from somewhere [with the cattle]. It affects them a lot when they travel,” he says. Freerange is important too, he tells me, because of the muscle it builds, and the “grass-fed, grain-finish” diet is another essential element that eliminates some of the gamey flavoring common to other Latin American beef.
“When we first opened the mercado here, it was supposed to be just a butcher store with groceries and wines and a bakery …”
Leo Graziano, CEO (right) on adding restaurants to the markets
My head now swimming with all these details, I ask Mario: “So, what’s the best way to butcher a cow? Where do you start? Do you do things differently from other butchers?” He responds plainly, with a smile, “A cow’s a cow: two front legs, two back legs.” At the end of the day, his philosophy is simple: “Give your customers the best you can give them. Anything I wouldn’t eat, I wouldn’t serve to my customers.”
As the business continues to grow – the Coral Gables restaurant just underwent renovations, and Hialeah is getting a new location – that commitment to quality is the governing factor. “We can’t grow too fast because that’s harder to control,” says Cecilia. “We don’t want to lose the essence of Graziano’s, [or the] time we have to transmit it to all of our employees.”
Melissa adds, “Our systems are becoming more defined. There’s more structure to the company than there ever was before. It’s just: How do we continue to expand in a way where everything is aligned?” Part of the answer to that question is the new community events the Group is rolling out: monthly barbecues at the LifeTime location, a specialized fernet (Argentina’s most iconic spirit) happyhour- slash-social-club every two weeks at the Coral Gables restaurant, and regular artisan markets at both Coral Gables mercados. The idea, Melissa says, is to make everyone feel a part of the Graziano family.
“This whole thing was for my family. The business, everything I do is for my kids and their kids…“
Mario with Melissa (above & right), toasting the fourth generation of the Graziano family
“I grew up in a scarcity mindset,” Mario, who still checks to make sure all the lights are turned off when he leaves the house, tells me in Spanish. “This whole thing was for my family. The business, everything I do is for my kids and their kids. It’s meant to be passed down.” Now, with the fourth generation of the Graziano family in the mix and a small empire spread across South Florida, he says with a smile, “I’m no longer sitting up in the middle of the night.”