Success with style: The making of restaurateur Steven Arroyo

Some people learn at an early age the wisdom of being ready when opportunity knocks. Steven Arroyo has made a career of yanking doors open before opportunity could even reach for the knocker. By so aggressively seizing not just the door but the moment, he’s turned himself into one of the city’s most successful restaurateurs. He owns two Cobras & Matadors, as well as Malo and Cobra Lily, and he’s now in negotiations to open Cobras & Matadors in Portland and Las Vegas.

Not bad for a 35-year-old whose grandmother ran a taco and burrito stand in East. L.A. and whose formal education stopped after high school.

Arroyo has dark, close-cropped hair, a dark beard and hooded eyes. He could appear foreboding, but his ready smile gives him a vaguely cherubic quality, especially when he speaks lightheartedly of his climb up the restaurant ladder.

Born in West Covina, the eldest of three children, Arroyo was 19 and still living at home when he got a job selling cappuccino in the Santa Anita mall. Six months later, when a repairman showed up to service his cappuccino machine, Arroyo talked him into hiring him as a repairman.

That was seized opportunity No. 1.

A year later, Arroyo went to the office of the manufacturer of the cappuccino machine to pick up a part -- and persuaded an executive there to hire him as a salesman.

Seized opportunity No. 2.

One of his new customers owned a restaurant, and over the course of three years, Arroyo came to realize two things: The restaurant owner seemed unhappy, ready for a change, and she liked Arroyo.

Seized opportunity No. 3: He bought the restaurant.

Arroyo then persuaded a childhood friend who’d done very well buying, selling and refinancing houses to invest $120,000 for a 50% interest in the restaurant, had it remodeled and, in August 1995, reopened it as Boxer, on Beverly Boulevard between La Brea and Fairfax.

“I’d always wanted to run my own small business,” he says, “not necessarily a restaurant. It could have been a hardware store. But once I started visiting restaurants to sell them cappuccino machines, I got to thinking, hey, I’m pretty good with people, I could excel at something like this. I liked the idea of designing a room and having people come in and enjoy themselves.”

Arroyo wasn’t a chef. “I enjoy cooking but I just do breakfast for my family,” he says.

Neal Fraser was a chef -- and a friend -- so Arroyo made him the chef at Boxer, and with no particular plan in mind, they created a small restaurant that Arroyo says vaguely was “inspired by the times.”

To Arroyo’s great surprise, the restaurant received good early reviews. But when Fraser (now the chef at Grace) left after two years, Arroyo says food quality “declined to the point where I was embarrassed by what we were serving.” In May 2001, he closed Boxer, borrowed $40,000 from relatives and reopened in August as Cobras and Matadors, a casual tapas restaurant -- noisy and dimly lighted, its tables covered with butcher paper and jammed together, its walls decorated with large, framed photos of Arroyo’s paternal grandparents.

When terrorists struck the U.S. a month after he opened, Arroyo found that he’d luckily, if unwittingly, created the ideal restaurant for the post-9/11 world. Cobras & Matadors was an instant success and remains jammed nightly, with waiting lines out front, to this day.

A sense of place

The food at both Cobras & Matadors can actually be quite good -- “closer to authentic Spanish tapas than what anybody else is doing,” as Irene Virbila, The Times restaurant critic, wrote in her review of the original Cobras three years ago. But it was the feel of the restaurant, not the food on the plate, that drew crowds to Cobras & Matadors.

“People didn’t want luxury or decadence right after 9/11,” he says. “They wanted to sit around tables together, eating small plates of food and sharing a sense of community. The food itself was secondary, beside the point, but that place turned my whole life around in about 20 days.”

Ultimately, food seems secondary at all of Arroyo’s restaurants, but at all of them, he has created the ideal setting for hip, casual, inexpensive dining.

“I just try to create an atmosphere, an opportunity for people to enjoy themselves in a warm setting, nothing dramatic or sharp or imposing,” he says.

Arroyo is a sports fan of sorts, and he thinks of his own restaurants in sports terms. “I like teams that win with defense, not offense,” he says, “and I think my restaurants are defense-minded, rather than offense-minded. They’re not glamorous or pretentious. The waiters aren’t in your face with a superior attitude.”

When I told Arroyo I liked the feel of his restaurants but found them too noisy, he laughed and said he eats early, before the noise begins to crescendo, and then goes home to his family. But he’s definitely part of the quick-eats mind-set that has fueled the success of his restaurants.

“I can’t sit in a restaurant and do the fine dining thing anymore,” he says. “When I was single, dating, trying to capture this woman, I liked the longer, more formal meal because it impressed her and gave me more time with her. But now I get bored. I’d rather go to Langer’s [deli] -- call them on my cell phone, order a pastrami sandwich and a root beer, drive up, have someone come out and hand them to me and then eat in my car, while I drive.”

Arroyo says he is “very hands-on during the creation stage of all my restaurants. I don’t work from blueprints or color charts. It’s all innate, inside my head, so I have to be there 12 hours a day to instruct every step of the way.”

But once they’re up and running, he backs off and doesn’t show up with any frequency.

“My personality is part of the restaurants whether I’m there or not,” he says. “But I worry that if I am there, the staff won’t have the opportunity to develop their own rhythm, and that’s important if the restaurant is to be successful.”

To ensure success, Arroyo is willing to make sudden, radical changes. Just as he knew what to do when food quality was declining at Boxer, so he recognized a similar decline at Hillmont, the low-cost steakhouse he opened in Silver Lake in the spring of 2002.

“About a year after it opened, I realized it was falling off badly,” he says. “Even when I ate there. I’d have a good meal one night, a bad one the next.”

But Arroyo didn’t just hire a new chef. As he had done at Boxer, he changed the entire concept of his restaurant. He closed Hillmont in July and reopened it as a second Cobras & Matadors -- and as a test run for a series of restaurants he’d like to open in other cities.

It has the same hip feel, butcher paper table-coverings and hard, noise-enhancing surfaces as the original -- stone floors, one wall of brick and mirrors -- but it lacks one of the major appeals of the original Cobras & Matadors: the presence, next door, of a small wine shop specializing in Spanish wines.

Arroyo owns that wine shop and he allows customers to buy wine there at reasonable retail prices. Diners can carry the bottles into the restaurant and drink them with dinner, without either a corkage fee or the huge markups many restaurants charge for wine.

Arroyo says 90% of the customers at the original Cobras & Matadors buy wine at his shop, so when he opened the second Cobras & Matadors, he wondered if he could duplicate his success in a location where customers wouldn’t have that option.

Now, several months later, Arroyo has his answer. Even without a wine store next door, Cobras & Matadors in Silver Lake is very successful.

Arroyo says he and the small group of investors who put money into Hillmont and then rolled their investment over into that second Cobras & Matadors now “have a proposal on the table” for a Cobras & Matadors in Portland.

“We’re also talking about a couple of possible locations in Vegas,” he says.

Sentimental venture

Regardless of how many Cobras & Matadors he opens, though, Malo -- Spanish for “bad” -- is (and will remain) the restaurant closest to his heart. It’s the restaurant he had wanted to open when he started the first Cobras & Matadors, and it’s the restaurant he wanted to open when he created Hillmont, but each time, he was talked out of it.

He finally opened it a year ago, as a tribute, of sorts, to his family.

“My mom’s mom ran Bea’s El Burrito in East L.A., and my mom is a good cook, too,” he says. “She inspired the menu and she works twice a week at Malo.”

Arroyo says Malo’s pork shoulder with red or green chili, the pozole and the enchiladas (“and their sauces”) are all made using his mother’s recipes.

“But I’m especially proud of our tortilla chips,” he says with a big grin. “I like my chips warm and still a little soft so you can taste the corn, not just the burned oil, so our chips are handmade right when you order them -- and ... we charge for them.

“About 6% of our gross at Malo,” he says, “comes from chips and salsa.”

That’s Arroyo’s latest “seized opportunity” -- making a profit on something that others give away.

David Shaw can be reached at [email protected]. To read previous “Matters of Taste” columns, please go to latimes.com/shaw-taste.