Ralph Rubio Is the Undisputed King of Fish Tacos

How Rubio turned a recipe on a scrap of paper into San Diego’s official dish

The billiard-green strips of poblano peppers on the paper plate in front of me could be worth millions. A member of the culinary team has divided the plate into two sections with a black Sharpie. The vegetables are roasted on one side and sautéed on the other. If the two men at the table’s corners like either option enough, a biblical flood of poblanos will flood the American market.

Justin Mosel, the culinary director, is one of the men. The other is a snowy-haired version of a college kid who returned from a Mexican surf trip in the 1970s with a tan and a recipe. That recipe scribbled on a scrap of notebook paper and carried unused in his pocket for years, would build an empire.

“I like the sautéed peppers better, more vibrancy,” Ralph Rubio says to his team before adding, to me: “We just launched a vegan option. The flexitarian movement is spreading. A vegan meal is not required if you are not a vegan.”

Ralph, now 64, exudes a supernatural calm usually associated with spiritual leaders or last call. His cheekbones are geological, not just pronounced. As a result, when he smiles, he expresses something both grandfatherly and childlike—a trust Venn diagram. And he has a lot of smiles.

“This is Ralph’s seat,” Mosel said as I walked into Rubio’s Coastal Grill test kitchen. Ralph values having a seat at the table. Rubio’s “Beach Club Members” will eventually be invited in to try the dishes and provide feedback during the three-to-six-month testing process for each new item. Yelp has a page dedicated to the test kitchen (five stars).

Rubio’s corporate headquarters is in Carlsbad, at the geographic Centre of their 117 quick-service restaurants throughout Southern California. (There are 196 Rubio’s in total, mostly in the Southwest but also in Florida.) A blue-lit tank filled with tropical fish adorns one wall of the waiting room. Above lime-green chairs, in keeping with Rubio’s color scheme, is one of the world’s most famous recipes for battering and frying a fish.

The Big (Spring) Break
Ralph was a freshman in Zura Hall at San Diego State University in 1973 when he was invited on a spring break trip by some upperclassmen. “What’s that, San Felipe?” he recalls asking. “‘We’re going to camp on the beach in Mexico, drink beer, dance, and party,’ they said. ‘Well, sign me up,’ I said.”

When they arrived in a small fishing village outside of San Felipe, they found makeshift stands selling fish tacos—beer-battered and fried whitefish served in a corn tortilla with cabbage, crema, salsa, and lime. Unlike many Americans, Ralph was unafraid of the idea. He and his friends ate them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, accompanied by ice-cold Corona (whose distributor was four doors down from their favorite stand). Every year, they went back and repeated the process.

“We took a break around 10 p.m. one night in 1975,” he recalls. “It’s dark, it’s festive, and I go, ‘Why is no one serving these in San Diego like this, with a cold beer? Look at all these college students who are having a great time.’ That’s when the light bulb went off in my head.”

Ralph believed that if he could open a fish taco stand near college kids and the beach in the United States, he might not need his backup career plan—becoming a teacher, as many of his relatives had. Carlos, the cook at his favorite fish taco stand, was invited to San Diego. Carlos replied, “No, not really,” and thanked him. “‘Okay, then… could you tell me what’s in the batter recipe?'” Ralph inquired. “I could figure out the rest—the crema, the lime, the cabbage—but the batter was the key.”

Carlos gave him the ingredients: flour, mustard, garlic, oregano, pepper, and water.

“I walked around with that piece of paper for eight years,” Ralph says. “You’re not very organized for a person your age (28, 30). I’m glad I kept it. It was clearly important to me.”

Ralph worked as a busser, waiter, and manager at restaurants such as The Old Spaghetti Factory, Hungry Hunter, and Harbor House. Ray (who immigrated to San Diego as a teen, took a job sweeping floors at a plastics factory, and eventually became one of the country’s top plastics industry consultants) eventually offered Ralph $70,000 to start his “fish taco idea.”

The Rubio’s saw an ad in the paper for a Mickey’s Burgers on Mission Bay Drive that had previously been an Orange Julius. Mickey demanded $80,000 in cash. Ray explained that they couldn’t afford it because they needed money for improvements and operating capital. He instructed his son to sit in the 7-Eleven across the street and count the customers at Mickey’s to determine its true worth.
“So I did, on my lunch breaks, with a pad and paper,” Ralph recalls. “And, as it turned out, he had no business. The figures he showed us were fictitious. My father advised me to make a cash offer of $15,000 to him. ‘Are you serious?’ I asked. That’s just plain rude.'”

Ralph obeyed his father once more. Mickey yelled at him, calling him a rude young punk, and hung up the phone. Mickey called back later that night, in tears. He needed the money, so he agreed to sell.

Ralph then met his father at Spiro’s Greek Cafe to negotiate the terms of their new venture. “I just wanted a loan, but my father said, ‘Oh no, I think equity be better,'” Ralph laughs. “So I proposed a 70/30 split. Nope. 60/40. Nope. He got me to a 50/50 split.”

The entire Rubio family—Ralph, Ray, mom Gloria, and siblings Gloria, Robert, Richard, and Roman—painted tables and signs and built a fish taco stand over the next few months. They did not conduct a soft opening, in which you test your concept with a small group of forgiving friends.

“We just opened the doors and decided to let a few people in to test it,” Ralph says. “It turns out that all those cars passing by had been watching us. There was a long line outside the door. We’d never made food to scale before. Probably half of the orders I placed were errors. I had to refund people’s money. It was a calamity. I was nearly in tears.”

The rush faded. They started with $200 a day. In 1983, Americans who had never surfed in Baja California thought fish tacos were weird/gross/oh-hell-no (which was almost all Americans).

“If you didn’t go to San Felipe, you didn’t know what it was,” says Ralph’s brother Robert. “Our promotional budget went to free fish tacos. 75% of testers bought it again. The motto was ‘One bite and you’re hooked.'”

Rubio’s strange fish tacos gained popularity. Ralph has the sales charts from that first year and says the line rises every month. After opening their second store near SDSU in year two or three, Rubio’s exploded.

Robert says people drove from LA and Orange County to Rubio’s. “Destination. It was LA’s first Tommy’s burgers.”

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Small Fish, Big Pond
To grasp the zeitgeist Rubio tapped into with its first Pacific Beach location, consider a time before the internet—specifically, social media. Instagram and Facebook are now indexes of what the world eats, displayed in high-resolution photos, often with recipes. Food discovery has become a worldwide obsession. Because of this second-by-second archiving, there are very few dishes in the world that do not have a hashtag, even in the most remote villages.

However, the internet was still futuristic babble in 1983. The only way to learn about fish tacos in Baja was to get in your car and drive to Baja. In the 1970s and 1980s, Americans saw Baja as Shangri-La, a dusty, remote otherworld for the bare-chested and free. Surf culture was taking over the American dreamscape, and American surfers in Baja became heroes of wanderlust, and what those heroes ate was fish tacos.

Historically, few food combinations have been associated with such mystique. Americans could be transported to San Felipe without ever crossing the border at Rubio’s.

Ralph would not have been able to keep the recipe in his pocket for eight years if Instagram had existed at the time. Fish tacos would have been popular. Another entrepreneur would have seen how much surfers and travelers romanticized them and would have beaten him to the punch. The recipe, the people, a cleanliness not often seen in fast food (“Ralph is a clean freak,” says Robert), marketing, real estate, and investors who believed in them all contributed to Rubio’s success (Union Bank, Rosewood Capital, Mill Road). However, at least part of their success can be attributed to the fact that fish tacos were largely unknown in the United States until Ralph was ready to capitalize on them.

Indeed. The goal was to create a replicable quick-service restaurant model. Ralph recommends McDonald’s. Rubio’s raised $9.6 million and opened 63 locations in four years. Fish tacos are San Diego’s cheesesteaks and pizza.

In 1999, Rubio went public because his first investors needed an exit strategy and the tech boom made IPOs the hot business play. Buca di Beppo and P. F. Chang had done it successfully. Ralph and his family flew to San Francisco’s Rosewood Capital offices to watch Rubio’s stock ticker. The IPO raised $23 million to open 204 stores. It gave Ralph lifelong financial security—and grand delusions.

Changing Tides
The Rubios all sold their stock. Dad’s initial $70,000 investment grew to be quite substantial. When things went bad in 2001, Ralph was the last Rubio standing. “We ran into a brick wall,” he says. “We had to close 11 restaurants after a year of underperformance. Even more difficult, we had to let go of 100 team members.”

They had grown too quickly, entering unfamiliar markets and making poor real estate decisions. Closer to the border, where Mexican food is more familiar, fish tacos sold better. Ralph even considered franchising, which he had always opposed due to quality control concerns. “When things are going well, the relationship is fantastic,” he says, adding that “when things go wrong, franchisees start cutting corners.”

Kyle Anderson, a trusted friend at Rosewood Capital, advised him to step down as CEO. “Those were dark times emotionally,” Ralph says, sitting in the backyard of his idyllic Rancho Santa Fe home, which you have to admit is a pretty safe place to confess past business mistakes. “I was brimming with arrogance. My feelings had been hurt. I had some maturing to do. However, it did not last long. I turned around. I’m a very pragmatic person, which has served me well. I was never prepared to lead a publicly traded company. I had a great run.”

Mark Simon, CEO for eight years, “was trained to do this and is a brilliant leader,” while Ralph remained chairman and co-founder. Ralph said the company “operated our way out of it” by slowing growth and marketing (four name changes). They sold for $91 million to Connecticut-based Mill Road Capital in 2010, which bought out the remaining public shares and made Rubio’s private again.

Ralph owns a minority stake. Every day, he works in the kitchen. Half of his week is spent making unannounced visits to stores to inspect quality, make sure they’re clean and customers look happy, listen to managers and inspire them, and be the brand’s face.

Rubio now offers over 40 items. Though wild Alaskan pollock fish tacos are still their biggest seller, bowls are their biggest growth—many Americans have learned that tortillas, while delicious, are 270 calories each. Two US trends—increased seafood consumption and the better-for-you food movement—are driving more customers their way. The California Bowl, a bestseller, is made vegetarian and gainless in the test kitchen. Nobody loves it. Rubio calls this a disaster test. “It has potential.”

Consumer Reports polled 32,000 readers in 2015 about their favorite rubio’s fresh mexican grill fast food chain. Rubio’s beat Chipotle and Taco Bell. San Diego declared April 5, 2016, Ralph Rubio Day.

“Awards are cool, but to be honest, I’m just not into it,” he says. “I love it more when I walk into a restaurant and they recognize me and say, ‘Hey, Mr. Rubio, I just want to say thank you. Every week, my family and I come here.’ That is why I live.”

They intend to pause growth and focus on operations at existing stores after opening their next location in Las Vegas (No. 196). Ralph believes Rubio’s could eventually open 400 stores in the western United States. As a private company, they can wait until the timing is right, rather than when quarterly forecasts are due. The fish taco king will step down at some point, as dictated by life and age, but not until he believes Rubio and “the people in the Rubio’s family” are set up for long-term success.

“I stayed for a few reasons,” he explains. “First and foremost, our name is on the building. But, in reality, I simply enjoy what I do. Not every day is perfect, but I enjoy getting up and going to work every day.”

Rubio’s has sold 249 million fish tacos as of this writing.

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