Alumni profile
K aris O swald , A I E S E C E dmonton
where’s the beef ?
Brazilian style
Oscar Mauricio Lopez,’02 BCom, is concerned with authenticity, and he should be. In February,
O s c a r M A URICI O LOPEZ
he opened his first restaurant in downtown Edmonton, Pampa Brazilian Steakhouse. He wanted to show that the
authentic through and through, and this stemmed from the genuine experience he had on an restaurant is
internship in Santa Maria, a small city in Southern Brazil.
4
ALBERTA SCHOOL OF BUSINESS
T
he opening of Pampa was a culmination of the hard work and unique experiences Oscar underwent in the past decade. He largely credits his time at the Alberta School of Business and his involvement in global internships through the Business Student Exchange and AIESEC with giving him the opportunity to develop his entrepreneurial skills and the international experience that transformed his life today. Born in El Salvador, Oscar moved to north Edmonton when he was ten years old. It seemed his Central American heritage would draw him back to his southern roots for an academic exchange to Guadalajara, Mexico, and a management internship
in Santa Maria, Brazil. “AIESEC is really about entrepreneurship, having your own business, and creating something out of nothing. So I was given the opportunity via this organization to do something completely different and here we are today,” he says. In Brazil, he met one of his current business partners, Joao Antonio Dachery, and the two came up with the concept of Pampa. This all began when Oscar applied for exchange in 2002 upon graduating with a BCom in Distributions Management and Each patron receives a color coded coaster a minor in International Marketing. His background seemed to be a perfect fit for Izaias Tolio (his original business partner), who hired (red on one side, green on the other) at their table him as an intern at Tolio Cereais Ltda. As an intern, Oscar was given the task of determining and can flip it to red to show the grill masters that the viability of transporting they are taking a brief breather from the 11 cuts of grains to and from Brazil and Alberta. juicy meat continuously circling around However, as Oscar discovered, this the room. was not plausible at the time. “After including the decor, the fixed-price continuous tableside spending a whole year there trying service, the equipment, the wine selection, and even Pampa’s to do some work in international unique name. business and exporting/importing Pampa is a region in Southern Brazil where, like Alberta, grains, we saw that there wasn’t really cattle-raising takes place. It is also a market for different reasons including the birthplace of churrasco, the free trade agreements, government subsidies in century-old method of Northern markets, and transportation costs.” using large skewers to Although importing and exporting grains was not feasible, barbecue meat, and the the initiative of importing a piece of Brazil to Canada was not inspiration behind impractical: it just needed to be reworked. The idea to export the churrascaria. a Brazilian service rather than a commodity popped into To ensure Oscar’s head one day over lunch. “My former boss [Izaias] and moisture and I came up with the idea of exporting a service—the concept of authentic flavour a Brazilian steakhouse to Edmonton. Everything just sort of to the restaurant’s matched because both Alberta and Brazil raise meat, Oscar also world-class beef.” imported the Eight years after that luncheon, Oscar and Izaias’ idea along rotisserie grill from with Joao came to fruition at the opening of their restaurant Brazil and imports the on 109 Street. Oscar and his partners’ main goal was to lump hardwood charcoal maintain the authenticity of the churrascaria, the Portuguese that fuels it monthly. Pampa term for the most common style of restaurant in Brazil. uses AAA Alberta beef, but has Almost all aspects of Pampa are infused with Brazilian culture
SPRING/SUMMER 2011
5