“I think anyone who grows up wanting to be a CEO is crazy,” the 34-year-old CEO of Momofuku just lately advised Fortune. “It’s a very difficult job.”
Reaching the C-suite of the culinary model might not have been a childhood dream for Mariscal, who grew up on New York’s Higher West Aspect. However her love affair with Momofuku—comprised of a restaurant group and a line of home-cooking merchandise—goes means again.
A teenaged Mariscal first ate at Momofuku’s Noodle Bar together with her father again in 2005, after studying a evaluate of the restaurant in The New York Instances. She later celebrated her 18th birthday at Momofuku Ko, the group’s two-Michelin-starred fine-dining restaurant within the East Village. She was drawn to Momofuku’s meals, in fact, but in addition chef David Chang’s ethos of shattering cultural obstacles in gastronomy.
“It felt like not so much a restaurant, as much as a brand trying to tackle how food and culture intersect,” Mariscal mentioned.
In 2011, after graduating from Bowdoin Faculty with a bachelor’s diploma in English, Mariscal noticed a web based itemizing for a public-relations internship at Momofuku. She utilized, received the gig, and two months later, was employed full-time. She held different positions on the firm over time, together with social media supervisor and VP of brand name and design. In 2018, Mariscal was promoted to chief of employees and inventive director.
In 2019, after working as Momofuku’s de facto chief since its inception, founder and chef Chang needed to shift his focus to the culinary and media sides of the enterprise—in addition to his TV-hosting duties. When it got here time to nominate Momofuku’s first-ever CEO, Chang turned to Mariscal, who was 29 years outdated on the time.
Mariscal had her reservations. “I did not feel ready to be a CEO,” she advised Fortune. However she couldn’t shake the sensation of duty and possession she felt in the direction of the model.
“I didn’t want someone else dictating the future of the company,” she mentioned
Let her prepare dinner
The brainchild of “rebellious” chef David Chang, Momofuku started in 2004 as a restaurant group. Its first location, Momofuku Noodle Bar in New York’s East Village, sought to vary Individuals’ definition of what ramen might be. Through the years, Momofuku tossed East and West collectively in a wok and set it aflame—and was topped “the most important restaurant in America” by Bon Appétit in 2013.
Mariscal was named the corporate’s CEO in 2019. First order of enterprise? “I felt really strongly that we needed to diversify the business,” Mariscal mentioned.
Mariscal’s hunch proved prophetic. The next yr, the COVID pandemic compelled the closure of a number of eating places, together with each of Momofuku’s worldwide areas and the Michelin-starred Ko. Momofuku launched a line of home-cooking merchandise like air-dried instantaneous noodles, soy sauce, chili crunch, and seasoning salt—to nice success.
In 2023, Momofuku Items hit $50 million in gross sales and offered 12 million servings of noodles. The merchandise can now be bought at Complete Meals, Publix, Wegmans, and numerous unbiased shops. In hindsight, Mariscal says main Momofuku by means of the pandemic gave her the final word confidence within the CEO position.
“Nothing really seems scary after that,” she defined. “Everything will be okay, because you made it through the worst possible thing that could happen.”
Courtesy of Momofuku
Constructing a dynasty
Mariscal first entered the restaurant business as an act of riot. Nicely, form of.
Her grandfather, Stanley Zabar, is the co-owner of Zabar’s, the enduring “gourmet emporium” in New York Metropolis’s Higher West Aspect that focuses on smoked fish, caviar, and cheese. Her great-grandparents based the grocery retailer. Rising up, Mariscal was all the time cautioned towards coming into the meals and retail companies.
“They were horrible businesses: You worked on holidays, the margins were terrible,” Mariscal remembers relations telling her.
However she didn’t pay attention—no one within the household did.
“I have a ton of cousins, uncles, family members that are all in the food business in one form or another,” she mentioned. “So even though my grandpa said not to, I think it was somewhat inevitable that I would end up back there.”
Momofuku’s founder equally hails from a household enterprise, and has injected that philosophy into his eating places. Mariscal shared the most effective piece of recommendation the chef has given her: “We always want to be right in the long run … So, focusing less on tomorrow or next week, and really trying to build something for the future,” Mariscal explains.
In different phrases, why cease at a meals empire when you can construct a dynasty?
The CEO walked Fortune by means of a day in her life, which frequently entails an hour-long stroll throughout the Brooklyn Bridge and “a disgusting number of meetings”—however by no means precludes time on the park together with her beloved canine, a Spinone Italiano named after a personality from The Sopranos.
Courtesy of Momofuku
Day within the life
7:30 a.m.: The very first thing Mariscal does when she wakes up is test her e-mail—whereas nonetheless in mattress. It’s “just to make sure there are no fires that happened the night before,” she mentioned.
8:00 a.m.: Mariscal takes her “ridiculous” Spinone Italiano, Carmela, off-leash in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park or Fort Greene Park. “She’s named after Carmela Soprano,” Mariscal mentioned.
Visiting the park each morning with Carmela has been a “net positive” for Mariscal’s psychological wellness, because it forces her to deal with her private life and get some contemporary air earlier than digging into work.
8:30 a.m.: Mariscal returns house from the park and will get to work at her desk. “The first thing I do when I get to my computer is look at my schedule for the day and jigsaw everything around.”
On Mondays or Fridays, Mariscal will “block off a big chunk” of time to work on big-picture tasks. Which will or might not contain future plans for the shuttered Ko restaurant. “We still have the space,” Mariscal teased. “So the idea is to do something else in there.”
9:00 a.m.: Mariscal begins sipping on espresso. “It’s just an iced coffee with oat milk,” she mentioned. “Or I really like drip coffee, which I think is very unsexy, but it’s great because you can just drink endless amounts.”
The espresso helps her “power through” her morning Zoom calls and cellphone conferences.
10:00 a.m.: Momofuku’s nightly restaurant logs are available. “Every restaurant submits a report of what happened the night before,” Mariscal says. “So it’s a way to catch up on how service went, or if anyone interesting came in.”
The craziest log she’s ever learn? “We had a coffee chain in the city come in for a holiday party, and the log was horrible. Everyone was double fisting drinks, it was just pure chaos.”
11:00 a.m.: Mariscal begins making her strategy to the workplace through her most well-liked mode of transportation: strolling. “My grandpa lives a block away from the store that he runs,” she says. “He always told me to live walking distance [away] from work.”
Mariscal’s strolling route takes her throughout both the Brooklyn Bridge or Manhattan Bridge to get to Momofuku’s workplace, which is positioned in Manhattan’s Chinatown. She can be keen on the “walk and talk”—and can take work calls throughout her hour-long commute to the workplace. “I think there’s too many Zooms happening right now,” she mentioned.
12:00 p.m.: Mariscal will get to the Momofuku workplace, which she says has a “pretty strong” snack choice together with seaweed, gummies, and Tiny Tate’s chocolate chip cookies. “I’ll have some in-person meetings, or I’ll walk over to the restaurants to have meetings there,” she mentioned.
1:30 p.m.: For lunch, Mariscal takes benefit of the workplace’s location to discover native Chinatown choices. “We used to have an office in Midtown that we moved, because life’s too short to eat bad food,” she mentioned.
Mariscal is at present on a quest to strive as many banh mi eateries as doable close to the workplace.
2:00 p.m.: Mariscal’s work day continues. She estimates she has 12 to fifteen conferences or cellphone calls every single day. “I have a lot of direct reports across the different businesses,” she mentioned. “So really just making sure I’m checking in with them consistently.”
Mariscal might have a “disgusting number” of conferences every single day, however she tries to maintain issues attention-grabbing. She repeatedly walks from Momofuku Noodle Bar’s Columbus Circle location to the East Village restaurant—which takes over an hour—whereas taking rolling calls.
6:00 p.m.: Mariscal wraps up her work day. A few of her days finish later if she has a restaurant go to or work drinks on her calendar.
8:00 p.m.: Dinner is Mariscal’s favourite meal of the day. “It’s the only one that I think about and plan,” she mentioned.
The CEO likes to plot out her dinner all through the work day. If she has a gathering uptown, she’ll try native connoisseur grocers. If her day ends within the Chinatown workplace, she’ll go to Asian grocery shops within the space. “I try to take advantage of my work schedule to fuel my dinner schedule,” she mentioned.
For Mariscal, cooking is a wellness exercise. “I think it’s a way of focusing on something else that’s not work, and it’s something I can put my full attention into.”
9:30 p.m.: “After dinner, if I’m not super stressed out about what’s going on at work, I’ll try to make a couple of old-fashioneds or martinis,” Mariscal says. To wind down, she and her girlfriend prefer to play video games like gin rummy and backgammon collectively.
12:00 a.m.: Mariscal doesn’t often fall asleep till midnight or 1:00 a.m. “The amount of blue light I intake is not helpful.”
