Oliver Kremer

Oliver Kremer ate at 45 Mexican restaurants in 10 days to research New York City’s Mexican food scene before opening Dos Toros Taqueria with his brother, Leo. Neither brother had restaurant or cooking experience. “We had combined experience of zero minutes and zero seconds working in restaurants,” Oliver said. Four years later, Oliver and his brother own four Dos Toros Taqueria locations in Manhattan and Brooklyn and have continued to garner rave reviews for their menu.

After graduating from Washington University in St. Louis in 2008 with a B.S. in Finance, Oliver drove home to California from St. Louis with his brother; they discussed their pipe dream of opening a Mexican restaurant like the ones they had grown up with in the Bay Area. Oliver told Leo that “I thought it was a really, really bad idea. And that I needed to get a job like all my friends [were] doing because I was 22 years old and neither of us had any experience. I just thought it was reckless.”

Highlights

On the value of his finance major: Finance always interested me. I don’t know if it’s totally reasonable as an undergraduate major, to be honest. I think probably as an undergraduate we should be learning more interesting things as opposed to just learning how to value a public company or things that you can learn when you go to work for a firm.

The risks of opening a restaurant in New York City: The stakes are higher, the rent is higher...If it went bad, it was going to go bad faster and more expensively. But if it goes well…