Dos Amigos Founder Jorge Bouras Believes in Business Making Life Better

Celebrating 10 Under 10 honoree Jorge Carlos Bouras ’17

An entrepreneur and Cali-Mex cook who believes in helping his employees to reach their goals,  Jorge Carlos Bouras ’17,  a graduate of the Cornell Peter and Stephanie Nolan School of Hotel Administration, is one of the 2024 10 Under 10 Notable Alumni honored by the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business.

Bouras is founder and CEO of Dos Amigos, an eatery in Ithaca’s Collegetown devoted to bringing Cali-Mex style tacos to Ithaca. He originally launched Dos Amigos as a food truck in Collegetown in 2015 with his business partner and fellow Nolan Hotel School graduate, David Farahi ’16. In June 2020, he opened a restaurant on College Ave. and in October 2023, he added Tres Leches, a bar located downstairs from Dos Amigos.

Dedicated to “making life a little better” for both customers and employees at Dos Amigos, Bouras believes in providing employees with a living wage, a great work environment, profit sharing, and management that cares about them so they can “thrive inside and outside of the restaurant.”

Bouras was formerly the area lead and operations manager for Wings Over, a chicken wings chain based in New York City, where he worked to make “restaurants easier to operate and [more] engaging environments to work in.”

Bouras hails from both San Diego and Mexico City and now calls Ithaca home. His favorite quote comes from Teresa Carter: “You are the sun of your own universe. When you let your light die out, your solar system will die with you. Keep your fire alive and your system will thrive.”

When not making power moves, Bouras likes to spend quality time with his inner circle and enjoys kiteboarding, skateboarding, surfing, cooking, and powerlifting or “lifting the heavy thing,” as Bouras put it, quoting comedian Dylan Moran.

Learn more about Bouras in this Q&A.

What drives your commitment and focus in your professional career?

Bouras: The obsession with continued progress. Being better today than we were yesterday in every facet of life. Increasing our impact by way of this continued progress.

Paying it forward to make life a little better

Bouras is committed to using his experience and time to “educating the next generation of entrepreneurs and leaders.” To that end, he addresses students about building a purpose-driven business as a guest speaker at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations and the Nolan Hotel School.

What inspires you to dedicate your time and energy to this community service? What impact do you want to have in the world?

Bouras: We believe we can make life a little better for our guests and our teams. The more businesses that adopt and execute that philosophy, the more people will enjoy both breaking bread with others and being a part of the teams that help make that possible. Everyone wins.

What drives your continued engagement with and contribution to the Cornell community?

Bouras: The Cornell community offered me the platform, market, and home to do what I love now. I will forever be indebted for this opportunity.

What does being selected for the 10 Under 10 Notable Alumni list mean to you?

Bouras: It’s time to double down, to reinvest in the mission and our values. Being an entrepreneur can be isolating and the first three years of our brick-and-mortar experiment were very difficult. However, we have grown steadily over time and a recognition like this can be validating and offset some of the isolation that comes with being a startup. It means that something we are doing, however challenging it is at times, is working.

What are the most valuable things you learned at Cornell that have helped you in your career?

Bouras: I learned the true power of a network and how to leverage it.

Mentors who modeled behavior and strategy for business success

Did any particular faculty or staff member(s) influence you on your chosen career path?

Bouras: The first thing I did when I moved back in 2019 was to connect with Susan Fleming, MS ’08, PhD ’10, who had been my professor as an undergrad at the Nolan Hotel School, and get into Rev: Ithaca Startup Works, a business incubator and startup workspace. [Fleming is an entrepreneur in residence at Rev: Ithaca Startup Works and was a Nolan School senior lecturer in entrepreneurship, 2009-2018.] Through Rev, we found our first contractor, our attorneys Klausner and Cook, and much-needed office space. We opened our first restaurant thanks, in part, to that early relationship I had with Susan, which opened many doors down the line. She continues to be a mentor to the present day.

We (my cofounder David Farahi  and I) wrote the original business plan for our Dos Amigos food truck in Neil Tarallo’s class. [Tarallo is a senior lecturer of entrepreneurship and was also director of the Pillsbury Institute for Hospitality Entrepreneurship].

Nick Bayer ’00 sets a great example for everyone else to follow with his own innovative hospitality business. [Bayer is founder and CEO of Saxby’s and an entrepreneur in residence at the Nolan School.]

Cheryl Stanley‘s approach to wine and spirits is unpretentious, which is great way to be about life in general. [Stanley is a senior lecturer in food and beverage management known for her courses Introduction to Wines, Food and Wine Pairing, and Beverage Management courses.]

All of these people influenced me by way of being who they are, modeling behavior and strategy that has worked really well for me and my business.

Describe a challenge you encountered as you built your career and how you overcame it.

Bouras: The global pandemic. Like most challenges, overcoming it boils down to discipline, prioritization, and, most importantly, grit. The pandemic decimated revenue for hospitality, making all of our overhead (rent, utilities, insurance, salaries) far more difficult to manage as they became a much larger percentage of our expense-to-income ratio. That, coupled with soaring inflation tripling the cost of materials and a mass exodus of hospitality workers, meant that we had a business that was four times more expensive to run with one-quarter of the available people to staff it and one-quarter of the customers.

Hospitality is an endurance sport

What is the proudest moment of your career or of your personal life?

Bouras: It’s not any one moment but the compilation of many. Watching as we become better at Dos Amigos in every facet of what we do—some of it as a result of also doing the uncomfortable work on myself to continuously improve—makes me proud.

Part of having great resilience is shifting your enthusiasm and energy source from achieving goals to enjoying the process of getting there. Hospitality is an endurance sport, like most businesses. A lot of businesses fail not because of incompetence, but because owners decide the reward is not enough to make the constant work worthwhile. While ambition and goals are important, resilience and endurance is ultimately the foundation on which you achieve those.

What do you do to recharge?

Bouras: Personal energy is different for everyone. For me, it requires fighting to be present. Typically, I can achieve that when I stop the information overload (disconnect) and then dial in on with something that lets me move, express, and share. This means exercise (kiteboarding, skateboarding, running, lifting, soccer, hiking, yoga), cooking or painting, and sharing quality time with my inner circle. If I can combine them all—exercise and cook a meal with my inner circle once a week—I feel like I can conquer the world in the next six days.

What do you wish you’d known as a student and what advice would you give to students today?

Bouras: Learn to love the process. Everything else will follow. If you are focused on only achieving external goals, you are setting yourself up for disappointment. Learn to keep your fire alive and your system will thrive.