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Hugo Rodríguez de Prada (38) packed his bags in 2009 for New York.
Next to him was his girlfriend and current wife, Icíar Aragón.
They had finished their respective studies at the ESIC business school, where they met, and were preparing to live in the US for a year before finding out what their next step would be.
Right next to their New York house they opened an "authentic Neapolitan pizzeria" that they liked so much that it was the first germ of the current Grosso Napoletano.
"I returned to Spain in 2010 and I try to set up a pizzeria in the same line
as the one I met in New York. I go to Naples and basically everything goes wrong. I had to transfer the premises and I keep that project in a drawer and I give up "Hugo tells LOC.
In 2011 he founded a marketing agency together with Icíar and met Jorge Blas, who already had a trattoria in Madrid. The agency becomes absorbed by a consultancy firm and Hugo decides to team up with Jorge to give birth to the Grosso Napoletano project in 2017.
Just five years later, they have 12 stores in Madrid,
two in Barcelona, one in Valencia and one in Zaragoza. 2022 they intend to finish it with 30 and 2023 with 50 stores. Some resounding figures that are rounded off with the approximately 28 million euros that they calculate for their next annual billing.
The business adventure of "democratizing authentic pizza" could not have gone better for Hugo, however, and although he now tastes success, he remembers the beginning. "Entrepreneurship is hard and there is a part that I like to highlight. This leads to chaos. At first it is a disaster. More than learning from mistakes, what you have to do is have
the ability to know how to withstand the tension of everything going wrong.
The reality is not 'I'm an entrepreneur and I'm very cool, I drink a specialty coffee and go on my fixie bike,'" he confesses.
The bases of his success are the same that he and his partner laid at the beginning: dough, ingredients, pizzaiolo (the master pizza maker) and oven.
The pizzaioli who are in charge of making the pizzas are from Naples and use ingredients that are mostly imported from Italy every week.
The ovens also have a peculiarity: they are made
with refractory stone from a quarry near Mount Vesuvius.
They are able to withstand the high temperatures that are needed for Neapolitan pizzas.
Hugo acknowledges, however, that there is no secret.
And above all, it is not in the dough.
"We give our employees some t-shirts with precisely that slogan,
'The secret is not in the dough',
because it is so.
In the end, it consists of pedaling and surrounding yourself with talent.
Meet people who know how to do things better than you, who complement you".
His team consists of 32 people in the office and about 270 in total.
One of the things he is most proud of is that the company is maintained with 100% Spanish capital and that they depend on themselves.
Some of his investors come precisely from the family.
His wife and his brothers-in-law, children of Emilio Aragón.
When asked what the actor is like as a father-in-law, Hugo prefers not to comment on his family nucleus.
However, he does recognize that they are all very enterprising and that they participate in each other's projects.
"If it goes well for us, it goes well for all of us and if it goes badly for us, the same."
FAMILY
Along with Icíar Aragón, he has formed a large family in which, in addition to his three children, they also add their dog.
Icíar is involved in Madreamiga, another project in which her husband and two other partners, Javier Garay and Begoña San Pedro, also participate.
Despite having many work commitments, Hugo admits that they try to spend
as much time as possible with his children.
It is not in vain that he attends to this supplement while he goes to pick them up from school.
His wife loves to share her day-to-day on social networks and she has almost become an
influencer,
with more than 39,000 followers.
She "she has a great time and she receives thousands of messages from her thanking her for showing herself as she is. She is very transparent."
Hugo does not rule out starting up again and perhaps in other sectors that are not the hotel industry.
"I love this world, I have always liked to travel to see different places to eat. Although I do not rule out embarking on new adventures that amuse me.
I have always undertaken, I only see it from this side,
I do not know how to do anything else. I am passionate about the fact to create".
Grosso is giving him a lot of joy at the moment and he is enthusiastic about his city, Madrid.
"It is the leisure capital of Europe. It is incredible what is coming, there are many openings and projects."
She recognizes her enjoyment side and the taste for good food, so she remembers a phrase that the father of a friend said to her.
"There is one life and many sizes".
Lastly, he sums up how he wants people to see Grosso Napoletano:
"We don't want to be the trendy place, but the neighborhood place
where you go to have a pizza on a first date or with your grandmother."
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