Pedro Pablo Rivero
Food & Beverage · Hospitality · Creation · Operations & Management
“Hospitality is almost impossible to teach. It is all about hiring the right people.” - Danny Meyer
Pedro Pablo Rivero is a food, beverage, and hospitality professional whose career has been built around his passion for making a hospitality experience memorable, and then understanding everything required behind the scenes to make that experience work. His experience spans New York, Miami, Playa del Carmen, and Colorado, crossing restaurants, bars, beverage development, hospitality education, catering, events, natural foods, supply chain, and operational management. That range has given him a perspective extending well beyond any single position in a restaurant or behind a bar. Rivero understands hospitality from both sides of the house: the experience the guest remembers and the operating system that makes it possible.
“I build curated, well-controlled hospitality systems designed to do one thing exceptionally well: elevate the guest experience. Because a guest who is truly well cared for comes back, talks about it and brings others with them.”
01 A Career Built Around Food, Beverage & Hospitality
Rivero’s foundation is hands-on.
He has worked inside restaurants and bars, collaborated in restaurants openings, managed beverage operations, developed cocktails and specialty drinks, contributed to menus, trained hospitality professionals, planned events, worked directly with guests, managed inventory and suppliers, and developed the procedures required to turn creative ideas into repeatable service.
At El Zorro Plateado in Playa del Carmen, Rivero participated in the development and opening of a full-service restaurant and bar concept. His work crossed the creative and operational sides of the business. His collaboration with Mezcal brand Papa Diablo and Pescadores, Beer Brand/Company owners took him from understanding the industry's nuts and bolts, beverage development, specialty cocktails creations, recipes, ingredients and spirits, presentation, menu development, purchasing, supplier coordination, inventory, preparation standards, staff training, promotions, events, and daily bar and restaurant operations.
It reinforced an idea that has followed him throughout his career: creativity in hospitality only becomes valuable when an operation can execute it consistently.
A cocktail can be imaginative, but someone must source the ingredients, establish the recipe, determine preparation and presentation, train the staff, maintain inventory, control waste, and reproduce the experience hundreds of times.
Rivero became as interested in that machinery as he was in the creation itself.
02 New York & Miami
His experience in New York and Miami further developed his grasp of beverage culture, restaurant identity, and the relationship between a concept and its guests.
In New York, including work associated with Cantina Royal in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Rivero developed specialty beverages and original cocktails, including Amor Celoso, a drink that attracted food and wine magazine attention.
Those experiences strengthened his interest in the creative possibilities of beverage programs - how ingredients, spirits, presentation, storytelling, food, atmosphere, and service can come together to give a restaurant its own identity.
In Miami, Rivero expanded from practicing the craft to teaching it.
As a very young instructor with Elite Bartending Schools, he trained aspiring hospitality professionals in spirits, beer, cocktails, drink creation, preparation techniques, garnishes, sanitation, product knowledge, professional bar operations, and guest service.
Teaching required him to do something different: take knowledge acquired through experience and turn it into a system another person could understand and reproduce.
That ability to move between creation and standardization would become an important part of his approach to hospitality operations.
03 Food, Health & A Broader Curiosity
Rivero’s interest in food eventually led him beyond restaurants.
His work with Natural Grocers reflected a desire to immerse himself in another side of the food world: nutrition, wellness, ingredients, natural products, sourcing, and the relationship between what people consume and how they live.
Inside a natural-food grocery environment, he also gained direct exposure to the operational infrastructure behind food retail - receiving, inventory movement, storage, replenishment, product availability, team coordination, and the movement of goods from suppliers to consumers.
It broadened his understanding of food and beverage.
A restaurant sees an ingredient at the point where it becomes part of a dish or drink. Operations and supply chain reveal everything that had to happen before that ingredient reached the kitchen or bar.
Rivero has deliberately developed knowledge of both.
Today, his perspective on food and beverage sits at the intersection of taste, nutrition, sourcing, hospitality, consumer behavior, and operations.
04 Events, Catering & The Human Side Of Hospitality
Through The Forage Sisters / Whistling Boar, and his own catering operation Mesa y Mezcal, Rivero has remained directly involved in catering, beverage service, and event hospitality across Colorado and surrounding markets.
Catering presents a different operating challenge from a fixed restaurant. Every venue changes. Guest counts change. Products move. Equipment moves. Service environments change. Teams must adapt quickly while the guest should experience none of that complexity.
His work in event and program management through The Oakley Art House has added another dimension: creating experiences around people, communities, programming, and events while coordinating the logistics and relationships necessary to make them happen.
Across each environment, one principle remains constant: hospitality is ultimately human.
Systems matter. Inventory matters. Cost matters. Technology matters. But the guest experiences hospitality through people.
05 Operations & Management
Rivero’s career has increasingly connected the creative side of hospitality with its operational backbone.
His experience encompasses restaurant and bar operations, openings, staff training, beverage development, purchasing, suppliers, inventory, receiving, storage, replenishment, event execution, team coordination, service standards, sanitation, waste control, reporting, and process improvement.
He approaches these functions as parts of one interconnected system.
A purchasing decision affects inventory. Inventory affects menu availability. Preparation affects service speed. Training affects consistency. Scheduling affects labor and guest experience. Waste affects margins. Supplier performance affects everything downstream.
Understanding those relationships is central to his management philosophy.
Rather than accepting a process simply because “that’s how restaurants do it,” Rivero is naturally drawn to examining how work can be organized better - where a procedure can be simplified, where information can become more visible, where repetitive work can be standardized or automated, and where technology can remove friction without removing the judgment and personal interaction that hospitality requires.
06 Creation & Innovation
Rivero sees innovation in hospitality as broader than inventing the next cocktail or restaurant concept.
Sometimes innovation is creative: a new drink, menu idea, event, presentation, or guest experience.
Sometimes it is operational: a better way to organize inventory, train a team, prepare a product, coordinate suppliers, or execute service.
And increasingly, innovation means understanding where technology and automation can improve hospitality operations without compromising quality or the human character of the experience.
His approach begins with understanding the work itself.
Know the product. Know the guest. Know the people doing the work. Know the operation. Then improve the system.
That philosophy reflects a career spent moving between the visible and invisible sides of hospitality - from the cocktail in a guest’s hand to the supply chain behind the bottle; from the creativity of a menu to the discipline required to execute it; from teaching a bartender how to make a drink to understanding how an entire operation can perform better.
07 The Through-Line
Food and beverage has never been simply a job category for Rivero. It has remained an area of continuing curiosity.
Restaurants led to beverage creation. Beverage creation led to management. Management led to training and systems. Food led to questions about ingredients and health. Grocery operations led deeper into inventory and supply chain. Events reinforced the importance of execution and human connection. Operations created an interest in technology, process improvement, and automation.
Together, those experiences have produced a hospitality professional who understands that the best food and beverage businesses require more than creativity and more than management.
They require passion for the product, curiosity about the customer, respect for the craft, command of the operation, and a willingness to keep improving how all of those pieces work together.