WORDS AND IMAGES CHARLOTTE GRIFFITHS
Catalyst meets the husband and wife team behind Cambridge’s restaurant on a bus, La Latina Bustaurante, to learn how they made their unique business concept a reality
atalina Uribe and Nelson Rodrigues are the owners of La Latina, Cambridge’s
Faced with the prospect of returning to an office job at the end of her second maternity leave, Catalina decided it was now or never to press go on her and Nelson’s long-held dream of running their own restaurant. She remembers their conversations at the time. “Let’s give it a go! If it works, it works – if it doesn’t, we can do other things.” After long discussions with her entrepreneurial mother, Catalina and Nelson travelled to Liverpool to pick the bus that would become La Latina in September 2016. “It was a proper passenger bus,” Catalina smiles. The bustaurant took up residency in a friend’s space at Quy Waters while Nelson worked on the restoration and Catalina handled the paperwork and permissions, playing to their individual strengths to move the project forward. “He was in charge of the transformation of the bus, and I was in charge of the documentation, the admin that he didn’t want to know anything about. I don’t have any clue how to do handy things – so it worked!” she says. “When I did the business plan, I planned the conversion for three months: it actually took us eight months, because he was working full time, and I had a six-month-old baby.” As the bus took shape, the menu was whittled down to three dishes. The short menu was a necessity caused by the shortage of space in the bus kitchen: “It’s impossible to have a huge menu in a tiny kitchen and make everything fresh every single day,” Catalina explains. “We focused on two or three things we could do from scratch easily without wasting food. We decided to do empanadas, arepas and tostones: that’s it.” On its first outings, the bustaurant moved around to different locations, with customers keeping up on social media, but Catalina wanted to find a permanent pitch for La Latina to call home. “I found a
first bustaurant: a vibrant and flavourful Latin eatery on wheels that’s parked up next to Homebase on the Cambridge Retail Park. “We didn’t have the money for a proper restaurant, so we had to start from somewhere,” Catalina says. “I considered a food truck, but my mum said, ‘The food you want to sell is different, so think out of the box and stand out.’ The idea of the bus got into my head – and Nelson used to work for Stagecoach, so he knew how to fix the bus, he had the bus driver licence. Everything just fit.” Prior to opening La Latina’s doors, Catalina worked as an engineer in Colombia, and came to the UK to study a master’s degree in project management at Cambridge University. Though she enjoyed her work, something was missing. “Having a restaurant was always on my to-do list,” she says. “I grew up with my mum and my granny running businesses and restaurants, working for themselves: I always wanted to do that, but they never allowed me to cook – they sent me to uni instead!” she laughs.
45
ISSUE 03
cambridgecatalyst.co.uk
Powered by FlippingBook