Alex Molina, General Manager of Mosto Group, Enters Dining Hall of Fame

Alex Molina, General Manager of the Mosto Group, was voted into the Beijinger's Dining Hall of Fame by fellow industry peers during the Beijinger 2016 Restaurant Awards. We spoke to him about what brought him to Beijing and what he has planned for the future.

RELATED: Brasserie FLO Joins the Beijinger's Dining Hall of Fame

TBJ: Where are you from, and what brought you to China?
Alex Molina: I’m originally from Columbia, and I came here in 2006 with all the excitement of the Olympics. We [Alex Molina and Daniel Urdaneta, fellow owner and executive chef] came to open a restaurant for a Chinese group. It was a one-year contract, and then we decided to stay and open our own business. My background is in the restaurant business, I have been doing that for 20 years in Columbia and in the US.

What do you like most about Beijing?
It is very dynamic – you meet people from everywhere, and everybody is doing something different. Everybody is working on a project. I find that very exciting.

Where do you get ideas for your different concepts?
Most of my ideas come from traveling and eating out. I used to live in New York, and I like the offerings there. But in general, we build the restaurants that we like. Of course in this business everything is already set, so it’s not like you come with anything, you take a little bit of this and a little bit of that, you put your own character into it. 

Within your concepts, how do you balance attracting Chinese and Western customers?
We try for our restaurants to be very honest and straight forward, so it is not that they are particularly appealing to Chinese or Westerners. We do try to make our restaurants friendly in case a Chinese customer is having this experience for the first time. The main languages in our restaurants are Chinese: the webpages, the menus, everything, because at the end of the day we are fully aware that we are in China.

How do you the music that you play at your restaurants, and how long does it take for you to put together a playlist?
It takes two to three days. I like music in general so I buy music for myself all the time, and we listen to a lot of music in our house, so when I need a new playlist of Mosto or for Moka, I just sit for two or three days and just work on it. You listen to a lot of crap music to get to a good song, hopefully!

Do you play any Chinese music?
Sometimes the staff give me something to listen to and I listen to it, I like it, and put it in the playlist. I would be lying if I said I had any favorite Chinese songs. 

What are your favorite restaurants in Beijing?
If I go for Chinese food, it is definitely Sichuanese. As for Western, I like TRB a lot, anything Ignace does is very good. I also really like all the breweries, for example Jing-A and Great Leap Brewing. 

What can we expect from you in the future?
I want to heal the world and make it a healthier place for my children. But when I'm not doing that, I'm working on opening a Moka Bros in Hangzhou this year, and a secret project. If I tell you about it, I'll have to kill you.

Read about all of our Dining Hall of Fame inductees here.

More stories by this author here.
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Photo: Uni