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When the Hustle Goes Beyond Running a Good Restaurant
Carlos Raba of Baltimore’s Clavel moonlights in a nonprofit Brazilian jiujitsu gym
Nobody in the Nordstrom in Rockville, Maryland, could sell stilettos like Carlos Raba.
He was 18, a high school wrestler and football player, doing $1.2 million in sales and making 5 percent commission.
“I would have a mom — she buys two pairs of shoes for the kids, and I tell her there’s a beautiful pair of Ferragamos upstairs that she needs to see,” Raba remembers. “I would grab them, and she wouldn’t even try them on. ‘Just put them in my purse.’” He grins beneath a black Baltimore Orioles hat. “Boom, boom, boom. Hustle, hustle, hustle.”
Raba doesn’t sell heels to the Real Housewives of the Beltway anymore. The 36-year-old parlayed hawking heels into the food industry, working for Whole Foods in departments ranging from seafood and cheese to merchandising and management, eventually becoming one of the youngest floor managers in the company. After eight years, he left retail for restaurants, partnering with Lane Harlan, his brother’s sister-in-law and the owner of cocktail bar W.C. Harlan and Fadensonnen beer garden. They opened Clavel in Baltimore’s Remington neighborhood, 10 minutes north of the Harbor, in 2015.
In early reports on the restaurant, Raba was a footnote — the Baltimore Sun called him a “family member who grew up in Sinaloa,” the Mexican state across the Gulf of California from the Baja Peninsula. He was an unknown, but Harlan believed in him. “She told me I was an amazing cook and business person, and I had to do this,” says Raba, who moved into the apartment above Clavel with his wife, Claudia, and young son, Lucas, and got to work channeling the food of his childhood in Sinaloa, where his four uncles owned a restaurant, La Mansion, and the family threw all-day fiestas “from ceviches in the morning to carne asada at night — every weekend.”
