Monica Ciobanu

Monica is a co-founder of Big5 American Diner and, in practice, the manager who keeps the floor, the kitchen and the guests moving at the same pace. Before Big5 she spent close to a decade in the American catering industry in Huntington Beach, California.

Five years at Kiros Catering, Huntington Beach

From May 2015 to September 2020 she was Office Manager and Catering & Events Manager at Kiros Catering Inc. An American restaurant on the Pacific coast, with large events and demanding clients. The kind of place where one small mistake shows up on the invoice right away.

That's where she learned, step by step, what 5-star American service actually looks like. Not from theory. From twelve-hour shifts.

What she actually did at Kiros

• Built the team schedule so the day ran without dead gaps between shifts.
• Went personally to the big deliveries. There is no room to wing it out there.
• Ran the email marketing campaigns through Constant Contact and handled client relationships end to end, from the first phone call to the post-event follow-up.
• Negotiated with suppliers and kept the cost sheet honest, always watching for somewhere to cut.
• Ran payroll, day-to-day bookkeeping in QuickBooks, and sat in on hiring interviews.
• Contributed to the American and Mexican menus, with an eye on taste, cost, and how easily a dish scales.

Five and a half years in one place, in an industry where most people rotate every season. That says something.

Coming home, and a year at Take & Eat

She moved back to Iași after Kiros. From February to October 2021 she worked as Manager at Take & Eat, where she did a bit of everything: hiring, daily menus, time off, guest feedback, and the small internal problems that come up in any team. A short period, but a dense one. The first real test of translating what she knew from the US into Romanian reality.

At Big5, with an apron on

At Big5, Monica didn't stop at management. She stepped onto the line too, and she'll openly say that most of what she knows about cooking she learned from her brother, Claudiu. When the kitchen needs her, she works sous chef alongside him.

And there's one more thing. The entire dessert side of the menu is hers. Every cake and dessert at Big5 has her signature on it — and for a lot of regulars, that's actually the main reason they come in, sometimes just for a coffee and something sweet.

For her, none of the kitchen side is a cute anecdote. It's part of the job. A manager who doesn't know what's happening on the line has no way to back up the team when the dining room is full.

What she actually runs day to day

• The day-to-day of the restaurant: shifts, scheduling, supply.
• Working sous chef alongside Claudiu, on the line, whenever the kitchen needs it.
• Pastry: every cake and dessert on the Big5 menu is hers.
• The team side: hiring, feedback, training, working through friction.
• Service standards and the mood on the floor.
• Guest relationships, from reservations to feedback, the good and the less good.
• The communication side: what goes on the blog, on social, and in the press.

Whatever hours are left, she writes on the Big5 blog. Recipes, people, and the less Instagrammable side of running a family restaurant in Iași: suppliers who are late, slow months, weekend shifts that run longer than the plan said they would. Her story and Claudiu's have also been covered in the local Iași press.