Owner of Consuelo’s Named President of Restaurant Group

Robin Davis, owner of Consuelo’s restaurant in La Jolla, has been named president of the 460-member San Diego Restaurant Assn.

Davis, who purchased Consuelo’s in 1974 from founder Dorothy Bales, at one time operated at four locations but has sold off all but the La Jolla Consuelo’s, in the courtyard of the Merrill Lynch office building at Fay and Silverado.

The single location is much to her liking, in part because she has only nine employees to worry about, instead of the 90 she had at one point.

“The macho types I sold (the other Consuelo’s locations) to all went out of business in a matter of months,” Davis said. “Some people think all there is to running a restaurant is standing around at the bar, buying pretty girls drinks.”

Davis said she is very much a hands-on owner, busing orders, mixing drinks, buying produce, seating customers and washing the linen. The high points in her restaurant career have been “meeting so many people.” The low point: getting held up by a robber wielding a sawed-off shotgun. “One of the waitresses saw the robber,” Davis said. “She thought I was buying a gun.”

Born in San Diego into a Navy family, which moved to several bases around the country, Davis resettled in San Diego after her Navy pilot husband was killed in a bombing raid over Vietnam in 1966. After trying her hand as a real estate agent, Davis decided to buy a restaurant in hopes of a steadier income.

As president of the association, Davis will represent the membership on a number of issues pertaining to restaurant owners. The issue that members are most concerned with these days, she said, is a bill before the state Legislature that would require all employers, including restaurants, to provide mandatory health insurance for employees. Such a bill would significantly raise the cost of running a restaurant, she said.