Ana Consulea, Pastry Chef & founder Zexe Braserie, Alexandra Blaș, Chef and founder Pickles, Ala Dumitrache, entrepreneur and founder Balls Bucharest and Cristina Mazilu, owner Mazilique and Arzu talk about challenges in their career, at the 14th edition of Fuckup Nights Bucharest.
The event will take place on Thursday, June 23rd, starting at 19:00, at CoOperativa Bar (86 Icoanei) Tickets for the event are available here and here.
Fuckup Nights shine new perspectives over professional mishaps and encourage creativity in finding solutions that can help us overcome difficult situations.
FUN XIV greets us with four new personalities, all from the HORECA sector, who will reveal how they managed to turn failure into a worthy tool towards success: Ana Consulea, Chef Cofetar & founder Zexe Brasserie, Alexandra Blaș, Chef and founder Pickles, Ala Dumitrache, entrepreneur, and founder of Balls Bucharest, and Cristina Mazilu, owner Mazilique Studio and Arzu. The four guests will tell their stories of failure and the role they played in their journey to success, at the third FUN event of the year.
Diana Iosu, the organizer of Fuckup Nights Bucharest, states: “Fuckup Nights is more than an event, it’s a movement, on a global scale, that manages to leave its print on us long after it has ended. The stories inspire and become valuable lessons for those who have the chance to listen closely, regardless of what each of us does in our professional lives. Every edition is different than the last, just as unique as everyone’s journey in life. What brings us closer is the willingness to become better, stronger, and more vulnerable in the face of seemingly disastrous events. When we share our stories with others, they become gentle and we take away their power – this is FUN’s purpose, which it fulfills with every edition.”
The event will be moderated by radio and TV journalist Julia Nagy.
Ana Consulea is a Pastry Chef and founder of three businesses in the field: Zexe Brasserie, a brasserie bakery born from the desire to bring back the flavor of Romanian confectionery, Zelato gelateria, and Zelateria, a business that will naturally continue the story that started at Zexe Brasserie and Zelato.
Ana studied confectionery in France, at the Montbeliard School of Confectionery, where she had the chance to learn from the big names in the industry: Eric Vergne, Pierre Herme, nicknamed “the god of macarons”, and Miackel Azouz. After graduating from pastry school in 2012, Ana returned to Romania, quite determined to change her inclinations and mentalities and to show the Romanian public that our confectionery is strong and full of personality. In 2014, trained the MasterChef finalists, and in 2019, she was awarded the “Pastry Chef of the Year” distinction from Gault & Millau. Ana believes that “the fear of failure, of losing, in a world where you have to get straight A’s, (…) to build a perfect business, does not make superstars. On the contrary, it shapes depressed, anxious, competitive-destructive monsters, who believe nothing is ever enough and that they must always want more, reach for more and do anything to succeed. In a functional society, failure would be taught in schools as a success-generating subject.”
Alexandra Blaș, Chef and founder of Pickles, is the woman behind the business that opened in November 2020. She’s a journalist by background, but her passion for cooking has proved to be greater than her passion for writing. In 2015 she booked a one-way ticket to London, where she spent the following five years in three restaurants in the UK capital city. Within two years, she was running her first kitchen, and it served her well. With all the experience she gained there, Alexandra returned home and shaped this little bistro, as she likes to call it, around pickles. Pickles is her playground Tuesday through Sunday. From the get-go, Alexandra says does not believe in professional failure. Journalism wasn’t a failure for her, it was the passion she had when she wasn’t quite sure what she wanted out of life. Alexandra believes we should think of failure as a series of trials and tribulations we need to go through until we find exactly what we want.
Ala Dumitrache, entrepreneur and founder of Balls Bucharest has held multiple titles and positions in multiple industries before she got to where she is now. She’s done almost-everything in HORECA: organizing events, social media, flipping burgers at festivals, a little bit of cooking, and a lot of hustling. By the age of 29, Ala believed it was unthinkable to stay put – that’s how she saw entrepreneurship, especially in the HORECA field. The balls idea came to her by chance, and she let it go, hoping it was just another thrill that would eventually pass. Weeks turned into months, and that thrill wasn’t going anywhere. She spent months searching for the perfect space to house her first business. The concept was thought through, over and over, as Ala became increasingly obsessed with the project, which made her feel this idea was important and needed to be brought to completion. It’s been 3 years this May since Ala sold her first meatball, and Ala is more thrilled every day, through every success and every failure.
Cristina Mazilu, owner of Mazilique Studio and Arzu, began her professional career as a cultural journalist, then her curiosity for food led her to the editorial office of a food magazine, which she managed for 5 years. Later on, the desire to experiment led her into the kitchen. In 2016, she opened Mazilique Studio: a test kitchen that, for a while, served as her play space and a spot to gather people around the table. One pandemic and a few sleepless nights later, in December 2021, she opened Arzu, a bistro where she seeks to take her creative energies and bring them into a new context.
Cristina is also aware “that failure is a key condition in both innovation and creativity – but in my professional life (that I wouldn’t name career a series of plays I took too seriously) there has never been a greater fear than that will fail. That has probably turned out to have been, equally my biggest motivation, too.”
Fuckup Nights Bucharest is part of a series of events that take place globally, in 321 cities and 91 countries all over the world. The event’s focus is on approaching professional failures constructively and it is meant for small and big entrepreneurs, corporate workers, freelancers, and students alike.
Previous Fuckup Nights Bucharest editions are captured here: Vol I, Vol II, Vol III, Vol VI, Vol X.
The event’s partners are FAN Courier, Radio Guerilla, CoOperativa, Complice, Techcelerator, ROTSA – Romanian Tech Startups Association, ClujHub, Fonduri Structurale, Bizilive, More Networking, Learning Network, Psychologies, Cooperativa FruFru, IQAds, SMARK, IQool, Revista CARIERE, Commons, SocialPedia, Sandler Training and Sabina Cornovac Online.
More details about the event can be found on its dedicated page, as well as on Facebook.
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About DiFine PR
DiFine PR is a full services communication agency that combines the team’s solid experience of over 20 years, both nationally and internationally, with the satisfaction of creating success stories. Besides complete PR, communication and business consulting services, the agency also organizes tech and business events (e.g. NASA Space Apps Challenge, TechFest, Fuckup Nights Bucharest). The agency’s current portfolio includes the business consulting company McKinsey & Company, Black Sea Fund, GapMinder VC, start-up accelerator Techcelerator, Seedblink, Growceanu, Goldring, Restart Energy, Tema Energy, Romcab, Alexandrion Group, Sodexo, Cognite, Bitcoin Romania, Tradesilvania, Undelucram.ro, ClujHub, bpv Grigorescu Ștefănică and over 80 technological startups.
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Contact:
Diana Iosu
Corporate Communication Senior Advisor, DiFine PR
diana.iosu@difinepr.com
