At seventeen, Johan Engman needed rent money, not a calling. He had moved out while still in high school, one year after arriving in San Diego from Östersund, Sweden. The job available to him was washing dishes at night. The arrangement was wonderfully free of romance: plates came in dirty, went out clean, and the landlord remained temporarily satisfied.
The dish pit led to bussing tables, then serving them. By twenty-five, Engman had spent enough time in restaurants to recognize that the industry was no longer a stopgap. He gave himself an ultimatum: two and a half years to open a place of his own or choose another career. This was less a business plan than an appointment with himself, but it worked. On October 9, 2008, at twenty-seven, he opened Fig Tree Cafe in Pacific Beach with roughly $45,000.
October 2008 was an educational month in which to become a restaurateur. The global economy was misbehaving flamboyantly. Fig Tree began losing money and continued with impressive consistency. After three months, people around Engman offered a humane verdict: close it. Nobody would blame him. They were right about the absence of blame. They had underestimated his appetite for refusal.
A café financed by refusal
Engman reduced the café's operating hours and found work elsewhere. One job was in the accounting department of a pharmaceutical company, a curious post for someone with no formal background in the field. He used the income to pay his personal expenses and soften the restaurant's losses. He has described working multiple jobs at once and going two and a half years without a day off. The heroic version sounds splendid. The lived version must have involved laundry.
Fig Tree finally turned a profit after about three years. In 2011, Engman left the corporate job and opened a second location in Hillcrest. A Liberty Station café followed in 2013. The sequence matters because the later growth can make the first survival look inevitable. It was not. Expansion came only after a long interval in which the most rational advice was to stop.
“Don't be afraid to fail, and when you do fail pick yourself up immediately and keep on pushing.”Johan Engman on the central lesson of his career
One small incident supplies the whole period in miniature. During a busy Sunday brunch, the kitchen floor drains clogged. Water spread. An emergency plumber on a Sunday belonged to a financial category beyond reach. Engman put on gloves, got onto the floor and cleared the drains himself. He still uses the memory to explain scrappiness. Wealth can purchase a repair; experience first asks whether the problem has surrendered its simplest answer.
Twelve wet hours in Borneo
Travel became Engman's way of stepping outside the machine he had built. In a hut near the Danum River in Borneo, rain fell for an entire day. He thought about Fig Tree Cafe and what he would improve. Rather than pull apart a working restaurant, he began imagining another one: simpler, instantly legible, centered on a meal that San Diego adored but few operators treated as a category with room to stretch.
The early name was California Breakfast Republic. “California” eventually disappeared; the republic remained. Engman wanted a menu that could roam while keeping the classics in sight. He also wanted a room with a sense of mischief. Jokes appeared on napkin bands and under coffee cups. Egg-shaped chairs made the theme impossible to miss. Even the bathrooms joined the performance.
Breakfast Republic opened in North Park on July 26, 2015. It treated breakfast with the attention usually reserved for dinner, but skipped dinner's solemnity. French toast and pancakes could carry ambition without demanding reverence. A guest might order a serious plate and sit in a ridiculous egg. This was not contradiction. It was the concept.
Moves from Sweden to San Diego at sixteen.
Opens Fig Tree Cafe in Pacific Beach during the recession.
The café is profitable; a second Fig Tree opens.
Breakfast Republic opens in North Park.
The breakfast brand marks its tenth anniversary.
The second Breakfast Republic opened in Liberty Station about a year later. More followed across San Diego and into Orange and Los Angeles counties. Rise & Shine Hospitality Group accumulated a family of concepts rather than forcing every morning into one uniform: Fig Tree Cafe, Breakfast Company, Eggies, Feast & Fareway and Ox Coffee joined the portfolio. The common territory is morning; the identities are meant to remain distinct.
The joke is part of the machinery
Restaurant design often arrives as an expensive coat draped over an ordinary proposition. Engman's best trick was to make the wit operational. A hidden line beneath a coffee cup rewards someone for finishing the drink. A napkin band earns its inch of table. The details create tiny discoveries, and discovery gives a familiar meal narrative tension. What is under this? What happens in that room? Why am I sitting inside an egg?
The humor also makes a promise: nobody here intends to bully you with importance. Engman has said his company prizes being humble and unpretentious, and once named a personal irritation as the feeling that a server is doing a guest a favor by bringing another glass of wine. His preferred management language is “anti-micromanagement” - hire people for their merits, allow personality, and expect leaders to own what happens.
That ownership principle began as necessity. There was nobody else to blame when Fig Tree was one location and the drain was full. Engman later distilled the traits he values into three words: resilient, humble and scrappy. In a 2024 conversation about leadership, he added compartmentalization, adaptability, disciplined planning and authenticity. The list is polished now, but its source material is resolutely unpolished: bad months, wet floors and conversations that cannot be sweetened.
“A fish rots from the head down.”Engman's reminder to look in the mirror before pointing elsewhere
An empire with neighborhood manners
Scale tests the charm of any local restaurant group. A private joke can become a corporate font. A neighborhood favorite can wake up as a rollout. Engman's answer has been to connect growth to place, sometimes by changing the concept itself. In 2025, Rise & Shine converted its West Hollywood Breakfast Republic into Breakfast Company, arguing that the latter's energy better fit the neighborhood. Opening-weekend food and beverage sales were pledged to Project Angel Food.
That fundraiser belongs to a larger habit. Rise & Shine has held annual Christmas dinners with complimentary meals for veterans and toys for children. During 2020, the company raised $79,290 while opening four restaurants. Engman was named the 2021 CEO of the Year in the private large-company category. He describes the group's mission as making a positive impact in every community where it operates.
Make the concept easy to understand, make the room worth discovering, give employees room to be themselves, and treat community work as part of the business rather than a decorative paragraph.
There is a pleasant symmetry here. Engman entered restaurants because he needed a wage. He stayed because the work revealed a life. The company he built now talks about internal paths for servers who want to become trainers and advance. He argues for honest feedback, visible steps and recognition of small achievements as well as large ones. Opportunity, in his telling, should not depend on an employee arriving with a map.
What the rain left behind
In 2025, Breakfast Republic turned ten. Anniversaries tempt a founder to sand the rough edges from the story. Engman's version keeps the inconvenient pieces: the opening during a crash, the jobs that propped up the dream, the possibility that knowing then what he knows now might have discouraged him from beginning at all.
His lesson is not ignorance as strategy. It is that conviction sometimes needs a head start on complete information. The why, he has said, matters more. Once the doors are open, romance becomes a schedule. Values become hiring and firing. Creativity becomes a coffee cup ordered by the thousand. Community becomes the decision to surrender a weekend's sales.
And breakfast, so easily dismissed as the meal one eats while preparing for the consequential part of the day, turns out to contain a career. Engman saw its overlooked theatrical possibilities. He also understood its democratic rhythm: morning returns, regular as rent, offering another service after the bad one and another year after the nearly impossible first three.
The rain in Borneo eventually stopped. The useful thought traveled home. By then, Johan Engman had already learned the harder trick: how to keep a door open long enough for an idea to walk through it.