Credit: On The Pass

Gabriel Ornelas Is Telling the Stories That Keep Hospitality Human

13 Minute read

20 Oct 2025

Paul Feinstein

Journalist

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Through On the Pass, the hospitality-focused studio and podcast he founded, Gabriel Ornelas amplifies the voices of chefs and creatives whose work connects, uplifts, and defines modern food culture.

Gabriel Ornelas has built a career out of what he calls “servicing the service industry.” Through his company On the Pass, he spotlights the people who feed, host, and care for others: the chefs, hoteliers, and visionaries shaping how the world connects around food. His videos, podcasts, and partnerships with industry leaders, from José Andrés’s team to S.Pellegrino Young Chef, are all rooted in one guiding belief: that storytelling can strengthen community. “I want people to say we create content that nourishes connection,” he says. “Content that builds community within and outside the industry.”

Origin Story

Ornelas’s sense of hospitality began long before his first job or business plan. “My mother’s family is from Italy, my father’s from Mexico,” he recalls. “We didn’t have money—we were lower middle class—but there was a real sense of pride around food.” Meals were sacred rituals. Napkins had to be folded a certain way; guests had to be made to feel seen. “I didn’t realize at the time,” he says, “but I was being trained to take pride in my culture and to have that hospitality gene. Some people are born with it; some grow into it. Both sides of my family loved to host.” That “welcome code” was reinforced by a great uncle who traveled the world in the pre-Instagram era, returning from Singapore, South Korea, or Russia with trinkets for his young nephew. “People ask who inspired me—was it Bourdain? A chef?” Ornelas says. “It was my great uncle. He showed me that curiosity and culture go hand in hand.” Raised in Los Angeles, he grew up straddling identities—American, Mexican, Italian—and that mix made him, as he puts it, “curious about everyone else.” Hospitality became not just service, but a way of understanding people.

The Industry Path

Ornelas’s professional path started behind a coffee counter. “I was a barista at Starbucks for seven years,” he says. “Then I got into sales and marketing—heads in beds, butts in seats.” He moved quickly into hotels and restaurants, learning the business side of hospitality at the Thompson Hotel Group under Jason Pomeranc. “This was 2012, 2013,” he recalls. “Instagram had just launched. Digital marketing was just starting to matter.” Soon after, he joined Sam Nazarian’s SBE, then a nightlife company transitioning into a hospitality brand. “I helped build sponsorships and partnerships, working with BMW and Citi Private Pass, creating exclusive access at Katsuya and Bazaar,” he says. “It was like a scrappy, well-funded startup before the adults came into the room.” When SBE hired seasoned executives like Sam Bakhshandehpour and Veronica Smiley, Ornelas stayed long enough to witness the company evolve from chaos to structure. “It was very informative,” he says. That experience led to consulting work on the Faena project in Miami, where he helped develop partnerships with Paul Qui, Pernod Ricard, Bacardi, and Mercedes-Benz. “I realized I didn’t want to do sales and procurement anymore,” he says. “I wanted to focus on marketing and storytelling.”

Credit: On The Pass

Founding On the Pass

By 2019, Ornelas had built a decade-long career in hospitality marketing, but he wanted to tell deeper stories—ones that went beyond brand partnerships and glossy 30-second videos. “I had all this incredible access,” he says. “I was traveling to events like the Cayman Cookout, shooting content with chefs like Daniel Boulud and Dominique Crenn, but the conversations that mattered most weren’t the ones on camera. They were the ones over lunch, the real talk about business, burnout, and creativity.”

That realization became the spark for On the Pass, a platform designed to elevate those unfiltered moments. “I wanted to start a platform that celebrates the icons and innovators moving food culture,” he says. “October 2019, I said, I’m starting this as a podcast—but the idea was never to just be a podcast. The idea was to be a studio that tells worldly stories about hospitality.”

His first recordings were bold: Daniel Boulud, Dominique Crenn, and Rajat Parr, captured at the Cayman Cookout with nothing more than a laptop and a Yeti mic. “My business partner at the time, who used to represent Velvet Revolver, joked that I wasn’t starting at the Viper Room, I was going straight to Madison Square Garden,” Ornelas says with a laugh. “But they said yes, so I did it.”

That leap of faith set the tone for On the Pass: intimate, independent, and intentionally different from the celebrity-driven food media mainstream. “It’s not about me—it’s about the guest,” he says. “How do we highlight them and allow them to be authentically themselves? We’ve created a platform that people really want to be a part of, globally.”

Philosophy and Purpose

For Ornelas, On the Pass has always been about something larger than media or metrics. “The big goal wasn’t monetization,” he says. “It was never, ‘I’m launching this and will monetize in six months.’ It was about creating authentic conversations and celebrating an industry.” That clarity, he explains, came from working inside hospitality long enough to understand its invisible weight—the burnout, the constant pressure, and the deep pride that keeps people showing up anyway.

“I want people to say we create content that nourishes connection,” Ornelas says. “Content that builds community within the industry and outside of it. I want someone to walk away from a story or episode feeling closer to themselves, to someone else, or to an experience.” He pauses before adding, “If someone listens and says, ‘I want to go to that place,’ or ‘I never thought of Bogotá that way,’ or even just starts thinking more sustainably, that’s what I want.”

He believes hospitality storytelling can be a form of care. “We live in a very divisive time. It’s brutal out there,” he says. “If we can offer up an opportunity for people to connect more with each other and themselves, that’s what I want. If someone can walk away from a story and think differently about how they cook, travel, or treat people, that’s everything to me.”

The Young Chef Connection

The collaboration with S.Pellegrino Young Chef came naturally. “It started with a conversation with our good friend Anna,” Ornelas says. “She had listened to a series I did in partnership with Bon Appétit called Effects of Change, which I co-hosted with Jamila Robinson.” In that series, Ornelas spoke with industry leaders like Claire Reichenbach, CEO of the James Beard Foundation, and Tim Brooke-Webb, former managing director of The World’s 50 Best Restaurants. The conversations explored why awards matter, what transparency means, and how recognition can build community rather than division.

“I don’t think we got into the politics,” he says, “but we talked about the beauty of how awards bring people together. They create community. They allow us to congregate and celebrate each other.” He recalls Colombian chef Leonor Espinosa describing the 50 Best ceremony as “like Christmas,” a rare moment when the global culinary family comes together. “There are people you don’t see throughout the year that you get to see and celebrate with,” Ornelas says. “Some of them are your favorites, some are like your crazy cousins, but it’s a holiday where we all get to be in one place.”

That spirit became the foundation for On the Pass’s three-part series celebrating S.Pellegrino Young Chef, weaving together perspectives from emerging talents and established mentors. “It’s a diverse tapestry of cultural conversation,” Ornelas says. “You’ve got Garrett, who’s in it right now, still 90 percent positive about how an award like this can change his life. Then there’s someone like Brad Kilgore, who remembers what that moment meant to him. And then people like Nancy, who’s been in the industry for decades, reflecting on how mentorship and leadership evolve.”

Across generations, the themes converge. “Although Nancy’s story is so different, there are similarities in how people define success or what mentorship has meant to them,” he says. “Someone like Charlie cared only about being a great technical chef. Now he’s realizing he needs to be a leader, a therapist, an operator. We’re not taught that in school.”

The upcoming series, he adds, aims to reveal sides of chefs that rarely surface in the quick-cut world of social media. “It’s a little more heartfelt and meaningful,” Ornelas says. “You’re going to see parts of people you haven’t seen before—because it didn’t hit the 20-second clip.”

A Shared Mission

As Ornelas reflects on everything from his Italian-Mexican roots to On the Pass’s growing global reach, he keeps circling back to one thing: community. “I just want to be a builder,” he says. “If that means I step aside and let someone else take over, then that’s what we do. We’re all here to lift the same industry.”

For him, the work is personal. “My father was a police officer and taught ethics,” he says. “As much as people think I’m a goofball, I care about people. I’m a people person. I’m loyal, sometimes to my own detriment.” That loyalty—paired with curiosity and a deep sense of purpose—has turned On the Pass into more than a platform. It’s a conduit for connection, a place where chefs, creatives, and dreamers see themselves reflected in the stories they share.

Ornelas says it best: “If we can offer people a chance to feel seen, to feel understood, then that’s enough. That’s the work.”

Paul Feinstein

20 Oct 2025

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