About Me

Husband to one of the coolest women I know, dad to great kids, a cat, and two dogs.

Born of a Colombian mother and a Yugoslavian father, I entered the restaurant business at 15 and never looked back. My front-of-house career took me from Franco's Trattoria in Scottsdale to Anne Rosenzweig's fine-dining Arcadia restaurant in New York City, and on to Restaurant & Bar Angele in Napa Valley. During four years in California wine country, I fell hard for the interconnected relationships between food and wine, farmers and winemakers — relationships that have defined my work ever since.

Returning to Arizona in 2007, I helped open a new restaurant before being approached to oversee the service staff at Prado at the Montelucia in Paradise Valley. Then a serendipitous shift filling in for a friend reconnected me with Charleen Badman, and before long we were plotting our own place. FnB opened in late 2009 in Old Scottsdale, built on two ideas: Charleen's deep relationships with Arizona's best farmers, and my commitment to championing the state's winemakers. The result was one of the first all-Arizona wine lists in the country. FnB has since been featured in the New York Times, Travel + Leisure, and Forbes, and was nominated by the James Beard Foundation for Outstanding Beverage Program in both 2017 and 2020 — an honor given to only 20 restaurants nationwide. Charleen and I were inducted into the Arizona Culinary Hall of Fame as Best Restaurateurs in 2013, and Charleen went on to win the James Beard Award for Best Chef: Southwest.

In 2014, I released my first wine label, Los Milics, in collaboration with Kelly and Todd Bostock of Dos Cabezas Wineworks in southern Arizona. What started as a label grew into a dream: in 2018, my business partner Mo Garfinkle and I founded Los Milics Vineyards on 20 acres in the foothills of the Mustang Mountains near Elgin, Arizona. We now farm over 70 acres of estate vineyards at 5,000 feet elevation, growing 17 varietals suited to Arizona's unique high-desert terroir. The tasting room — designed by Patricia and Tommy of Chen + Suchart Studio — has become a destination in its own right, and in 2024 we opened nine casitas on the property so guests can wake up among the vines.

The accolades have followed. In March 2024, Los Milics swept the Arizona Governor's Cup wine competition, taking home Best White, Best Rosé, and Best in Show. In 2024, USA Today Readers' Choice Awards named us the #2 Best Wine Tasting Room in the United States. The June 2024 issue of Wallpaper magazine featured our tasting room's architecture. And in September 2025, Food & Wine magazine named Los Milics Vineyards its featured vineyard for the annual Harvest Issue — believed to be the first time Food & Wine has spotlighted an Arizona vineyard in that coveted slot.

Since 2015, I've written Pavle-On-Juice, a column about Arizona wine and its growers for Phoenix Magazine. In June 2024, I launched the Wine World Podcast — a show that takes listeners from vineyard to glass, exploring winemaking, food pairings, and the stories behind Arizona's thriving wine scene and beyond. New episodes drop regularly; you can find them under the Wine World Pod tab on this site.

The first time I stepped into a dining room was June of 1988. Every project since — a restaurant, a wine list, a label, a vineyard — has followed the same arc: an idea, a team, and the hard work of making it real. Ephemera to reality. That's the dragon I chase.