He started as a server, worked his way up to headwaiter and then to maître d’ of a small restaurant on the ship. He did a contract with one cruise line and then joined the Silverseas luxury cruise line in the middle of 2000. One of his friends at work talked about working on a cruise ship and suggested to many of the young people that they give it a shot.ĭjordjevic was the only one of his group who applied. “We’re talking about good stuff, how life is beautiful and on the other side, you’re trying to cure people.”įrom there, he began to work at the finest hotel in the city, the Hyatt Regency. I don’t have to worry about their medical history or anything,” he says. In this, I’m working with healthy people. He then began to study hospitality, with an eye to taking over the family business, and soon realized he enjoyed his hospitality studies more than medicine. He had originally intended to study medicine and finished his secondary schooling (roughly the latter part of high school and early part of college) with a nursing degree. There were riots and all sorts of unpleasant things for kids to see,” he says. “These were tough years, especially when I was in secondary school. Throughout the 1990s, former countrymen fought bitterly against each other.Īs a boy growing up in Belgrade, Djordjevic was somewhat insulated from the worst of the times because his family owned a business, a small restaurant-supply company. The communist dictator of the time, President Josip Broz Tito, suppressed the different nationalist movements, x but the union by force began to unravel shortly after his death in 1980. He was born in the final years of what was then known as Yugoslavia.

In his case, moving for love came after he met a young woman from San Antonio. His story isn’t one of a war refugee fleeing horrors, but instead of an energetic and ambitious young man who left home in search of a better life, stability for the future and for love. “I was trying to better myself to do something where I don’t have to be in the same situation like my parents or like me or anybody else.” “Not that I was trying to escape from the country at any point,” he says. There’s something wonderfully San Antonian and completely American that the first person to greet customers at a bastion of Southwestern and regional American cuisine comes from Serbia and became an American citizen in May.īorn in the days when his country was still known as a part of Yugoslavia, he grew up in Serbia and lived through the war in his homeland. Like any true professional, Milan Djordjevic makes it look easy. The tall, thin man who combines Old World refinement and hospitality with a sense of Texas friendliness gives the sense that he knows what’s going on at all the tables and in the kitchen of the signature restaurant at Westin La Cantera Resort. It’s European, but at least in this part of the country, not one of the more readily identifiable articulations. The first thing that you notice upon walking into Francesca’s at Sunset restaurant, that is, besides the expansive Hill Country view, is the accent of the manager who greets customers. Facebook Twitter Email Milan Djordjevic compares the view from Francesca's at Sunset at the Westin La Cantera resort.

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