web exclusive: Growing Pains
Raising a Restaurant
It’s 5 p.m. on Friday and anticipation for the night’s events increase, easy chitchat between waiters and cooks changes to direct orders of menu clarifications with sides orders of pre-opening anxiety. The waitresses are strategizing, maximizing seating potential; the table for two is modified to accommodate three. Their calculated arrangement (each table is numbered and assigned to a waitress) could be overthrown by a last minute reservation or a walk-in party greater than five.
“Fifteen minutes, children,” Alex, one of the waitresses, announces. The specials menu doesn’t have the correct font and must be reprinted, while last minute vacuuming, food preparations and music and lighting selections take place.
“This is my favorite part of the night—the curtain is about to go up, and I don’t know what’s going to happen,” admits owner Mark Burhans, a short man with glasses and gray hair. Everyone takes his or her place- cooks in the back, wait staff up front. Last minute coffee and cigarettes before the door is unlocked. Lights, music, action. The first couple of the night walks in…without reservations.
Salaam restaurant, serving Middle Eastern, Indian, and North African-inspired cuisine, is tucked down a brick alley adorned with graffiti art of belly dancers and hookahs—live belly dancers are on Wednesday nights. The restaurant was conceived by Ryland Burhans, Mark and Hilary’s son, who wanted to start a hookah bar.
Compromising her anti-tobacco stance, Hilary, a heavy-set woman in her early 50s with short dark hair and plastic rimmed glasses, agreed to the project so long as she could add food to the equation. The Hookah bar opened. But soon, favoring the restaurant component and voting for the smoking ban, dynamics in the family business changed…and grew. Out went the hookahs and in came the tables, chairs and menus. Serving up to 100 customers on Friday nights, in a space that accommodates 45 people at maximum capacity, Salaam has outgrown its location. The kitchen, a 10 by 16 ft. space, is a tight squeeze for the three cooks and few waitresses maneuvering in and around.
“By the end of the night, you feel as if you’ve had sex with everyone back there,” Hilary jokes. The restaurant has strained through growing pains long enough, and by the end of this quarter, it will be moving to Washington St, neighboring Donkey Coffee.
The staff is not only close in proximity to one another throughout the night, but they are also a team working together to run the restaurant efficiently. “This is the best place to work,” said Chris Monday, a skinny cook and dishwasher who paces while he talks. All the tips are pooled at the end of the night and split among the waiters and kitchen staff, unlike most restaurants where the dishwashers make minimum wage and don’t share in tip benefits. “Everyone works like dogs…and they are rewarded,” Hilary said. “We pay them as well as we can afford to.” The equality and monetary incentives encourage hard work from each person.
Coworker dependency also improves restaurant efficiency. As Molly’s section of tables began to fill, Becky and Megan help fill water glasses and check on customers. In Salaam, no one benefits from letting a coworker scramble. Bad revues can run among community social circles deterring potential customers from coming for dinner, and Salaam takes pride in its reputation. “I’ve never seen a customer unhappy,” Megan said. Awards for best ethnic restaurant adorn the wall behind the entrance door.
Hilary manages the menu, but organizing the specials can be a challenge. To come up with fresh ideas she shops at the Athens’ Farmer’s Market, to use seasonal ingredients from local farmers, and she peruses cookbooks, many of which are tucked around the restaurant with fraying corners and droopy pieces of paper poking through.
No matter what is cooking, there is passion behind the product. “We love to feed people,” Hilary says. She is in charge of the menu, specials and décor of the restaurant (Mark handles the business side of the operation.) Hilary grew up in Pakistan and Ethiopia, where she studied cooking with the house cooks and servants. After her kids were grown and independent, she taught culinary arts at a men’s medium security prison for seven years through Hocking College. The men learned cooking skills they could use to find work after their sentence.
Hilary uses her cooking and teaching skills in the restaurant. Friday night when she offered an eggplant as the special she stayed in the restaurant until a customer ordered the dish, so she could show the cooks how to “plate” it. Before customers arrive, Becky was dissatisfied with the specials menu insert, Hilary edited the copy, and showed Becky which wording and font techniques were better suited for customer appeal. For example, fewer words are better than long descriptions and tuna comes before chicken because prices increase down the menu. Printing the specials instead of verbalizing them to customers was Hilary’s idea and increased their sale. When Dean, a waiter-in-training, failed to report the broken oven (the only one they have), Hilary scolded: “I don’t care if people break things, but not telling is a no- no.” Fortunately the old cooking range that had been tucked away in storage was retrieved and usable.
Sometimes she tricks the staff into doing what she wants. When Cliff, a former waiter, refused to put less paprika on the hummus Hilary removed all the paprika from the kitchen. He didn’t understand it was for the aesthetic appeal of the dish, not to change the hummus’ flavor, she said.
Constantly monitoring the comings and goings of patrons and staff, Hilary’s eyes drift between her conversation with her husband and the door. The bell chimes and a fresh breeze indicates a new arrival. Hilary discretely shifts her gaze to the newcomers and then to Molly, who has rushed forward to greet and seat them. Hilary is the wing woman ready to step in if help isn’t available to meet the demands of the diners, but she’s confident that the staff is capable of successfully handling any situation on their own. Occasionally she and Mark will take off for the weekend or go out for a movie and leave the restaurant in the hands of the employees.
The restaurant is open Tuesday through Saturday. Food and supplies for the week are purchased during a weekly Monday trip to Columbus. When buying foods and supplies, Hilary considers the menu and specials for the week, which change daily to appease the palettes of the many regulars. The menu is tailored to the kitchen’s limitations—they have a two-burner hot plate in place of a cooking range. Hilary buys the restaurant’s food from the Restaurant Depot, which caters to the large Somali population of Columbus (second highest in the nation), and therefore carries the more exotic ingredients Hilary needs to make the food she and other staff members make from scratch.
During the trip to Columbus, the Burhans stop to visit friends, a Sri Lankan couple they have come to know, who own Café Shish Kebab and Istanbul. They visit the Muslim markets and they visit used goods markets to buy replacement dishware (at least six plates break a week). This is all part of the network they have established since staring Salaam. Shop owners give Hilary discounts and her restaurant friends are always willing to give recipe advice. Hilary also has acquaintances in India who send her fabric.
In Athens, friends and frequent patrons of Salaam have assisted the Burhans’ business. When John, with Avalanche Pizza, stopped for lunch he gave Hilary an electrician’s number to fix her oven and ‘to-go boxes’ he no longer needed. Hilary spent an afternoon sorting through the dusty cartons of ‘to-go boxes’ while she was recovering from the whooping cough, to recover useable boxes. This business doesn’t stop when one is sick, and Hilary persevered through her normal working hours after she was not longer contagious.
Hilary and Mark help their employees in and out of the restaurant. Shortly after being hired, Megan, a waitress of almost a year, needed storage space as she was transitioning out of college and into an apartment; she used the Burhans’ garage free of charge. In the midst of the evening’s preparations, a letter from a former employee arrived. The staff stopped working to listen to the two-page handwritten note being read. The letter’s author tells of her whereabouts and recommends a person she thinks Hilary should hire.
Hilary is accustomed to hiring people she hasn’t seen. “Some of my best employees I hired on the phone,” she said. She has a few dress recommendations —no other local restaurant logos or exposed armpits, but there is no official dress code in addition to the U.S. health and safety standards. Individual tastes in dress add to the eclectic vibe of the restaurant.
“Hilary hired me because of my tattoos,” joked Becky Kimmel, a staff member at Salaam. “She said you can come to work here as long as you don’t cover up your tattoos…plus I had experience.” Friday night Becky wore all black, but her decorated arms were exposed. Contrasting the black attire, Megan wore a brightly colored flowing skirt, bandana and large hoop earrings.
The business is demanding. “Restaurant people are stress junkies…in place of drugs,” Hilary said. But before the curtain goes up, there is joking among the staff from the kitchen “We don’t want to kill people,” said Morganna, a cook, referring to food preparations and precautions. And of course the outcry of frustration over the small kitchen that won’t be endured much longer. The restaurant has flourished under the watchful eye, and labor of Hilary and Mark, who know that no matter how much preparation they do…
“We are always ready ten minutes after the first people arrive,” Mark says. All variables can’t be accounted for in this business, but by helping one another in challenging situations, such as an overwhelming number of tables, they can accumulate more tip money from satisfied customers. And during the rare moments when Hilary isn’t available to help or answer questions, she trusts her capable staff to make the best decision possible. It’s a growing process.