Your Pie
“To blame this all on unemployment benefits is unfair,” said Efrem Yates, a Your Pie franchisee with three locations in the Raleigh-Durham, N.C., area. “Everyone had to make tough choices this past year there are parents that had to leave their jobs because they became the primary caregiver. There are so many layers to this.”
For Yates’ restaurants, getting employees in the door has been much more challenging than fighting the turnover rate, and he cites the highly competitive job market, which has pushed restaurants to raise their wages just to compete.
All three of his restaurants are operating with 15–20% fewer employees than they had in 2019, making for a very tight ship. At one location, he had to shorten hours and close between the midday lunch and dinner rushes to combat the staffing shortages.
In Just 10 Years of Cooking, Tailorâs Vivek Surti Has Come a Long Way Through June, Tailor is offering an elevated reimagining of Surtiâs very first supper-club menu Tweet
Vivek SurtiPhoto: Eric England
At a glance, chef Vivek Surti seems to have had a meteoric climb at his Germantown restaurant Tailor, where he shares his first-generation Americanâs version of his ancestral Gujarati cuisine in a jovial dinner-party atmosphere. But his path to becoming an award-winning restaurateur and chef has been far from direct or sudden. Ten years ago, Surti was still living at home with his parents and sister, using the money he was saving on rent to buy all sorts of fun exotic ingredients while learning to cook for himself. âI started cooking by watching TV shows like
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Like nearly all chefs and restaurant owners, Sarah Gavigan did a fair amount of pandemic pivoting in 2020. She launched at-home ramen kits back in January after opening a pop-up location in West Nashville. That spot offered both ramen and kits for pickup and delivery. She’s now decided to make that Charlotte Avenue location permanent.
“It seemed completely bananas to open during a pandemic,” Gavigan says. “We were beyond surprised at how well the neighborhood responded to the location, so we signed a full-term lease.”
The Otaku Ramen West will be open seven days a week from 4 to 9 p.m., offering pickup and delivery. They’ve streamlined the process so ordering takes place directly from them, rather than a third-party app. (Third-party drivers will still do the delivery, but they essentially act as dispatch, and Otaku gets to keep a larger percentage of fees and can manage the process.)
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The Monster Kit from Otaku Ramen At this point in the pandemic, you may feel like you’ve exhausted all the different permutations of takeout, cook-it-yourself and restaurant-to-home kit. Well, Sarah Gavigan to the rescue.
Gavigan is the owner of Otaku Ramen, Nashville’s beloved ramen shop, and on Monday, Jan. 18 she is releasing at-home ramen kits to help us get through these next few months of continuing to social distancing and stay in.
“There has never been a better time to become a ramen chef at home,” she says. “We want everyone to experience the joys of restaurant ramen in the comfort of their homes.”
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Photo via East Side Banh MiIt didn’t take long for East Side Banh Mi to ingrain themselves in the community. Back in the summer I told you about how the owners moved to Nashville from California and decided to open their cozy little Vietnamese eatery in the face of the pandemic, and we were all rewarded with some really inventive versions of traditional banh mi sandwiches courtesy of Grace Nguyen and Chad Newton. They’ve since established relationships with their neighbors, particularly with some of their fellow chefs in town.
Together, they’ve banded together to create a special fundraiser for The Nashville Food Project that they are calling the Nashville Banh Mi Project. Talented chefs such as Sean Brock, Bryan Lee Weaver, Philip Krajeck, Sarah Gavigan, Julia Sullivan, Mailea Weger and tattooist/foodie Chad Koeplinger have each come up with their own unique banh mi creations.