Behind the Kitchen Door by Jayaraman Saru

Author:Jayaraman, Saru [Jayaraman, Saru]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780801467585
Publisher: ILR Press
Published: 2013-01-31T22:00:00+00:00

Jason and Ben, owners of Russell Street Deli, in Detroit’s Eastern Market. Courtesy of Russell Street Deli.

Ben, on the other hand, thought that buying the restaurant was perhaps a good idea. “We had a lot of different conversations when Bob offered us the restaurant,” says Ben. “I actually owned a record store at the time, and I was doing well. I had already saved some money, and I was planning to go to grad school. Jason was unsure. It was a lot of money, and it would be hard if we failed. But it was an opportunity to radically change our lives. It was a big thing, and we didn’t know how good we’d be at it. We both had qualms, but we were both excited. We encouraged each other to make that jump, and we’re very grateful that it worked.”

Ben set up a payment plan with Bob so that he and Jason could pay for the restaurant over time. The initial idea was that he and Jason could run the restaurant well, make some money, and sell it. They could then move on with their passions—art and music. “We can make a living with this was our initial thought,” says Jason. “We weren’t thinking about wages, high road practices, paying $5 or $6 per hour to the wait staff, health insurance, or anything like that. We were just thinking, Let’s do this damn thing. Once we started, though, we remembered all the things we’d learned at Bennington in Vermont.

They decided to change the wage structure in the restaurant. Bob had always paid people well, but Ben and Jason agreed that no worker at the Russell Street Deli should be paid the abysmally low Michigan tipped minimum wage of $2.77. Servers in the front of the house began earning around $5 an hour, plus tips. Cooks made $12 or $17 an hour, depending on their experience.

Jason explains how they reached the decision to pay workers almost twice the wage required by law: “We figured that’s what would work for us because we are both pretty independent guys. Neither of us liked punching a clock. Neither of us wanted to run a restaurant,” says Jason. “When I’m not at the restaurant I spend 95 percent of my time alone doing watercolors. Ben has a record label. He’s an underground musician. So neither of us wanted to be there all the time. Both of us initially said, ‘Let’s turn this place around, fix it, because it isn’t profitable—it had never made money. Let’s manage it well, sell it, and walk away with $100,000.’ But once we started running it, implementing some of our ideas, we made the restaurant profitable, and we found that we were both taking home a good wage. So after the first year and a half we said, ‘Let’s not flip it. Let’s make $700 a week from this restaurant for the rest of our lives, plus health insurance and IRAs.’ Part of the plan was that each person would have six months off while the other was in school.

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