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Kasa’s Love / Hate Relationship with Yelp

July 6, 2010 by Anamika
How do I feel about Yelp?  Hmmm. If I’m really honest, I would say we have an intense love/hate relationship.
Kasa Castro and Kasa Marina are blessed to have excellent Yelp ratings — “people love us on yelp” :) — and many new customers find their way to our doors via Yelp.  For this, I am grateful and LOVE Yelp.
I also LOVE Yelp when we get reviews where people get our concept, appreciate our passion and recognize the food’s authenticity and quality.
And even though one of the hardest things on this planet is to receive negative feedback, we carefully study feedback as it allows us to learn what we are doing well and ways we can improve.  We also get to see how my staff is doing in delighting customers.
For all this, I also LOVE Yelp.
However (and you knew there’d be a however)….there are times when I want to tear my hair out, throw my laptop out the window and scream to no one in particular: “Come and say that to my face!”  Or “Go get a life!”  Or “What in the world are you talking about?” and “Clearly you are a vicious competitor posing as a Yelper!” (Whew, that felt good.)
Those outbursts are aimed at the small minority of Yelpers who have no idea about the topic that they have a strong negative opinion on.
My favourite examples are:
“The naan didn’t taste like naan.”  –> That’s because we don’t serve naan. We serve roti.
“Why are they serving Mexican black beans?”  –> We don’t serve black beans. We serve black lentils (daal).  There are dozens of different types of lentils.
“Why are there white people serving us Indian food?” —> We live in the United States of America!
And my favourite most hated comment: “It’s Americanized Indian food.”  –> It’s homestyle Indian food, different to what people may have tried before.
There isn’t much to do during these moments.  My first reaction is to fume and feel hurt and disappointed that people don’t realize their flippant remarks affect the hard work and love that we put into our business. Eventually I get over it, read the review again to see if there is useful feedback and remember why I love Yelp.
But I do secretly wish that I could concoct my own 1 to 5 star rating of these handful of ignorant yelpers based on the following criterion:
1 – How cute were they?
2 – How funny were they?
3 – How cheap (with their tip)?
4 – How clean (did they buss their table)?
5 – How polite?
But who has time for that? I just get back to trying to delight each and every customer… and the love/hate relationship with Yelp continues…
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The Resiliency of an Entrepreneur

May 12, 2010 by Anamika

So Suresh (my wonderful husband, co-owner of Kasa, Google employee) is speaking next week at the San Francisco Small Business Conference about how small businesses can use online tools to manage their business (using Kasa as a case study).  It got me thinking about entrepreneurship and how much resiliency is required to be successful.

When we meet other small business owners, there is a definite and instant camaraderie, an unspoken understanding that we belong to the same club.  No matter our product or service, our shared painful, exhausting, rewarding and sometimes humiliating experiences bond us together (even if we mercilessly compete with each other).

Acquaintances often ask us to share our experience of running a restaurant as they consider embarking on their own dream venture, so this post is for those brave souls.  I will say that Tim, Suresh and I are still seriously in learning mode even after 2 years, but so far this is a collection of what I’ve learned.

If you’re confident about your food and can raise enough money to get started, then you’ve just hit the tip of the iceberg. Thereafter, no matter how much preparation and due diligence you’ve done, chaos will ensue.  This is some of what we have been dealing with:

  • Smelling of Chicken Tikka ALL the time
  • Not seeing your children and family for days at a time (no exaggeration)
  • Being self critical to an extreme and disciplining yourself with an iron fist
  • Scrubbing things clean for hours
  • Lifting stuff so heavy, you permanently have shoulder or wrist aches
  • Controlling your emotions, not showing how upset or angry you are
  • Stopping yourself from stalking and throttling an ignorant yelper (although mostly people LOVE US ON YELP, and we LOVE them…   :)
  • Paying attention to mind numbingly boring details
  • Thinking, eating, sleeping and dreaming your restaurant
  • Listening to everyone on your staff’s issues and dealing with them
  • Going wherever necessary with your menu to shamelessly promote your restaurant
  • Making mistakes and moving on optimistically
  • Learning Spanish at 10pm at night after a long day at work
  • Watching your friends have a social life on the weekends without you since it’s your busiest work time
  • Trusting your instincts and confidently hiring (and firing) people
  • Forgetting about privacy – your phone is on 24/7
  • Having unyielding faith in your food and concept
  • Giving up everything you own to the bank, including your first born child
  • Did I mention…smelling of Chicken Tikka ALL the time!

On the flip side, there is nothing more I would rather be doing with my life as I love Kasa deeply — despite the occasions when I feel I can’t take the stress any more, like the time I checked myself into a hotel for the weekend, told Suresh and Tim I wasn’t coming in and switched my phone off.  I pretended to be a tourist with my English accent, walked the city, met a bunch of friendly Americans who gave me recommendations on where to eat, shopped and went back to Kasa recharged.

Most importantly, prepare to pace yourself and take a vacation before a breakdown.

If you’re still up for plunging ahead despite all this, then you’re as mad as we are and we look forward to bonding with you as a comrade in arms one day.

Anamika

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Punjabi Santa

January 10, 2010 by Anamika

It’s 2010, the holiday season is over, and I’m glad!  Don’t get me wrong, I kind of like the holidays…. using up all my patience putting up lights on the tree, overeating, mandatory time with the family, missing folks back home and shopping (I hate shopping!). The highlights of this holiday season for me were:

  • Suresh’s joke about the ’Punjabi Santa’ (like Santa, he has a beard, is tall and plump, and say Hoy Hoy Hoy)
  • Going to Winter Wonderland in Tilden Park in Berkeley with the kids
  • Dancing to Country, Salsa and Hip Hop at the Kasa Staff Holiday Party

But I couldn’t relax, as in the midst of all this, K2 (aka Kasa Marina) launched and Tim and Mer had their third baby (aka V3).  This should have been a time of only serious hard work for us, and whilst all of us at Kasa put that work in, it had to be so stop and start because of the holidays.  We literally had to force ourselves not to think or do any work on Xmas day and spend it with our families, and try to understand that the government and rest of the country were going slower because of the holidays.

So I’m glad that life is back to normality and we can just steam ahead with work now, as we have a lot more ahead of us.  The pressure is on high, not only because we have a bigger space and higher rent at K2.  We opened around December 19, and these first few weeks have been pretty steady but not that many people in the Marina know that we exist yet and we need customers flooding in.

Whilst it’s exhilarating and satisfying to have a successful restaurant or to get some wonderful press,  margins in our business are slim so we have to be super successful to make it all add up, and that pressure extends all the way through to our staff. Our staff need their hours maxed out (or else we lose them) to make rent, support families here and back home, put themselves through school or, like our Line Cook Extraordinaire Gomez who is about to have his first baby, just survive in SF. The emotional pressure of being successful is intense as our families, staff, vendors and on and on rely on us.  More customers means more hours for our staff, which means more tips (which is vital to their livelihood) and ultimately more raises.

So instead of waiting around for the Punjabi Santa to deliver a bushel of money, we’ve come up with our own Kasa Plan of Action:

  1. Continue to keep the food as excellent as humanly possible
  2. Continue to train our staff to provide warm, wonderful service, even if on occasion you have to deal with a not-so-pleasant customer
  3. Community outreach and education in the Marina — introduce ourselves and turn people on to delicious, homestyle Indian food
  4. Connect with all of our customers as much as possible…like through this blog :)

I’m confident that with a little more time and work, we will all reap the rewards of our hard work, all whilst consistently giving our endless love to Kasa Castro.  In the meanwhile, we thank you all for your continued support and hope that you’ll pass the word to your friends.

Love, Anamika

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Doubling Down With K2

November 7, 2009 by Suresh

We were crazy enough to get into this restaurant business in the first place, and then held on for dear life as the economy went to hell.  After a year and a half of the hardest and most fulfilling work of our lives,  we’ve come to the realization that:

1) you have to sell a heck of a lot of $4.50 kati rolls to make a living for two families in San Francisco; and

2) it’s time to spread the gospel for simple, fresh homestyle Indian food to other parts of the City.

So…we’re doubling down and opening our second Kasa location (dubbed K2) in the Marina next month!

The space is at 3115 Fillmore Street (b/t Union & Lombard) and is a little bigger than K1.  We’re converting the space from an old furniture store, so the permitting, design and construction process has been intense. (K2 “Coming Soon” sign)

We kept things really really simple at K1 with a handful of dishes and a clean aesthetic so that we could focus on making amazing food from scratch every day, and we plan to keep the Heart of Kasa the same at K2.

Of course, we have some twists that we’re adding this time around, most notably: late night weekend hours (open til 2am Thursday thru Saturdays) and pitchers of beer and Sangria, but mainly we don’t want to mess with a good thing.

So…tell your friends, help us spread the word, and as always let us know your comments and brilliant ideas.

K2 Construction Site, circa Mid October

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The Kasa 1 Construction Story (Vol. 1)

October 3, 2009 by Anamika

The day we signed our lease on Kasa and it was officially ours was a momentous moment for us all.  I think we had drinks to celebrate!

Despite Kasa being a business entirely about Indian food, we now found ourselves in a world which had nothing to do with food.  Creating the physical space for Kasa up to code and having the finances to be able to do it was the enormous task ahead of us.

For a minute, we were all stunned and unsure about where to start the magnanimous task of transforming ‘La Castro Taqueria’ to the blurry vision of Kasa that was in our heads.  It really dawned on me that the restaurant was about to become a reality.  So far, we had ignored all the people who had told us that we were crazy to enter into this business.  I never worried about that as I kind of like crazy.

vegas

But when the owner of La Castro Taqueria, on the night of the signing, breathed a sigh of relief and fled to Vegas tocelebrate getting out of the business, I did momentarily panic as to what I had got myself into.  But not for long as there was no turning back now.  Besides, I think I truly understood the old phrase ‘Time is Money’ to my core, for everyday that went by, we paid rent with no money coming in.  Time really was of the essence just to intensify the pressure.

There was no more theorizing, no more hypothesizing — only completely plunging into action was required.

morgan

At the time, Tim was struggling with his move to San Francisco from Chicago after leaving Kraft and was desperately trying to hunt down an affordable place to live for himself and his family and their very large dog

Morgan and trying to sort out schools for their kids.

Suresh was working hard at his demanding full time Google job and I didn’t have any experience with restaurants or construction projects or health codes or building codes.  I hadn’t worked on anything business-like for the previous 6 years after being consumed by full-time child raising and being a co-op parent (which is still the hardest thing I’ve ever done).  I didn’t really know where to start either.  Those first few days were a little surreal and a lot scary.

Six months later, on June 18, 2008, Kasa finally DID open its doors for business.  For those interested in the birth of Kasa or in opening their own restaurant one day, Tim, Suresh and I will detail some of what was involved during those grueling six months in future blog posts.

Anamika

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