As a young man working my way through school, I worked in the restaurant industry for more than a decade.
I moved from dishwasher to prep cook and line cook while I was still in high school. At 18 and still in New Jersey, I got a job as a waiter at Donald’s Bistro and was taken under the wing of a couple of career servers. I didn’t realize it back then, but this was an incredible classroom for learning business soft skills. I learned how to read people and situations at the spur of the moment, during random interactions.
Good servers, within 10 seconds, introduce themselves and the restaurant’s specials, drinks and other details. This is all while they determine if the guests in front of them want to be entertained or left alone. Are they conducting business? Having a romantic interlude? Something else? If we got it right, the evening was usually blissful and profitable. If we got it wrong, the evening was long, miserable and usually not as profitable. Once you got comfortable in the rapid-fire nature of a Friday-night rush, you felt like a million bucks. You knew when you could work a room for four or five hours nonstop. There would always be complaints—the food’s not cooked enough, cooked too much, too spicy, not spicy enough, tastes like crap, etc.—but the old pros taught me that, as long as you could work a room, dealing with the rest of it was easy.
The restaurant business is notoriously one of the toughest businesses to start and sustain anywhere in the world. According to FoodIndustry.com, 60% of restaurants fail in the first year, and 80% fail within five years. That means that just 20% of restaurants make it to mature profitability. That is a low percentage rate for any business sector. According to CNBC, the primary reason cited for failure is poor location.
Back in 2012, I had a student in my entrepreneurship class at the University of Nevada, Reno, Kurtis Tan. In addition to attending school full-time, he worked at the Asian and sushi restaurants that his dad, Truman Tan, owns, with business partner Remmy Jia. He also did digital marketing to Asian communities for the Peppermill. This was a huge learning experience, which Kurtis didn’t realize until much later. His dad had wanted him to finish his education and eventually take over the family Ijji restaurants here in Reno and Sparks. Kurtis was grateful every day for his family’s mentoring and commitment to his education.
As a kid, he had watched them work hard, with crazy schedules and hours, building their business. He had learned all facets of the restaurant business, and especially the Asian-restaurant business, but he yearned to go his own way and build his own company.
Understand that restaurant owners must be contrarians. Why? Because restaurants make money when everyone else isn’t—evenings, weekends and holidays. It is a weird lifestyle. You work until 10 or 11 o’clock or later, then sleep until 9 or 10 (if you’re not the owner!) and do it all over again. It’s a really tough routine, but there are folks like the owners of Ijji who would have it no other way.
As Kurtis says, “We sell experience.” The great food and extensive menu are bonuses. This is the recipe for success (no pun intended—really!) in arguably one of the toughest professions there is.
With the help and blessing of his family, Kurtis opened his Ijji Noodle House & Poke Don in south Reno at 199 Damonte Ranch Parkway in 2019. Yup, that 2019, before the pandemic. Kurtis and his staff spent the first few months tweaking the menu—testing various menu items and marketing strategies, which takes time. Kurtis realized that the numbers didn’t lie, and he had to make a tough decision: He decided to cut the Chinese food items off the menu to focus on ramen, poke and pho.
Initially, there were some pissed-off customers. Ijji Noodle House withstood the pressure, and Kurtis stuck to his decision. Soon thereafter, a bigger crisis hit: The entire world was feeling the sudden effects of the COVID pandemic, and most everyone had to adjust, including businesses—especially restaurants.
The Ijji restaurants were stocked with food—the walk-in fridges were full of meat, fish, poultry and veggies—that would spoil within days. Kurtis and his chef went around to each branch, gathered hundreds of pounds of food, and cooked it up. They delivered it to the area hospitals for the patients and staff to enjoy. Those donations and deliveries had Kurtis thinking about how to quickly adapt to the pandemic. He pivoted to doing only curbside pickup and delivery. It was a tough transition for the Ijji team; they fumbled through the first weeks before starting to get into a groove. Soon, they were a tuned-up machine, serving and delivering.
Once restaurants were opening back up, Kurtis realized that the new (to him) pickup/delivery piece of the business was a good one. He kept refining it. To this day, the “to-go” piece of the business is about 30%—and a very profitable piece at that, as to-go orders don’t involve service staff, table clearing or dishes to wash.
As we saw from the statistics from FoodIndustry.com, it takes five years to make it past the critical zone and into a sustainable business. The recipes for success include lots of pivots, quick adapting and focusing on the numbers. We can congratulate Kurtis and his family at Ijji Noodle House, as they’ve passed that five-year milestone. On a recent Friday night, they were packed.
Well done, Ijji, and thanks for continuing to serve the community!