Moroccan restaurant Tara Kitchen began as a small stall at the Schenectady Greenmarket. Then, owner Aneesa Waheed and her husband decided to open a full-service eatery in the city in 2008. The venture eventually grew to six branches in the Capital Region, one in New York City, and one in Hyderabad in India. WAMC's Maryam Ahmad spoke to Waheed about the evolution of the business, and how she hopes to focus her time now on her family and advocacy for her fellow minority and women business owners.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Editor's note: This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Ahmad: Tell me about that first restaurant opening and what that moment was like.
Waheed: It was crazy because neither one of us really have a restaurant background. We took this old, old diner, very tiny, little diner in Schenectady, and converted it into a full-service restaurant, not really having any sense of how are we going to do full-service - how are we actually cooking for orders coming?
A market is very different, right? You have your food prepared, and people just come and you serve it and you give it to them like a buffet line. But this is tickets coming in; you have servers. I mean, obviously you've been to a restaurant before, so you know how, in theory, it's supposed to work, but what are the logistics, right? And I remember that first day before we opened, some guy was walking by and he said to me, “Nothing ever works in this location, and you're going to fail.” He's like, "This place is just kind of doomed for failures.” That was the afternoon we were supposed to open, and the night we opened, it was January 31. [A] freezing, freezing night, and the line was around the block.
I think we served lots of wrong dishes to the wrong tables. We made tons of mistakes. A lot of my friends had shown up to actually be servers. I was pregnant, heavily pregnant. It was kind of like a comedy show more than anything else, so I remember it vividly. But we got through that night. We got better the next day. We got better the day after, and we learned as we were going.
Ahmad: Tell me about this move to the city and opening a branch there. What’s the direction you're going in now?
Waheed: Well, the city location opened in 2022, so it's been there for a little bit. I fully expected it to fail, as I do all of my locations. It has not been smooth sailing, but you know, New York City is probably my first love, and I've loved that place, that city, for the entirety of my adult life, even since I was a teenager. I worked there for a very long time.
When my husband and I decided to move upstate to start the business, really, it was to start a family. We weren't necessarily thinking we were going to build these restaurants. We were thinking, "We're married, we're going to have kids. What are we going to do?" The natural place for us was up here, because my family is up here. So we came up really with that goal in mind: to raise children, and then the business was something that happened because of it. It wasn't the other way around.
When we opened in the city four years ago, the impetus really was for a way for me really to get back into a place where I feel really alive, and I felt like it would be a great place for me to grow myself professionally, personally, all of those kind of things: all the normal reasons why people move to big cities, right?
When my kids got into high school, my oldest got into high school last year, it kind of brought a lot of stuff to the forefront for us. They're going to be out of high school in like three years, and what does that mean for us as a couple, as professionals? And are we still living in Niskayuna? What are we going to do with this house, with the dog, with the yard?
It kind of happened very fast without us even thinking about it. Last year, the family kept having a lot of conversations around what does it look like for us after four years? And honestly, the kids were like, "Mom, we really want to be in the city." Then we were like, "Well, do you want to do high school in the city?" They just kind of went berserk with this idea that they could do high school in the city because they really were thinking they would do college in the city.
I said, well, you know, the more time I'm spending in the city, I want the kids to be closer to me. So it wasn't a decision that happened overnight, or it's not a decision based on numbers and financials and you know whether things are good, bad, ugly, any of that stuff. It really was a decision based on what did the four of us want to do as people and as a family unit.
Ahmad: What would you say has been the biggest challenge in running these multiple branches and bringing this cuisine to the Capital Region, and also now to New York City?
Waheed: There are many, many challenges. You know, like I'll try to answer them one at a time. You know, like bringing this cuisine to any city, any part of the world, the biggest challenge always is the education of that - Moroccan food, "What is it? You know, where does it come from? Does it have curry? I don't eat spicy. I don't do this. I don't do that."
It's not a cuisine that has a benchmark everywhere you go. Even in the city, people still come to my restaurant and they tell me, "We've had Moroccan food, but we've never had this." There's a complete lack of availability of information for this cuisine, so it's a lot of education that we have to do, an extreme amount of it. That's always a hurdle: customer acquisition, customer conversion. It's a very slow process.
When you're running a restaurant, at the end of the day, it does not matter what kind of restaurant it is, the food does not matter. It's still a business, right? So, you're constantly looking at the logistics, the metrics, the numbers. You know, are you hitting your target digits? Are you doing all the things right? The correct vendors, the correct employees, keeping up rules, regulations, all of that stuff.
It's its own little universe that you're constantly handling. And then, the other really, really, really huge part of the equation is your family. How do you have a work-life balance? How do you manage things? My husband and I work in the business together. So how do you manage that relationship?
There's no one time when all of it works well. At this very moment in life, with my kids being in high school, teenage girls going into colleges, I really, really feel like I really need to lean heavily into being mom and nurturing this phase of their life, so I'm making decisions very much geared towards what that means.
Ahmad: What are you most excited about going into this new phase in terms of planning to expand the options in the restaurants?
Waheed: I think it's great because I also am shocked that I've spent almost two decades here building what we've built, and it's been phenomenal. It's been beyond anything I I could have expected, but I'm also at the same time ready for a whole new career and change.
I really want to get into advocacy, and I want to do some stuff that helps minorities and women in business. I feel very passionate about those kind of things: diversity and inclusion. I'm working towards doing something with that. I want to do a new concept of Tara Kitchen that we are working on. It's taking us a while because it's something so new, which we're hoping to launch in the city. That's in the works.
I'm also going to be doing some traveling. So we're gonna do culinary tours to Morocco, and we're hoping to build that into something that becomes a big part of my life: maybe do some culinary tours to India, maybe do some culinary tours to Sri Lanka, all these places that are kind of near and dear to me; but also part of this world that I like to live in, which is food and culture and exploration.
I honestly couldn't tell you what's going to work and what's not going to work: you throw a bunch of balls in the air, see what sticks, and then you go from there.
Ahmad: You mentioned advocacy and that work. Why is that important to you to do?
Waheed: It's very, very important to me because I feel like there's a lot of things that are wrong, and most people won't say anything about it. Since I was a child, my dad used to always call me "rebel without a cause." I would always be the one would be who would be [asking], "But why? But why? But why does it have to be this way?" And my dad was like, "Oh my God, shut up."
I've overcome so many barriers financially: being a female, being a Muslim, being a woman, being a minority and being a mother, being all of these things, and I feel extremely fortunate about it. I feel like a lot of women will not speak up for fear of whether it's actually going to change anything or not.
I teach my kids the same thing. I truly believe that if you can do something to make something better for the other guy, even if it's not going to be for you, it's your duty to do it. I feel very strongly about that, personally. So that's why, you know, there are lots of issues. So whatever I can do, you know, maybe it's just one thing, but it helps me feel like I'm giving back to a community that does so much for me.
