Kellie and Mike Osler - Oasis Falafel
MARCH 25, 2020 © Right Here, Right Now.
Kellie
I know for me I’m the type of person that deals with an emergency pretty well and I go on to, “Okay, what needs to be done. What are we going to do? What are the action steps? How can we move forward? And then I’ll feel about it later.” I made it for about a week and then the feelings began to arise because the first week we were trying to do curbside with a bare-bones staff and then it started to hit, feeling a little grumpy. You know, why are we doing this? Can we make it happen? Feeling a little nervous now...is it responsible? That's a piece of it too. Is it best for our family, our staff, our community? So I think that’s when it really started to all hit me emotionally after that first week of, Okay, well this is what we’re going to do...and we put that into place, and then that went into place...and it got harder and harder. And I’m watching everybody else on social media complaining about what’s next on Netflix and I ‘m still grinding, even more, it feels like and trying to hang on. So it was a balance, that’s when about after a week when we started to think, what is really next? What's sustainable? Because every single day was a mass of new information. We can’t plan...and I’m a planner (Laughs) and so it felt like we were winging every day...
Mike
And that’s still kind of where we are at though, anything could change at any given time as for as to whether we can continue to do what we are doing or want to. I agree with Kellie, I’m good in a crisis, I think restaurants are always kind of on the verge of crisis mode, we’re always putting out fires, we’re always kind of scattered and pushing through. So, to answer your questions... I’m okay, right now...at the time of this interview, fine. We’re focusing on the health of our family. The first week, the week they announced the canceling of the College World Series, so two weeks ago on Thursday. Going into that weekend...that’s when...I remember Isa from Modern Love said that all of the servers will be wearing gloves when we serve you, that alone was like “Woah, really? That's what we have to do to roll right now?” and they were still dining, that Friday they were still dining inside. Monday was when we decided to do carry out only, we just didn’t want people to be sitting lingering, we’ll make some food for you, in and out - boom. So during that time, at first we’re like, “Cool we can knock this out”...we scrapped the condiment bar, a matter of a couple of days it was just like “This is not sustainable” and restaurant sales started going down. So for us, it was a balance of “what can we do?”
We need to figure out as business owners this is our only job, as a family, this is our source income. So we had to figure out how to keep a roof over our heads. Figure out what's best for our staff both in terms of their safety and offering them hours, can we afford to offer them hours? Not really anymore, not the way we used to. But we don’t want to leave them hanging because they’re our extended family and that’s the best part about owning a small business, I’ve worked corporate places, but I’ve always appreciated the family-run mom and pop shops. And that’s where we are now so, that's why we came up with our family-style catering, our restaurant was definitely suited for that and can offer that in the time being.
Kellie
We have a couple of Pre-made kits that people can customize a little bit. A variety of different sizes. We have a couple of clever names like the quarantine cuddle kit, it’s just enough for social distancing and Netflix. (laughs) And then we’ve got an Oasis survival kit that’s basically sandwiches for a couple of days, we’ve got a family kit. We have a fiendish stockpile that’s groceries for days basically.
Mike
For a couple of hundred bucks, we’ll stock your pantry for you and include a roll of toilet paper, just a little incentive (Laughs) and obviously we’re maintaining a sense of humor through all of this.
We have an opportunity to really serve the public and people need to eat from their home and that’s why we’re taking advantage of having the commercial kitchen in place and the means to produce food that people want to eat and we’re happy to deliver it to them.
Kellie
So they don’t have to come to us. That’s one challenging thing about being downtown, there is a blessing and a curse being downtown. We have a great lunch service because we have a lot of offices, in particular, we also have a sense of nightlife and community here on the weekend evenings. But the workers go away, the entertainment goes away, and you’re too far from the epicenter of where most people live, cause they don’t want to go downtown. So that’s a limitation for us to some degree. So if we can take the food out to west Omaha, Papillion, or wherever then we’ll do it. That’s fine. Right now we can’t run service with that, and that may change. But for now, that’s how we had to pivot to feel sustainable as well as our retail side. We already have a retail schedule with our eight grocery stores and it’s important that we keep that. Can we survive off of that only? No, we’re not at that point, so that’s why it’s important that we need to do something else and to us, the family meals from our family to their family during a really difficult time of uncertainty for everyone, it just felt like the right thing to do for now.
Josh - What grocery stores are your products in right now in case people want to support you when they grocery shop?
Mike
We’re in half of the Hy-Vee stores in the metro right now, Natural Grocers. We had products on the UNO campus but that got shut down.
Kellie
So we lost that weekly sale as well. But we were unique and lucky hopefully in the long term, we have a few things working against about being new and still having people having no idea of who we are, so we don’t have a huge following that can carry us. But we diversified a little bit. We had retail, we had campus food, we had catering, we already had our delivery service up and going, we already had the ability to do curbside just like that.
Mike
And most people already offer to carry out but for us, having street food, it was decided to go right out the door.
Kellie
So that was a really easy change for us early on. It was like, “Oh we’ll fall back on the things we already do,” Instead of having to re-invent the wheel and say “Oh we have never done delivery and now we have to learn how to use Grubhub”.
Mike
We are so grateful to have Hy-vee. We got our foot in the door with Hy-Vee early on with one store, practiced that, this was a year ago, and come last fall we started to expand with a couple here and there and then, boom, we wanted to get in all the Hy-Vee’s and we’re halfway there, but we’ve established ourselves at the stores that we are at and all their accumulated sales are like having a nice busy day at the restaurant every week and an extra day. So, if people are aware that they’re buying a local product at the grocery store it really helps us out tremendously, so we are planning on continuing to push that and it helps the grocery stores too, they want the product on their shelf, you know its a symbiotic relationship. Plus the local contribution, as long as we are able to do it we’re going to keep doing it.
Natural Grocers central put up a sign up supporting us and other local products by putting up a sign saying our local businesses need us so support local. One of our other stores, 90th and Center, just asked us to test out some of our lunch packs along with the hummus. So some of the stores there is going to be an Ebb and flow in the retail aspect because people are bulk buying, so some are buying the 16 oz hummus is selling more as opposed to the 8 oz hummus so its a little different. But other people are afraid to go into the stores, rightfully so. And so we’re trying to push really hard so we can get it into the Hy-Vee aisles, but all of it requires time and effort.
Mike
But that first weekend when people were out buying all of the toilet paper, we instantly saw a boom in sales. Natural Grocers Central literally doubled their order the following week and we’re still seeing those sales sill being sustained.
Kellie
I think as a country we’re all feeling some grief and that comes in different stages and shows up in different ways. And I think that we take turns thankfully, it works out nicely that we take turns having our down moments of “Holy crap, is there going to be business at the end of this?” or “Man, this sucks”.Because we were on such a great upswing, we as Oasis, we were in our slow months outdoing our busiest months last year and we had all of these amazing things we had built, these events we did last year, I mean earth day was really big. Orpheum district is trying to brand and do a block party, we’ve been working on that for over the summer and MAHA we were going to rock that again and we don’t know what’s happening with that. We had all of this momentum and optimism. We were anticipating a really lucrative summer. So that there were less stress and fear of “Can I take a paycheck? can I pay off things”? All of that stress.
Mike
We made ends meet, I mean we’re still a new business, but as for our cash flow we learned a lot in a short amount of time and we were ready to step it up, so you know, personally it was a big bummer but you have to shake that off and get back to work. And because we have that foundation, and it all comes from the support of the community. Everyone that’s tasted our food, liked us, wants more, tells their friend about it...we love what we do here, and I’m not saying it was effortless, it was naturally fitting...we worked our butts off. And being from Iowa and Nebraska, that midwest work ethic is so well known like if there’s anything, we come from a history of being farmers and being in Omaha, just like an epicenter for trade and travel, those are the kind of things that are really getting us through here.
Kellie
I think the sense of community is a big piece.
Mike
It doesn’t come as a surprise but at the same time, it never ceases to amaze me. The outpouring of support. Even our own staff, when we said there are no hours right now they were like “we understand, what can we do to help? let me know when you need me.” And every one of them has a job waiting for them when they get back, we love our staff.
Mike
Because we had to cut our hours on our staff to basically nothing, she and I are doing a lot more of those things like sweeping the store, as we did in the very beginning when there were just four of us. So now we’re doing all the prepping and taking all the orders and doing all the cleaning, like hats off to the kitchen and restaurant staff at every single restaurant who bust their butt. And I think maybe as a whole, you see that we’re considered essential workers now, grocery store workers are essential. The whole debate about minimum wage at a federal level being 15 dollars an hour for Mcdonald's employees like you can’t knock the fact that there's a reason we got excellent on our health inspection. So the routine over and over and just the fact that, especially with our grocery store sales, when we were slower during those months in the winter, lunch comes and goes, we have a couple of hours left, we’re still staying busy and we’re still refilling everything. So the fact that right now I’m able to go to work, like just having the work to do, that’s something you may have taken for granted before. And now there are people at home that have either lost their job or doing what they can from their home offices. I will never take for granted waking up in the morning and doing your thing. Especially as a small business owner and entrepreneur, like the fact that you know I’m no expert but it’s pretty clear how this could wipe you off the map overnight. Especially started out but even the well-established ones. It’s crazy to think about how fragile it is.
I’ve been working in restaurants for a long time. I went to school in Iowa City, so did Kellie and that’s where all of this kind started with Oasis if you know the history original restaurant and the owners there. They closed their doors in Iowa City. They’re still doing their hummus production on a different level for grocery stores but they closed the restaurant.
Kellie
They closed before we did and it was kind of a shock. Mike
I don’t want to take for granted, and maybe I was, but people love this food for a reason and we want to make it for them. Because there is no replacement for us, and the same to the other restaurants like Dante’s for example, no one's gonna have that same pizza.
Kellie
I think it’s hard because he works a lot more hours than I do, so on Thursday, Friday, and Saturdays when we’re open first and second shift, he’s here so he pulls three doubles plus those several days, but the reality of it is it’s a hard balance of family life and personal life and that was part of the decision to pull back the way that we have for the right way so he could be home a little bit more. So we could have a scheduled sustainable something for just he and I to do so that when we can decide to pull staff back on we can afford to pay them, which we look forward to greatly, but when we’re able to do that.
Because we are restaurant owners and an entrepreneurial family we are slightly used to, prepared for, immune to, the fact that we are worried whether or not our job will be here. We always have that nagging, “We have to make this work or it could go away,” differently than someone who shows up to their office job every day. We already burden that already, this has made that intensify.
Mike
Being able to provide a little comfort through food is everything like it was, to begin with so if we can do that even on a smaller scale we will make it happen.
Kellie
I had to call a customer and it was just a small little order and nothing crazy but he was so grateful that we were willing to deliver to him. Because a lot of people are out of our normal delivery radius as is, so the fact that we’re bringing them food they’re like “wow, you’ll bring it to me?!” and this was a small order, it wasn’t anything huge. He probably could have gotten all of this stuff from Hy-Vee or Natural Grocers but he came to us and he stopped me and specifically said, “ I just have to tell you, Kellie, you run a really amazing business, like the food is really great but I come back for the business”. And those little tidbits, we’ve had several people buy gift cards from us, those little things remind us why...again we have moments where we’re like “is it worth it? you know, are we going to be okay at the end?” And it reminds us why we have to be open. We have to be open to us, the staff, for the customers. But we haven’t even seen the worst yet, it’s hard because we are anticipated what we don’t know, and yet what we kind of know from seeing it from other places, we haven’t seen the worse yet so the need for in-home food is just gonna get stronger and stronger over the next several weeks. And the uncertainty of everything right now, what we do know, what is certain is people need to eat. So if we can give back like we’re taking donations so we can give back to hospitals, we regularly like donating to St. Francis House as much as we can too. So that’s one of the things, when people get the family kits they can offer donations and we will match it and we’re going to rotate it to different hospitals.
Mike
And donate food, not just collecting a pool of money but like, everyone chips in when they order, we’ll match that, translate it to a catering order, it’ll cover the cost of the food. And then like what I mentioned before, any of the perishable items that we would normally go through every week routinely, I want to do everything I can for the food not to end up in the compost. All the perishables, for instance, I had a pan of lamb that was skewered up ready for service, service was 86’d, which means we don’t do it anymore, so I turned it into the soup and dropped it off at St Francis House. They need it more than ever too, and their staff for that matter.
Kellie
more and more people, if there is unemployment and things like that will have need. And we’re about, obviously, we don’t have a business if people don’t pay us for our food but also we are very community-minded and want to give back as much as possible. It’s not uncommon, I mean we’re downtown, the homeless populations downtown is something you can easily turn a blind eye to, but it’s not uncommon with one of us walking in and saying, “what can I throw together to take out to somebody”. Or we have people coming in asking if we have anything and we always hook them up.
Mike
It’s in our nature. We are inspired by many people who have done similar things before us so we want to keep giving back with no thought of return. I mean, if you like the food, we like the food, we feel like we struck gold with this hummus and this whole menu so the idea of money coming in, its a tool to build. How can we keep growing with the best interest of everybody in mind.
Kellie
We’ve always been grateful to our partners because they trust us and have a really great business relationship and we’re very really lucky. And I think even more now we just feel very lucky to have such great mentors and role models because they’ve always given back to Iowa City. It’s just really nice to know that even though distance literally separates us now, and even this will continue to separate us for who knows how long because no one is going to be traveling, that we know that we have partners in this and whatever decisions need to be made whether it’s negative or positive we have support and encouragement like they’re proud of us and when they tell us we’re doing a good job, we need to hear that because we’re tired and take turns being scared or pissed off, so we’re really lucky and even more so now very grateful for the partnership we have with our partners.
Mike
Which is where all of this amazing food comes from, to begin with.