Hope & Aneel Taj - Le Peep

MARCH 28, 2020 © Right Here, Right Now.

TRANSCRIBED BY NATE FOO

Hope: I feel like… I’ve been trying to put my finger on how I am doing for two to three weeks now. If I could describe how I feel, it reminds me of when my mother died, and you put yourself on autopilot to get through every day, and you have to think about what you have to do for your family. Le Peep is my family, so every single day I get up with the drive to push and encourage, and just get through to the next. It’s hard.

Aneel: You know, I am one who keeps a pretty positive attitude, not only for myself but for our whole team. Am I worried? Yes, I am very worried. More for our people than myself, and I’m looking for answers like the rest of us, as far as “what’s around the corner?”, “Is there going to be a cure?”, and “How long is it going to take?”. All the same, things that everybody is worried about right now.

Josh: Could you take me back to when you knew changes were going to be happening? What changes did you start to see?

Hope: Yeah, it was a sudden and harsh stop. We called an emergency meeting with our managers. We discussed how we were going to stay safe, went into survival mode, who can we keep, how much do we have to sell a day just to pay people and keep the lights, is it sustainable for all locations? Just a real war room situation and every day is changing. So, the managers are looking to us daily almost for “What’s tomorrow?”. People will say “Did you ever see this coming?”. No, not this particular thing, but yes. Our generation, at least Aneel and I, do not live a wild lifestyle. We’re very conservative spenders. To me, this is the worst-case scenario that you could ever imagine, but it’s always been in the back of our mind. Something. Some disaster’s around the corner. So you have to be ready, or at least be able to deal with that, and handle that as it comes. So the staff is looking to us, and I had people on that first day, I got all my kitchen people together, all my back of the house people, and we had a meeting. They’re telling me as I’m crying “It’s going to be okay. We’re going to be okay. It’s going to be okay. Don’t cry.”. I mean, the fortitude is amazing.

Josh: How has this changed the way you might do business later?

Aneel: It’s definitely teaching us how to market better. Our son, Zach, is helping us. Hope and Zach are on Instagram and Facebook right now. We’re trying to get Grubhub because we didn’t know if we could handle all those in our normal business. So now, we’re signing up for Grubhub, Ubereats, and our own online ordering. It’s definitely making us better marketers. I feel like we will appreciate every customer, everything we have going forward…

Hope: Even more.

Aneel: Even more. We’ll be thankful for whatever we get.

Hope: Or even the comments like “Oh, it’s so noisy in here”. I mean, I want to hear that again. Somebody tells me “It’s too loud in here”, somebody tells me “I can’t get a table”. Have you been here on a Sunday? Have you ever been here on a Sunday?

Josh: No

Hope: So, we seat about 80-100 folks, and we’ll feed 500 people on a Sunday in about six hours. It’s a celebratory, joyous thing, but it’s overwhelming at times trying to get people in. But my new attitude going forward will be “How much more wonderful” because in the past it was like “Oh Sunday? Oh my gosh, it’s so hard. It’s so hard” because we don’t want to let people down. I mean, we never want to let people down. I can’t wait to see our people. I mean, we’ve had customers since the beginning for almost twenty years who come every Saturday that we’re not seeing. Who come two to three times a week that we aren’t seeing. And who’s going to contract the virus? Which one of our customers are we never going to see? These are the things…

Josh: What kind of services are you still serving?

Hope: We’re doing carryout curbside, and we have a drive-thru at our 177th and Center location, which is really keeping us here. We’re so grateful for the response. Then starting last night, we opened for dinner out there 4:30-8 and it was amazing. We had two days to get the word out on social media, and it was just non-stop last night. So, we’ll be doing that every night. I don’t cook every night. People do not cook every night. I don’t know, I just think they need to get out of the house, they need to get going, I feel concerned for myself and my staff and for our customers. But at the same time, we’re trying to keep things up and going. I mean, we’ve had such a great response so why don’t we have pancakes for dinner?

Aneel: Breakfast for dinner haha.

Hope: We’re still offering the full menu. Everything is from scratch here, so the pancake batter is made here every day, so now we have to go from making, what is it like 60 quarts of pancake batter for a weekend? So now, how do you make pancakes for ten call-aheads? Like, I don’t know. We’re figuring that out. How do you keep smoked salmon fresh and rotated? You know what I’m saying? Those kinds of processes that we’ve always done daily, but trying to have them on board with “There can’t be any waste. You’ve got to make sure it’s fresh. Our customers get the same product now as they did when we were rolling through it cases and cases a week. They’ve all been so fabulous at really monitoring that. They’re all proud of their work. They’re not slinging hash in here. We’re doing it right and they know that about us and they love that about us and they love working for people that care about that. If it’s not right, we’re doing it again. We’re not sending out something that isn’t right. I think it’s teaching them a lot about why we talk about controlling costs, food costs, labor all year, all the time. Now, they can see the result of that. It’s that maybe we can keep our doors open a little bit longer because we do try to have those controls, those systems, and methods in place. To help us be successful with what the business is at the time.

Josh: As you’re providing services to your customers, are you seeing some of your regulars coming through? Have the customers been really supportive, whether it’s tipping or leaving notes? What are some things that you’ve seen with the customers?

Hope: Well last night, specifically, a woman came through the drive-thru out at Legacy and she said, “Who gets the tips?”. And my manager Sherry said, “Well, typically, the servers are splitting all of the tips”. Obviously, the managers aren’t taking tips. So this woman said, “I would like half of this fifty dollar tip, on a twenty-dollar order, to go to the kitchen staff, and the servers could split the rest”. We just had two girls on, taking orders and filling orders, and then two cooks and Aneel was cooking last night too.

Aneel: We’ve had several “hundred dollar tips” from customers over the last week, and they just want us to spread it out amongst the staff.

Josh: That’s awesome.

Hope: It’s been great. And then, there are some people we know that if they don’t tip, that’s fine. If this is what you can do, we’re here for you too. Every single day, not just now. Always. We don’t base how we feel about you on how much money you are leaving on the table.

Aneel: The support of our regular customers has been really great. I get calls from my friends who are concerned, and their friends are coming out to get something to eat. So that really helps.

Josh: Food, especially for me breakfast food, is one of the most comforting things. What’s it like being able to provide a little bit of comfort to people especially during this time?

Hope: Well it feels great because we’re food people too obviously. I also think breakfast is the most fun. Even when we’re off on a Monday, that’s the first thing we do at home is make breakfast. Or maybe we’ll hop in the car and drive out to Legacy, because we live near there, and visit our own restaurants on our own days off to eat. Not to critique or judge, but literally just to sit down and have a meal there and see the customers, see the interaction. I was at Pepperwood on Wednesday over at Dodge, and Frank came in for lunch for him and his wife Carol. “This is my third time this week!” Sometimes I think some of our older customers, we might be their only interaction all week on a regular week. We have a wide demographic of customers, but those weekday regular people that come two, three, four, times a week, they’re still coming.

Josh: There was one chef that we interviewed that said “You got to be a little crazy to open a restaurant”. Even just one of four. Why are you doing this? Where does this passion come from for you two to open the restaurant?

Aneel: Well, that’s a great question. I’ve always wanted to open my own business from a young age and work for corporate America, and my job got downsized actually. We were looking for what we can do, and I had some difficulty changing careers, changing jobs, so we decided to open a restaurant. You really have to enjoy people if you’re going to be in this business. From your staff to your customers. I think that’s what really drives us. All of the people that we’ve met and that we’ve worked with. A lot of our young Le Peepers that worked for us in high school now have children, and they bring their families in, and that’s really cool. So those kinds of things really motivate us. People watch you in their neighborhood all the time, so we get calls from realtors and sometimes you get good deals that you can’t pass up, and you say “Okay we’ll open up another”.

Hope: I will tell you, I was against the idea, and my family all said: “Don’t do it”. My mother once told me “Don’t ever open a restaurant. It’ll be the most work for the least amount of return you’ll ever do in your life. Don’t ever do it”. She passed away in 1998, and in 2001 we opened up our first location. But I was against it for a year, and I couldn’t see how we could do it. We don’t have a history in it, we don’t have any money, we don’t have experience. What are we doing? And then, with the second one, we were working together side by side in that first location. We were the managers. The team, the owners, the operators, every day with a small staff. And finally…

Aneel: We were about to kill each other.

Hope: Yeah haha. We had to move to another location so we didn’t have to work together. Because a lot of marriages will not survive this kind of stress. It’s not for someone with a weak stomach, but when you come from the backgrounds that we come from, which is not a lot, and you do what you have to do to survive. You just put one foot in front of the other every day, and he’s extremely “Whatever Aneel wants, he gets” and he is very patient and kind. But in the end, if it’s something he really, really wants to do, we’re going to do it.

Aneel: That’s me, but Hope is the one who runs the show day-to-day.

Hope: I’m very driven to please. I want things done the right way every time. I will not compromise. You can talk to anyone who has worked for me for the last eighteen years, and they would say “Yes, she’s harsh but she’s fair. She’s firm but fair. Her expectations are high”. We employ adults and we employ teenage kids, and I’ll tell you, it’s a lie that Gen-z’s or Gen-x’s don’t work hard. It’s not true. You have to have patience and the willingness to train and develop people. If you can train and develop people, teach them how and teach them why. That is the difference in someone that just works for a paycheck and someone that works for your business. You have to have people that support you and your business and understand why what they do is important. Otherwise, it’s just a revolving door of people. We don’t hire people with the idea that “Well if it doesn’t work out, we’ll just hire someone else”. We go into it with “We know you don’t know how we want things done. We need you to have an open mind, and learn it our way. You’ve got to understand that we know what we are doing, and if you trust me, you’re going to be successful here. Whatever you learn here will follow you. We have former employees that are doctors, nurses, lawyers, accountants, highly driven motivated folks who started out serving or coffee bar or busting, and it makes me so proud when they bring their families in or they text me. This morning one of them texted me. This one lady had nine siblings. Five of her siblings worked for me at Pepperwood on Dodge over the course of the last eighteen years. She has three kids now, her sister has four kids that started with me. She said “How are you guys doing? I can’t wait to get back to you”. It’s just amazing. So, it’s that connection that you are making, you understand that you are forming those folks. These young people, you’re going to be their first memory of my first job. Good habits and good work ethic, and a good attitude, and how to overcome adversity. How to keep going when customers are mean, or they didn’t get what they wanted. You bounce up. They knock you down, and you bounce back up. Failure is not an option for us. Never. Like when I was mentioning to you, at one point after the financial crash in ’08, they said “You should close that West location because it’s a failing business”. We opened it right before ’08, thinking “Oh, it’s growing West” and then it just tanked. No, that’s not an option.

Aneel: We kept it going. And that’s what our attitude is now as well. Whatever we need to do, expand our hours, shorten them on one side, to-go’s, bringing online service, possibly delivery service. Whatever we’ve got to do to make it, we’re going to try to do for us. If we find that the results aren’t good, we’ll change things around until we find the right answer. We just have that attitude to keep going.

Josh: Is there anything the community can do to help Le Peep.

Hope: Well I mean, if they feel safe coming out to get food, that’s going to be the best way for us to continue to pay our people. We want something to come back. We’re planning to be back better than ever. I keep reading these stories “We were one track for our record here and it was going to be amazing”. But now, it’s going to be amazing in another way, because we’re going to learn from this and we’re going to be better and stronger on the other side. We just want to make sure our people come with us.

Aneel: I would say just for people to be safe themselves. Practice what they’re saying. Let’s get past this. Try to take care of each other, and if they feel safe coming out and purchasing some food, which helps our people, that’ll be even better for us. The important thing is for the community to stay safe and to practice what they are telling us and hopefully, this will be behind us sooner than later. We worry a lot about the whole community, the whole country, the whole world actually right now, as many of us are in the same position. So, that’d be my thing, people practice safety and let’s get through this. I’m sure they’ll find answers soon.

Hope: We’re going to come out of this. It’s cyclical right? I would tell people that are young, that haven’t been through anything as devastating as this, there’s a rainbow. There’s one. It’ll be here soon. It will be. It’s not going to last forever. Think about what our ancestors have been through. Think about the wars. This is, I guess, our world war III, I don’t know. It feels like it a little bit. But it’s going to be okay. We have to make sure it’s okay.