Around this time last year, we were operating The Charcoal Grill as a once-a-week delivery-only #restaurant. Orders grew WoW till early June. Then, all summer, it seemed like there was no more #COVID in Toronto. Restaurants and bars were allowed to reopen, and people thronged the beaches, pools, museums, and parks. Turns out, #fooddelivery in Toronto is an anti-cyclical business; […]
Soon after I decided to run a restaurant (instead of another PM gig in tech), I got a call from a friend in San Francisco. I’m out of my mind, he said, and that this is the worst “financial decision” I could ever make! I agree, I said. It’s not a financial decision, it’s emotional. […]
Daniel Faranda read my postmortem of The Charcoal Grill, and invited me to talk about it on Foodie Nerds HQ.
When we spoke in April last year, I told you I had left tech to join a restaurant, pivoted it online, and was now “finding our place in that (new) normal”. I was both new to the service industry, and to Toronto (and still am!). Three months later, you probably saw me on Business Insider […]
I spoke with Amir Siddique on his new podcast, TechStory. It was meant to be a wide-ranging conversation, but it turned out to be a candid deep-dive on chOpaal. It’s mostly in Urdu.
Asim Fayaz, an immigrant from Pakistan, moved to Toronto from California over fears about his immigration status. He now runs an online restaurant business. Silicon Valley’s reputation as the world’s leading tech hub could be in jeopardy because of the United States’ restrictive immigration laws. Tens of thousands of immigrant tech workers have flocked to Toronto in […]
I had a fun conversation with Adeel Hasan about what it’s like running your own business, becoming selfaware of your drivers, weighing learning vs earning, and the etiquettes of snagging a “mufta”. A fair bit was in Urdu so it will be hard for non-desis to follow.
Partners in a Toronto restaurant were forced to abandon their plans when the pandemic hit and now they’re struggling to stay afloat long enough to keep their dream alive. Before April, co-owners Asim Fayaz and Zubair Dar, were in the midst of purchasing and designing a restaurant in Kensington Market. As immigrants from Pakistan and Kashmir, Fayaz and Dar planned […]
27th March, 11: 15pm. I called Zubair and Sabina: “We lost money in March again, and April is going to kill us. I’ve looked at our expenses — we need to dramatically cut costs and save cash.” The lockdown had already started in Toronto. Like every other business, we had shut down and were now isolated in […]
I’ve attended Product School events in the San Francisco Bay Area and Buenos Aires. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that they also have a chapter in Lahore. Their local organizer, Haseeb Raza, reached out on LinkedIn and asked me to speak on a trip to Lahore in 2019. Product School talks in SF […]