I liked to come up with crazy ingredients. My tongue gets addicted to flavors. I wouldn't say I'm a chef, but my number one experience on earth is to taste things. Do you have a favorite sandwich to make for yourself? When I go out to eat, nine out of ten times those leftovers will end up in a sandwich. I went to Baby Blues the other night and had barbecue brisket, cornbread, creamed spinach and chicken wings. So I piled it all up and added dirty sauce and threw everything on Dutch Crunch bread.
What's the secret to your famous dirty sauce? We used to answer that question differently every time. We've said unicorn farts, fairy dust, love potion, crack cocaine. We bake it into the bread and we also spread it as mayo. Two years ago, you famously got evicted for being too popular in your neighborhood. Did that experience sour you on running a business in San Francisco? It didn't sour me on San Francisco. Some of the greatest moments we've had here give us hope that we should keep going.
Like the last day of the original shop. People came out in droves. The last sandwich went out at a. There were drum circles in our line, a group of people sprayed champagne. The line was people long. You wouldn't wait in a line that long at 11 o'clock at night because you wanted a really good sandwich.
It was much more personal. No matter what happens with the city, at least we know we have the people on our side. Your sandwiches are so coveted that customers who call in for pickup orders are willing to wait as long as four hours myself included!
How have you learned to address that demand? After hiring a CEO in , Shehadeh has taken on a role centered on fun, strategy and branding as the company ballooned to a national sandwich brand with dozens of locations spanning the country. From there we had to get creative and we immediately went into launching free delivery on our app.
What were your delivery options prior to the pandemic? Being founded San Francisco, we had the blessing of launching with Uber Eats, Postmates and DoorDash back when they themselves were infant companies, so we were already on the path to be able to work with this environment. The game changer for us was when we started doing the delivery through our own app. We started doing five-dollar Fridays or five-dollar Fri-Yay sandwiches.
We started doing themed sandwiches based on Tiger King or what have you and only making them available on the app. If you wanted this sandwich, you had to buy it on the app. When you look forward to recovery, what would you hope the city would do to make starting a small business easier? I knew I needed to pay my taxes. I knew I had to get a health permit and things like that. Three years later almost, we get closed down for not having a restaurant permit.
In the realm of all possibilities, I would have never thought that was an actual thing. And if you do need that, why does that take so long? From a brand new build to opening up a store we could do it in six months. Our location in Glendale, Arizona, which used to be a different sandwich chain, we were able to open in 45 days. And this is a good idea … All these sandwiches are good ideas. Thanks to Yelp defaulting to its San Francisco restaurant page when accessed internationally, his shop became a destination for travelers.
People from Australia all the way to Italy wanted both a sandwich and a photo with Shehadeh. But by the time the original shop closed down in , he had already expanded his burgeoning sandwich empire to Redwood Shores and Stanford University — and more were on the way.
These days, Shehadeh is no longer the CEO of the sandwich chain. He relinquished the title in , and he prefers things this way, leaving him to the more enjoyable aspects of the business, such as doing interviews like this one , sandwich approvals more on that later and solving his Dutch crunch dilemma. Now with Ike's, we make it specifically so your mouth, it doesn't get injured. I hate everything about the East Coast, traditional Reuben. And the first time I ever made a Reuben, the Ike's way, I dreamt about it that night — and I ate it the next day and I ate it the day after that.
There are, of course, the celebrity sandwich collaborations, like the ones he did with Steph Curry, Madison Bumgarner and Marshawn Lynch, for instance, plus they also allow employees to design a sandwich after five years of service, as a thank you. But to make it onto the sandwich board, or, the official printed menu, Shehadeh says he has to want to eat it again after the first sandwich.
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