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A podcast that spotlights the women reshaping the hospitality industry, breaking barriers, and carving their paths in the ever-evolving world of restaurants, food, and community.
Sara Abernethy (00:41)
Hello everybody and happy launch day. thrilled to introduce you to Molly Irani, my empath sister from Asheville, North Carolina
Molly is the co-founder and chief culture officer of the James- Beard award winning Chai Pani restaurant group in Asheville. They have several concepts, the original being Chai Pani, which is an Indian street food experience, Spice Walla, a spice company, and Bhoti which is also opening a location in Ironworks in Raleigh later this year. Molly, you'll hear the story about how I met her a few years ago.
I just see so much of myself in her and her story. She works with her husband. She's entirely bootstrapped. We have a lot in common persona wise and she just recently launched her first memoir called Service Ready. So I had the amazing opportunity to interview her at the Durham Hotel on her book tour to talk about her new memoir, what the concept of mind-blasting hospitality means and how building a meaningful culture is the foundation upon which all of their success was built.
Sara Abernethy (02:04)
One more quick note, just an FYI really. My Bluetooth mics for this interview went out, like right as Molly was finishing her last story. So right at the end of this recording, you will hear the audio do a pretty significant record scratch. I am so sorry about that. the story is definitely worth finishing. So just a heads up.
Sara Abernethy (02:24)
So please enjoy my conversation with Molly Irani!
Sara Abernethy (02:30)
It's happening!
Well, good evening, everyone. Thank you all so, so much for being here. But most of all, thanks to Molly, the wonderful Molly Irani for being here tonight. I'm so excited for this conversation with you. Me too. We are here to celebrate Molly's newly released memoir, Service Ready.
Molly Irani (02:57)
Whoop whoop!
Sara Abernethy (02:59)
And I do hope that if you have not yet purchased a copy that you will not be walking out empty handed and that you'll visit our friends over at Letters in the corner to procure your copy. Another detail before we get started and a note of gratitude, your presence here is supporting a scholarship for a future attendee of Fab.
the Fab Women's Conference in Charleston. This takes place in June every year in support of women in food and beverage, food and beverage fab, ha ha ha, get it? But also, it's also females and business.
Molly Irani (03:37)
I never understood that that's what...
Okay, we'll see there's lots of different versions of it.
Sara Abernethy (03:43)
I know, I know. ⁓ Of which Molly was a keynote speaker last year, where she got us all turnt saying, we ride it off.
Molly Irani (03:52)
It's time. We're riding at dawn. We're riding at dawn, women.
Sara Abernethy (03:55)
So thank you all for your presence ⁓ and for supporting a future attendee. Professional development opportunities in the hospitality industry are very few and far between. It's mostly F around and find out if you know you know. So we thank you for that and we thank you for being here.
Molly Irani (04:12)
Thank you all.
Sara Abernethy (04:14)
Also, I guess I should tell you who I am if you don't know. My name is Sarah Abernethy. I am a Raleigh native. I am a restaurateur entrepreneur mom of two. We have two restaurant locations in the area, Why Hill Kitchen and Brewing in downtown Raleigh and Glass House Kitchen in Research Triangle. Perhaps you've been, perhaps you will go. We'd love to see you there.
And I, like Molly, am in business with my partner in love, life, and parenting. ⁓ And I also started a podcast series called Her Seat at the Table. So here's my cute little cue cards. So we are recording tonight's conversation to be a future episode of Her Seat at the Table, which our new season will premiere on Monday, May 4th.
I hope you tune in. ⁓ The through line really is that I wish I had had these conversations available to me when I was starting out eight years ago, and I really wish I had had this book eight years ago. So you, by sharing your story so openly and vulnerably, you are giving a huge gift to our community.
Molly Irani (05:34)
Thank you, Sarah. That was what I felt. I just felt like I was, I wrote the book that I felt like I needed. In part,
you know, our takeaways and the things that we learned over the 16 years of being in business, but also the true messy parts of running a business and particularly starting a business with my life partner and a group of friends. And it's not an easy thing to do, but it turned out to be a really wonderful thing to do. And I felt that that messy story wasn't reflected in print. And I would read other books.
and feel inspired by them, but also feel like, well, good for you that you have a director of magic budget, because I don't know how to balance payroll. it was like wanting to have representation in book form of what the real gritty food and beverage behind the scenes version of the story is and how we worked through that to reach.
Sara Abernethy (06:36)
It's real. Your experience is real. And ⁓ it is unusual, I think. It's very, very special and it is a story worth telling. I texted Molly this while I was reading it, but there was a point where I threw the book across the room because I thought, did I fucking write this myself? I mean, it just so much of ⁓ the journey, we have so many parallels. ⁓ We stumbled upon it because we have a
I'll say adorably insane partner that we love dearly who said this is I'm middle-aged and this is my new life dream ⁓ So I do share that in common with you ⁓ the space chose us our first restaurant space chose us a second generation restaurant space that ⁓ We it was irresistible we couldn't turn down the opportunity and we too had no money and it was just so
Validating to hear somebody say, yeah, I maxed out all my personal credit cards to do this. That's how I did it. And we got a seller finance loan. Right. So I just again, I thank you. I thank you. I thank you. And I will say the first time I met Molly was at the James Beard Foundation Financial Literacy Summit, which takes place in New York every January. Molly gave a talk about she was there to give a talk about CPG and the journey of spice walla.
another wonderful venture. ⁓ She was giving this beautiful presentation. I was coming out of a very miserable year. I had had my first child. We had just opened Glass House Kitchen. And I had been through really, really dark moments in my marriage and as a leader.
I mean, I just felt like I was fucking up left and right everywhere doing everything wrong despite having all the best intentions. And I hear your story and it's so like mine. And then the slide comes up, Oprah's favorite things. And I just like crumbled into sobbing hysterics in the back of the room because you showed me that victory was an option. And I did not know at that point that it was.
So you did it, girl.
Molly Irani (09:00)
Woo. Thank you, Sarah. Thank you, Sarah. Well, I knew we were going to be friends when I looked up and I saw this woman bawling and I really wasn't talking about anything particularly moving. I was talking about finances and. It's our tins and all the problems. James is here. He was the guy that helped us start the spice while adventure. So he knows all about that. But it I feel like I saw something in your face.
Sara Abernethy (09:13)
and square tens.
Molly Irani (09:30)
out there in the audience having this emotional reaction to me sharing my story, which was basically just the true version of how we started not knowing what we were doing and how we figured it out along the way and that the version of success that we see sometimes when somebody wins a big award or gets an Oprah's favorite things, I think we project an imaginary story onto those successes.
And the truth is that many of those businesses started just like ours and are going through challenges all the time. So when I saw your face in the audience having that emotional reaction, it was one of the moments that I decided that I needed to write this book. Because I was like, people need to know that this is.
This is normal in business for it to be hard and challenging. It doesn't mean you're doing something wrong. It means we need to be sharing our information and helping each other so that we can all figure out the how. How do you turn the corner and how do you make it successful and how do you find a way to manage businesses that's not breaking you?
Sara Abernethy (10:33)
How did you approach the decision to write this book? And was it cooking within you for a long time? Did you feel it sort of tapping on your shoulder for years and years?
Molly Irani (10:45)
Yeah, I had this sort of crazy collection of photocopied pages from other people's books where I would say like, okay, read this section of this book, but then forget the rest of it because it really doesn't apply to us. And then read these 10 pages. I had just had this collection. And I realized that they were getting more and more outdated as more and more time went on. And I felt like our industry in general just didn't have enough
of the guide, of the how, when it comes to things like how do you build a team that people want to be a part of? How do you hold on to people and grow them into positions of leadership? How do you build a culture around an ethos that has to do with taking care of people? And there's a lot of how-to guides in terms of like how to be dazzling in hospitality or how to.
Sara Abernethy (11:41)
You
Molly Irani (11:43)
Exactly.
Sara Abernethy (11:44)
have a guide to doing that you give your team.
Molly Irani (11:47)
Yeah,
yeah, it's like basics, like, you know, learning basics, like deep breaths when you're running a line in a kitchen. But I feel like those how to guides had been forming and building in our collection of our training over the years as we learned our way through it. And I kept feeling this sort of tap on the shoulder when I would have interactions like I had with you in New York that day where we hugged afterwards and we both cried and we were like.
Yeah, this shit is hard and we need to be sharing our stories openly so that we can be helping each other learn from each other's hard lessons and mistakes. And the actual way of writing the book though turned out to be a really wonderful permission slip for me to extract myself up and out of operations so that I wasn't so weeded by the day to day work. And really honestly,
16 years in, I had a pretty well-developed muscle around inserting myself into things that I didn't really need to be in anymore. Preach. Right, it becomes a habit. Yeah. And I had several failed attempts of mentoring people into positions of leadership, and then something would happen, and they would move on, and I'd be like, well, OK, now I've got to find another person. And that happened for many years. But ultimately, I started to leave town and go away.
in order to deep dive and really think about what was the content of the book that most needed to be shared. What was the parts of our story of 16 years of high drama? mean, restaurants are high drama, so there was lots of material to pick from. It was more like, what are the ones that are relevant that really feel important to share? And a lot of that was a decision to share our personal story too, because our backgrounds, we started a restaurant with no money, not knowing what we were doing.
and no professional training. So we had to rely on our backgrounds in order to inform what we built. So deciding how to share that, how much of that to share was a process and I would go out of town for these sort of trips for a few weeks at a time and my child had flown the nest, she was in college, our business was at a different phase where leadership positions were getting strong enough where.
the culture of the business, was really what I was focused on, had legs and could stand on its own. And it allowed me to be out of operations long enough to realize that my highest, greatest contribution to the business is writing this book so that now our teams on the ground can help us hold ourselves accountable to our goals. It's like.
It's all in there, what we're trying to do. And so now it's a way of everyone on my team knowing what those goals are and as much information as I can provide on how to reach them. yes.
Sara Abernethy (14:42)
This was the thing that got you out of day to day.
Wow. Mine was pushing out a baby. So your sounds way more fun.
Molly Irani (14:52)
happened
on an island in Greece so it definitely mine was not your
Sara Abernethy (14:56)
Your book writing. Well, the birth of this book. Not your birth of a human. Yes, that sounds much more agreeable. man, now I want to take this in so many directions. ⁓ You and Merwin obviously had different careers before coming into this. Chris and I did too. We were theater kids, right? So we met in San Diego at a professional theater.
called La Jolla Playhouse, if anyone's been to beautiful La Jolla. ⁓ One of us is an onstage person, I'll let you guess who that is. One of us is a backstage person who would rather walk into oncoming traffic than speak in front of people. ⁓ Honestly, who has said the words, my husband has said the words, can we just have systems that are so good that people don't have to talk to each other? And I'm like, okay, I don't think that's realistic.
⁓ But we have been in business for eight years and I still to this day have trouble claiming the title of restaurateur. Still to this day. And I have two that are open. ⁓ Can you talk a little bit about your experience claiming your identity?
Molly Irani (16:13)
Yeah, think we, so when we started our first restaurant, I won't get into the whole story, because it's all in the book, and it was a very dramatic story, because we didn't know what we were doing, and we didn't have any money. And we got really lucky that we started with a group of people who stayed with us and started to grow with us. And
Because of that, after about a year of absolute and utter chaos, I think I put this in the book, but now I'm forgetting what the number was. James, do you remember this? and James was one of our, say, raise your hand here, say hi, hi everybody. I'm putting you on the spot. James was one of our day one hires. And I remember you telling me when I was collecting information for this book that after we fired our head chef,
you and Daniel recorded a certain amount of overtime on the wall of the dungeon downstairs. Do you remember how many hours it was? It was something like 80 hours of overtime within the pay period that the two of them collectively had. In seven days, yeah. So it was an insane time. because of the very good natures of these people that we got lucky enough to find,
Sara Abernethy (17:05)
I remember reading about that.
Molly Irani (17:28)
We just laughed our way through it instead of burning out, freaking out, or running away. And we've managed like that for about a year. And I didn't think of myself as a restaurateur. I was just trying to help my husband follow this dream that he had, which was a complete midlife crisis. It was a total turn of our lives. It was like not the direction that we were headed and.
financial collapse happened of 2008. We had just moved from San Francisco to Asheville, North Carolina. We wanted to stay. We needed to figure out something to do. So he had this middle of the night vision. We decided to do this business. I am totally going to break these two up. Marijuana and Nick sitting next to each other, two wild entrepreneurs who have all started businesses exactly the same way. Your story also. ⁓
All that is to say, about a year in, James, I don't know if you remember this day or not, but we decided to take a staycation and go to a hotel room for the day and write down on big post-its around the walls of the room everything that we had built that was special and everything that wasn't working. And it was really, really long lists of things. was like.
We didn't have a POS. We didn't know what we were doing. We weren't charging the right amount for food. I mean, there was a lot of things that were broken. But we also acknowledged that we had touched lightning in a bottle, that there was something magical about this restaurant. People were drawn to it. And we wanted to identify what was the magic? What was hooking people to come and have this experience, even though it was kind of bumpy?
in the early days, what was the hook that was pulling them in? So we named all those things and those ideas of what we had built kind of accidentally without really knowing, we were just going by instinct of our upbringings that had informed how to manage people well, but also this idea that we just believed we could do things differently. We believed we wanted to rewrite the rules.
We believed in this idea that we could color outside the lines of how restaurants are run and figure out a better way to do things. Mind you, in 2008, our industry did not have really great models. So it wasn't really that radical of an idea to think, well, what if we started coming up with more humanistic ways of managing this business?
Yet it felt radical because when we would try to present these ideas to our people that had much more experience in the industry than we did, they would look at us like, well, that's not how things are done. yes, and we would say, yes, that is exactly the point. That is not how things are done and we are doing it differently.
Sara Abernethy (20:20)
I've heard that so many times.
at
you and it's obvious that your experience outside the industry is actually a huge strength for you because you do look at things differently. And it's harder to say that to yourself. I think it's easy to see that in other people. But you have business expertise, have sales, you have organizing, and then you also just have your, I call it a multi-layered croissant, both of your upbringings, right? Like it's just like such a rich tale.
Actually, one of the things that I really didn't expect to find in here was your and Mervin's love story and how you orbited around each other your whole lives. When you guys read this, it's gonna blow your mind. I mean, I think it is a real lesson and you cannot miss what is meant for you, really. ⁓ So to the tune of that hotel room.
is that with all the post-its on the wall, this is where we pulled this concept of mind-blasting hospitality, is it not?
Molly Irani (21:38)
Yeah, was basically, yes, definitely. In the sense that, I don't know if we had actually named it that at that moment yet, but we were looking at these post-its, these giant post-its on the wall of all the problems, and we were also seeing a lot of magic named in those post-its. And from that, we started to organize, okay, this is what we want to never lose.
we started to organize ourselves around that. the key principles that I sort of organized this book around are those things. They were the same things in year one that we identified as this is the thing that's making the magic. One of those things was the way we were trying to elevate hospitality in a very fast casual ⁓ happy chaos setting is the way that we like to think about it because ultimately our restaurants are representing Indian culture. We're trying to transport people from the
street outside to a street in India. And we wanted to share the sort of cacophony of noise and sound and smell and joy and everything that you experienced. thank you. Exactly. One of the things that we were dialing in on that really helped
Sara Abernethy (22:44)
It's sensory experience.
Molly Irani (22:55)
set our concepts apart was this idea of mind-blasting hospitality. It's just what we call it. There's lots of different words out there. Hi, darling. But it's this idea that regardless of what level restaurant you're running or what level environment you're managing, meaning like it doesn't have to be a fine dining, white tablecloth environment to reach for excellence.
We were striving to go above and beyond to surprise and delight our guests with how much we cared about them. And we were trying to sort of reverse engineer that goal within a very high volume, fast paced restaurant environment. And so we had to look for the spaces.
in between and find the unexpected moments to provide that level of hospitality. The term itself actually comes from Russell Peters. He's an Indian comedian. And in the early days, Merwin and I could not afford therapy, so we just listened to stand up comedy as our my god, that's what we're doing right now. Yeah, it's not a bad idea. I mean, it definitely works. And we had to laugh our way through it. It was either laugh or cry. So we cried a lot too, but there was a lot of laughter. And we tried to just not take ourselves too seriously.
We're trying to take what we do seriously, but not ourselves too seriously. And with that, we were able to create, with that goal, we were able to create an environment that had a kind of lightness of being. I don't know if our day one guy would, like, did you feel that in year one? Probably not. But we got there. And we got there by having a lot of fun together and holding onto the people that...
didn't necessarily always know how to do the job the best, but they brought that atmosphere and that love and that intention to the space. And then we started to grow our business around those people. So mind-blasting hospitality was one of those terms that we latched onto to identify the goal, but also it also became our how. Because restaurants function, like you have to use code words. Things have to be said in the least amount of words possible.
And you don't have time in a fast-paced restaurant to go back to the kitchen and say, I made a mistake and somebody waited too long and now their food is, they don't like it and it's too salty. Whatever the thing is, you can't give a speech. You have to say the thing you need to say in the least amount of words possible if you want to hold that chef's attention and get buy-in from the chef. So Mind Blast became our goal. We're trying to Mind Blast our guests, but it also became the how.
So if a server comes back into the kitchen and they've had all those things that I just said happen with a guest and the cook knows that he just over fired a dish and he has an extra plate of okra fries, it's the point of connection in his mind to be like, okay, the server's saying I need a mind blast. He has an extra dish. This is yours. There's no questions asked. There's no conversation. There's no explaining or justifying or getting permission.
We're empowering our team to be able to use those opportunities to surprise and delight a guest that wasn't asking or complaining or any of that. It was just like, this is a way to surprise somebody. And what an incredible gift it is to be able to call that work, to be able to show up and take care of people in that way and the way that that ripples out into the world and changes people's lives. That's the surprise that I wasn't expecting in this industry.
Sara Abernethy (26:27)
It is very intoxicating to me, the ability to surprise and delight someone. It's so good. When you can, ⁓ I don't know, when you can anticipate a need or an ask or you can make a special occasion really, really extra special. It's all about making people feel seen, which is so healing.
It's kind of addictive actually. However, I wonder how you balance that delight with people pleasing. Because I am a people pleaser, well, no, still am a people pleaser ⁓ as a leader and as a restaurateur. And it fills my cup to serve, to be of service.
Molly Irani (26:59)
It's addictive. In the best kind of way. It's a good addiction. Yes.
Sara Abernethy (27:27)
I love that. But then at what point, at a certain point I'm bending way too far and I'm acting out of alignment. Has that ever come up for you?
Molly Irani (27:37)
yeah, for sure. And it comes up for our people in the space too. I think that the shift in thinking that I had around it that was kind of ⁓ a turning point for me in terms of how I thought about that exact challenge was if we are showing up in service in a way where we're disembodying ourselves and we're leaning like energetically way out of our comfort zone all the time, we get depleted. But
If we are taking care of ourselves, taking care of each other in the team, and taking care of the guests in the space all in the same level and intention and way, there's a special kind of magic that happens in service when people have your back. And when you can show up and do something really challenging and hard as a crew, it is electric.
and addictive in the best kind of way, but you have to do it as a collective. If one person is feeling that burden of like it's on me to take care of all of the people all of the time, it breaks you over time. But if you feel held and supported by a team that is collectively trying to do something, then it's like a creative challenge and you get sort of stimulated and excited and like hooked by that creative challenge, trying to accomplish it together. And you know, we try to encourage the team to talk to each other about it like,
I don't know, I messed this up, I don't know what to do and to come to each other and talk about it and be vulnerable and be able to ask for help. And the feeling in that moment of like, there's peaks of tumult and chaos in restaurants that can be tipping points. And they can also be moments where you feel held and seen in a way that I haven't experienced anywhere outside of restaurants. And it's a moment of like,
I'm at a tipping point. We're at peak chaos. There's 20 million things happening, and everybody needs something from me. And the chef looks at you and says, I've got you. And it changes your brain chemistry. It changes the way you feel about your crew. It changes what you feel capable of doing. And it's a beautiful thing. But you can't feel like you're in it alone. And I think our industry is changing also. I think during the pandemic, it
has never been harder to be in service because people forgot how to behave in public and it was awful. It was a big mess. And it was bumpy to be like, to show up and be offering service with the big open heart all the time when people were just, it was so messy. But I think we moved out of that. And one of the things that I got to write about in the end of this book because of the timing.
I had to get an extension on this book for six months because
Sara Abernethy (30:28)
flooded because of hurricane.
Molly Irani (30:30)
Hurricane
Helene devastated Western North Carolina and we were without water for over 50 days. We didn't have power. was a devastation really beyond description that's very hard to still wrap my brain around what we witnessed there. But what happened was the opposite feeling started to happen in service where people realized how much we need each other in community.
And we needed to get out of our houses and step up and save each other. And that's what started happening around our area. And it was really freaking beautiful in a time of like profound division going on in society. People were putting their food and water out on their front yard for strangers when they had no way of replenishing their own resources. And it was an example of what is possible when people show up with that idea of like, how do we think about our neighbors and
people in our community as people we are responsible for instead of strangers. And when I saw that unfolding, I realized that's actually what people are doing in the service industry every single day. They show up and they try to create a space that makes everyone feel welcome and they're trying to do it in a way that's not depleting of themselves, but instead invigorating because they're handling this creative challenge as a collective. And that's what happened in the storm. It was a collective.
everybody was doing what they knew how to do. And that's why I.
Sara Abernethy (31:59)
Miraculously, your space still had power.
Molly Irani (32:03)
Our original little funky downtown 1920s building had power and it was like this little lifeboat in the middle of an area that was just devastated. So it became a hub for World Central Kitchen and we were cooking and feeding and Nick, my friend here, drove up a generator the size of this room. He was like, finally we had cell service and he called me and he was like, what do you need? I'm like, I need a generator. And he was like, I got you. I'm coming. I'll be there tomorrow.
Sara Abernethy (32:33)
mean, no one handles crises like restaurant people. We are uniquely equipped for that.
Molly Irani (32:39)
That's
Saturday night in our world. That's always a crisis.
Sara Abernethy (32:43)
We also always show up first. We could have a whole other conversation about the support and aid that was provided or not to your community. But the restaurants always show up first.
Molly Irani (32:46)
It's really true.
Yeah, mean, know, Jose Andres was dropping out of helicopter, you know, before we even had FEMA or anybody because the roads were blocked off. we were an island basically. days, most of the art, well, for a couple of days, all the arteries in and out of Asheville were blocked by landslides or flooding. And then as they started opening, it was really limited who could get through. And the
When we did get federal aid into town, they were dealing with rescue. They weren't dealing with providing water to people that were trapped on hillsides or even downtown buildings. mean, nobody had any access to any supplies. So Jose Andres was on the ground organizing our community, and it was restaurateurs that showed up. They're like, we've got food. We know how to cook. We do this every day. We know how to deal with impossible situations. We know how to get to work despite calamities and somebody not showing up.
natural disasters. is what we do all the time.
Sara Abernethy (33:55)
also had that experience from the summer camp, right? Cooking in insane, impossible conditions. Yet another skill set that served you.
Molly Irani (34:03)
Yeah,
we call it gorilla. Yes kitchen. Yes. Yeah, that taught me how much fun it is because the thing that I learned at that camp was that there is this magical place on the other side of impossible and I
Sara Abernethy (34:20)
You
said everything's figureoutable in your book. Didn't you? Everything is figureoutable.
Molly Irani (34:24)
No, not at all.
Yeah. That we should have just tattooed on the inside of our eyelids, you know, because in the early days it would be like these problems would come up all the time that felt like they were going to break us. And I think Merriwin and I are both naturally optimistic people, but the amount of times that we had to say to ourselves and everybody else that was on this ride with us, like, OK, let's figure it out. Let's just roll up our sleeves and figure it out.
And that's what I think is so beautiful about our industry that the world needs to know about, which is the other reason I felt inspired to write this book is I think restaurateurs are a very gritty, tenacious tribe of people that are figuring things out, sometimes seemingly impossible things, every day and building profound culture right along while figuring out the impossible. And that builds resilience that
I don't see in very many other industries and I think that it's something that the world could really learn from this industry.
Sara Abernethy (35:31)
Working with your spouse.
Molly Irani (35:34)
Do do do. How many? We've got some couples in the room. Can you guys, can you, we're not alone here. We've got what Paul and Chi-T back there, Rochelle, me, you. James and Katie are now doing a business together. it's a thing. This is not an easy ride, right? Can I get a a Amen choir back there? thing.
Sara Abernethy (35:58)
It's perhaps a puzzle and a cocktail that we're all figuring out in real time and it's different and nuanced for everybody. I really appreciated the transparency you got into here. It's something that, to be honest, I'm dying to talk about, but feel like I can't because I feel like it's super private. I would be oversharing and I might say something, you know, disrespectful about my.
partner who I love really and want to do everything to elevate and lift up. This was why Hill was Chris's idea. Why Hill was Chris's pursuit. And I think I worked full time in sales, B2B sales for the first three years that we were open because you got to somebody's got to pay the bills. ⁓ So I was working in RTP nine to five and then coming in every day.
and on the weekends to help out. And I never really thought that I would have a role aside from maybe sort of a translator or some kind of connective tissue. And it sounds like you can relate to that quite a bit. And I do want to ask you, can you talk a little bit about how you and Merwin have found
your lanes over the years. The advice you read is like, yeah, just find your lane and stick to it. And that is not helpful because that's just not how things work. But how did you both find, and then more importantly, how did you both honor the lanes when you found them?
Molly Irani (37:35)
think that's probably the key to the question, right, is how to honor each other's differences. think it took, the really true honest answer to that is we're still figuring it out. Didn't we have a fight yesterday about that?
Sara Abernethy (37:50)
It's real.
Molly Irani (37:51)
It is always a work in progress, but I do feel like we landed in a place where we recognize that we are bringing different strengths to our team and In the beginning we were just pulling our hair out with each other all the time because of our differences and it took us a little while to realize that those differences were actually the gift so he had instincts and skills and
personality and a particular way of doing things that was literally opposite from me. And it took us some time to really honor that and.
I don't think it ever worked for us to stay out of each other's lanes, although I write about it in the book in the sense of we called it zones of responsibility. And we were always sort of tweaking and reshaping and rewriting what those zones looked like. In the early days, we were all in. I was running the register every day. He was on the line. We were doing everything ourselves all the time together. Over time, the way we started to think about it is that we were
We were designing the road map together of where we wanted to go, but we were not both holding the wheel. And if we had tried to both hold the wheel, we would have killed each other. And definitely, nobody would have had fun on that ride.
Sara Abernethy (39:15)
I
thank you so much for putting language to that because you describe like being in meetings with the team and it was like you leaning over and grabbing the wheel and I have done that so many times. It is not helpful to us. It's incredibly awkward to the people who are in the meeting with you because they can tell mom and dad are fighting and it's just not productive. So I thank you for that. That's exactly how I felt. I didn't know if there was
I still to this day, the reason why I started this podcast is because I am unclear on what my role is in our business moving forward. I am needed at home. I am irreplaceable at home. And my God, it's a luxury that is possible. ⁓ I am not required for service any longer. I'm not required for operations. It's like I have guilt that I'm not there all the time. And I have guilt that
I'm not there all the time and yet I put my kids in full-time daycare. I mean, it's just like an impossible equation. ⁓ But you landed on this title of Chief Culture Officer, which I saw on your org chart that very first day a few years ago. And I was like, ⁓ that's a thing. Did you?
Molly Irani (40:32)
How did you come to that? I think we made it up. it came from, so the story behind it is that we got in a big fight, which is usually how most of our big transformation times actually happened was we would get in a big fight about it. And then we would come out of that and try to figure out like what's the...
what's the holistic or enlightened path forward that really honors both of our perspectives? And sometimes it was really basic stuff, like don't grab the wheel while someone else is driving, because that's not fun for anybody that's in the car. And other times it was, there was one big argument that we had about it where I just felt like we kept going around in circles, stuck in a certain tension point around ⁓
It had really to do with it's a very classic sort of men are from Mars women are from Venus dynamic and marijuana and I are pretty gender stereotypical in that way. And it had to do with the way we were communicating with other people. And I found myself constantly going behind him and interpreting you said this word interpreter. So I was going behind him and interpreting him to our team. The problem is that we're a married couple.
And it's hard to then not bring that dynamic home where you feel some built up resentment or frustration around it. Like he doesn't really want his wife to be interpreting him for people. I don't really want to be interpreting him for people. So it was like we were doing it out of survival mode, but we weren't honoring the romance in our relationship in those moments. So we got in this big fight about it and I wrote him a resignation letter.
The resignation letter was not about a veiled threat. It was more like, I love you enough to walk away from this. And I want us to work more than I want to be in this business. And he wrote me a letter back that said, you can change your position any way you want. Maybe we need to reevaluate again, what are our zones of responsibility so that our zones aren't butting up against each other so much?
But he said, you can never really resign from your real role in the business because you are our wisdom keeper. You are the person that is aligning our soul and ethos in this business. And without you, nobody else can fill that role. And so I designed my job around that. got out of everything. I I say I got out of everything, but then the pandemic happened and Nick and I were importing.
in masks from a scuba diver importer from China because we couldn't get masks for our team. So, you know, within reason, I got out of operations. The restaurateur version of that is like I have some time where I'm not in operations. It's not a full stop. But because things happen, right? And you have to get back in the weeds. But my goal and my highest, greatest contribution that I can make to the business is not being in operations. There's plenty of people that know how to do it better than I do. And I can
teach a lot of the parts that I don't, it doesn't need to be me doing them. So back to your question is like, that was the gift of staying together through this journey was like, we could also, we could drive each other the most crazy, but we could also see each other in a way that other people didn't always see. Yeah.
Sara Abernethy (44:07)
This is the resignation letter is when I threw the book across the room. I'm glad you didn't. No. I read it to Chris aloud, who sometimes struggles with words. He does. He just struggles saying words. And he said, you know,
Molly Irani (44:16)
frustration.
Sara Abernethy (44:35)
I'm actually going to read it because I have it dogged right here.
He wrote me a response that read, can change your job however you need or want to, but you can never resign from your real role. You are our wisdom keeper. And when I read that to Chris, it was very emotional for both of us. I had a situation like this, although I did not handle it nearly as eloquently as you did.
Molly Irani (45:03)
I didn't put those in the book, but there are plenty of those too, but I gotta have something private.
Sara Abernethy (45:08)
And it was the straw that broke the camel's back was about a paint sample, you know? And it's like, it's not the paint sample. But I do remember like having this out of body, like toddler temper tantrum on the patio. I've really felt like a little kid, like you're not listening to me. You're not hearing me. And I really threw my hands up and I was like, I quit, I quit, I quit, I quit. I quit it all. You do whatever you want to do.
and then got pregnant with our second child. So that did allow a natural pause in things for me. ⁓ But I feel a kinship with you. My role where I am the best and highest use of me is this culture building and I call it horn tooting out in the world of our brands. What can I do out in the world that promotes our restaurant brands and
helps people feel connected to our story and what we're offering the world. ⁓ So maybe I should be the chief culture officer. Maybe that's my title.
Molly Irani (46:14)
I think it's a great title and I think that there is no cut and paste version of this right it's like ultimately the gift the surprising gift of working with my life partner is That we were able to challenge each other and mirror each other stuff in a way that was
with a lot of care and love at the end of the day. drove each other crazy. There was plenty of fights and plenty of arguments and throwing things and all of the stuff. But also, we saw each other. And I think that there's a gift in that where you can help each other grow and push each other into whatever the highest, greatest contribution is that you are going to make in the business. There's no cut and paste. It's like Chief Culture Officer works for me. It doesn't work for somebody else. Whatever their strength is, being able to really
The beautiful thing of having your own business and designing things in your own version of reality is that you get to create your own titles. Like we're not big on titles that came from the world. We're big on trying to make titles that actually feel true to that person's contribution. And that's also how we grew our team was really finding roles for people in our team that acknowledged their contribution. So we learned it as a husband and wife dynamic, but we were able to kind of transfer that into our growing.
team that we've been able to nurture and really build our entire company's growth around these people.
Sara Abernethy (47:38)
The is, you're in it together whether you're in the business or not. You're in the business. If you are married to an entrepreneur, that goes beyond our industry, I think. You're in it whether you want to be or not. And that was the dilemma I came to when I was evaluating, should I give up my salary and health insurance and really take the leap? ⁓ But I just wanted also, to be honest, at that time, I just wanted to spend time with him.
I just wanted to see him. So that's what brought me in to the restaurant and one by one project, know, one by one, hey, can you handle this? Hey, can you handle this? you're good at this. ⁓ you're very eloquent with language. Maybe you should write the copy for the website or you should do the social, you know, one by one by one. ⁓ And I do still feel though that he is making the road. We make the, sorry.
We make the roadmap together, but I let him drive, as you say. So what happens when you disagree on the map?
Molly Irani (48:45)
We have some very colorful conversations. And has that ever I'm sure it has. my god, so many times. We disagree on the map a lot of times. But I think that ultimately that's where trust comes into it. It's like you have to trust that you're going to be partnered with somebody in your life, but also in the business that's, even if they can't admit it in the moment or can't hear you in the moment, that they are going to hear your perspective and consider it as part of.
Sara Abernethy (48:50)
Never happened.
Molly Irani (49:14)
how that map gets drawn. So one of the arguments that we'll have a lot is like, yes, this is a thing with entrepreneurs, particularly entrepreneurs who ⁓ have a high threshold for risk and ⁓ they tend to fly planes before they're built. Okay, it's a dynamic that a lot of entrepreneurs have.
And I kept saying, my god, you're taking off, the plane's not built. And he'd be like, yeah, yeah, we gotta go. This is the time, I'm going, we're just gotta go. And then I'm in the back sewing the parachutes and trying to make sure the people aren't falling out and everybody feels safe. And eventually we got to the point where we might argue about it in the moment. And there's plenty of times that I'm saying to him, like I am.
I am not on board, for the record, am not on board with this plane taking off in that direction. And there have been times where I've learned, ⁓ particularly during times of crisis, that I had to choose my battles really wisely and that we were gonna agree to disagree and sometimes the plane took off and it crashed and it's like, okay, well, we learned from that. But at the end of the day, I know that he respects my
disagreement and that he will factor it into the roadmap. So we might not always agree on exactly how we're drawing it, but both of us equally respecting each other's perspectives and whether or not we could like, you know, be flexible enough about it in the moment is another thing. But knowing that like he's gonna weave that into his thought process as he's drafting the next turn. Yeah.
Sara Abernethy (51:08)
Thank you for that. That's the goal. It's very common. Yeah, It's a very common story. You grew up with parents who were restaurateurs as well. Molly, you are an empath. Is that true? Yeah. Yes. How are you filling your cup? How are you showing hospitality to yourself?
Molly Irani (51:36)
had this experience recently where, has anybody else been riveted by the astronauts going to the moon? So I had this experience lately where I was like, why am I so emotional about these astronauts? And then they came back and astronaut Christina gave this speech about the difference between a team and a
Now I forgot the word because I'm distracted by what said. A crew. Did you all hear this speech? It is really worth listening to. You can Google it. The difference between a team and a crew. And the reason why this resonated so much with me is it was torturing me when I was writing the book that I couldn't find the word to describe this organization of people, how people come together in restaurants and food and beverage and service.
Because what I saw happening was a family. But you were not supposed to call it a family, because there's all kinds of things with that. People have projections onto family. Everybody has their own reaction to it. It kind of implies a lack of boundary between personal life and business life. And it's a sticky word these days. So that's kind of like out. And team doesn't really capture it, because ⁓ it's not deep enough. And also people can get kicked off for underperformance when they might be like really
a rock star at something else and can contribute it in another way. And the way that she described crew, I actually have it, I have it saved. Can I just read you all this thing? Please it's so beautiful. And I am answering your question, I promise. It's getting to the heart of how this sustains me. Christina, the astronaut, said, a crew is a group of people who are in it together no matter what. There's a shared purpose.
They're willing to sacrifice silently for each other. They give grace. They hold each other accountable. A crew is inescapably, beautifully, dutifully linked. And then she describes that what struck her about seeing tiny Earth off in the distance was the blackness that it's floating in. And she said it looked like a lifeboat.
out in the darkness. So when she came back from space, she said the one thing that she knows for sure after seeing that tiny earth out in space is that planet Earth is a crew.
And what struck me so much about that is that is what I see hospitality modeling in the world. And that's what sustains me about this business. like people show up every day to be of service to other people. And that is modeling how do we treat each other with that level of grace and care.
And it goes back to that magic that I saw happening after the storm. Like when it all falls apart, this is how humanity survives. that being able to touch that at work is the thing that sustains me.
Sara Abernethy (55:03)
Boom.
Molly Irani (55:05)
Thank you, Christina Astronaut.
Sara Abernethy (55:10)
I could talk to you all night. I really could. And we will continue this conversation, no doubt, another time. I want to give anyone who has a question for Molly a chance to ask, because we do have a few more minutes. ⁓ If you do have a question, don't be shy.
Molly Irani (55:11)
Me too.
hope so.
Sara Abernethy (55:36)
Reminder that you can buy her book at the back table from letters and please don't walk out of here without
Molly Irani (55:42)
And I'll be signing books back there if anybody wants a personalized book. Happy dirt.
Sara Abernethy (55:46)
Yes.
What do you want to be remembered for?
Molly Irani (55:59)
love that question. I've never been asked that. Thank you for that question. This is one of those things that's gonna wake me up in the middle of the night. I should have said this! I just thought of it!
think if I really, like I think the honest answer for me, if I really look forward, if I imagine like looking back on my life, whatever I want to be remembered for, I hope that people think of me as somebody who loved deeply and found fun in the most unexpected places. Like restaurants.
Sara Abernethy (56:44)
Anyone else? Yes.
Yeah. Examples of surprising and delighting community.
Molly Irani (57:05)
Yes. Yes. Yes. Exactly. ⁓
There is, there's a lot of examples that I share in the book. I think for us, the creative challenge was like, we didn't have any money. So we, we couldn't, we had to find a way to do it that was about getting creative, right? But I am remembering, I'm remembering the early days. James, I'm going to call you out again. Do you remember Dosa Boy? We had a young man who,
He was essentially like he had a whole multitude of disabilities. And he had a handler come with him. He was probably in his 30s at the time. But he was of Indian origin, and he really wanted dosas. And we don't have dosas on our menu. But he would come in every day and ask for a dosa. And what we
Sara Abernethy (58:10)
We're almost done anyway. I will just, ⁓ let's talk loud. Okay, Dosa Boy would come in. We have uta pappam on our menu, which is made from the same batter, but it's basically made like a pancake. But Dosa's take up the whole griddle space, because you gotta clear the griddle in order to make this really big, thin, crispy, amazing ⁓ crepe that you roll up. So Dosa Boy would come in, and he would start to yell from the door, Dosa Coke, Dosa Coke, Dosa Coke!
And everybody that was dining in the restaurant was like, what is happening? And I had to make a decision in that moment of like, what matters the most in this moment? And what felt like the most important thing was that he felt welcome in our space. So I would go back to James and say, can you make a dosa? And he would have to clear everything else off the griddle and clean it. And it was a whole production to get it to the right temperature to make the dosa. Like he would turn the whole kitchen upside down to able to make this dosa.
And we made Rahul happy at the end of the day. He felt like he belonged. There was a lot of rules that came with it. He was afraid of birds, we had to the door. It was a really complicated dance to take care of him well in the space. years later, do you remember this honey? When the dad came up to us? So many years later, we were just trying to accommodate Rahul in whatever way we
with it. James was such a sweetie that he would always make it work one way or another. We would always somehow figure out how to this kid a dosa. Many years later, the dad came up to us at Chai Pani and said, I need you to know how much that changed his life. He didn't feel like he belonged anywhere. And he always felt that you wanted him there. And that, like, I mean, that's what it's all about, right? Like, it was all that.
That was enough, just that one man.
This book is a permission slip for me to be exactly who I am, to claim my story, to not let the mistakes or the night, and day define me. I cannot thank you enough for doing this. Thank you so much, Molly, for your time, for your wisdom, for your vulnerability. It's just such a gift, such a gift. So I want to toot Molly's horn. ⁓
collective congratulations as they are celebrating at James Kearns.
⁓ including an existing Jake's Beard Awards, but additionally they are opening a location, Vatoovala in Raleigh at Ironworks. we all have, we will have the absolute privilege of being No, no, no. I'm experiencing that. When does that slated to open? When do we open it honey? June? No, no, no. It's slated to open June. Summer, summer. ⁓
Question
of the hour. can't tell. At Ironworks in Raleigh. And please follow her on social media if you're not already. Raleigh, you're a gift. Thank you. Thank you. Thank Thank you all so much