“We would like to take out an ad in WestView News to advertise our new restaurant”.
Nothing, oh nothing, cheers me more than this call and when I asked the owner, Fikret Uslu, his country of origin I had another boost with “Turkey,” because my father, although very Greek, was born in Chesme, a Greek fishing village on the coast of Turkey. I salivated at the thought of my new home away from home where I could get sizzling moussaka right out of the oven.
When I walked into the restaurant on Christopher and Greenwich Street I was greeted by Fikret, 32, and his older brother Omur, 43, both handsome with blue-gray eyes from their “most beautiful mother.” After exchanging my father’s lineage they began to call me “father” which of course charged me with the role of making the restaurant a success.
The restaurant is very much Fikret’s and he told me his remarkable story. He was born in a town not too far from my father’s village and at 13 got an after-school job washing dishes in a restaurant. At 18 he came to his father and asked if he would lend him the down payment on a restaurant. Naturally skeptical, he gave him just enough for a down payment to “try it” and exceptional young Fikret made it a success.
He entered the local university to study hotel management. On graduation he went into mandatory military service and was sent to Istanbul. Still in uniform he fell into conversation with a wealthy casino owner who offered, “When you are finished with military service come and see me.” Fikret did and was put in charge of the leading seafood restaurant of Istanbul.
“You know Istanbul but you don’t know the world,” came the challenge from a friend, so Fikret applied for a job on a cruise line and found himself in Miami for training. At his evaluation the consensus was that while he did not speak English well he certainly knew restaurant operations, and he was sent to work in a three star restaurant in Paris.
Fikret came to New York eight years ago and met a group who ran a number of restaurants. He offered to join them as a partner with the condition that if he were able to double the revenue he would get half. When he succeeded he discovered that they had two sets of books, and so left to find his own place.
“You don’t mean the restaurant on Christopher and Greenwich Street?” said our beautiful Westview accountant Jolanta, whose husband had sniffed at it, but the offering price was, gasp, insurmountable.
“Oh, wow ‘father’,” I said to myself, “A huge down payment and the crazy Village rents and the long wait for a liquor license – this is not so easy. George you’d better go easy in your role of “father” and helping these boys make this a success,” and then the Fikret luck broke out again.
“George, Fikret’s restaurant is going on NBC in a few minutes,” came a call from Stephanie, our graphic designer, and sure enough there it was with a story that the restaurant space could have been the model for Edward Hopper’s most famous painting “Nighthawks.” Then Bang! The Post does a big story on it a few days later. Oh wow, a million bucks in publicity and the restaurant is barely open!
“What makes a restaurant a success”? I asked David Porat, our Westview food editor. He answered, “Just take a look at the ones that do succeed, like Pastis – they have food and décor that you cannot get in any other place – going to Pastis is like going to Paris.”
“ Okay Fikret, what kind of food do you want to serve?” I asked, and he responded remembering how he learned the secrets of haute cuisine in Paris, and how fish was prepared in the best seafood restaurant in Istanbul. “Classic and traditional,” he said, and that is why he first named the restaurant “Classic’s.” Then came Edward Hopper so now it has become “Nighthawks”.
The food is delicious, I mean fresh and delicious! Of course I eat the Greek Turkish dishes like crispy fried calamari and a Greek salad like none I have had before, with dark greens, tiny pitless olives, soft warm feta cheese and an olive oil whose taste takes me back to Greece. But I leave the “classic” dishes to David’s evaluation.
Fikret is blissfully sure his restaurant will succeed – because no other in the West Village has had a chef in one of the best restaurants in Paris reveal to him the secret of his sauce, or a Turkish chef teach him how to grill a fish just enough so you can still taste the sea. But try it for yourself, and taste Fikret’s recipe for success. He leaves nothing to chance.
