One Year on East Franklin: A Father, a Daughter, and We’re Still Here

Sajida Ahmed
Aug 11
6 min read

It has officially been one year since my dad and I opened Curry in a Hurry New Generation at 31st and East Franklin Avenue in Minneapolis. Honestly, it feels a little crazy even saying that because this first year has been a lot. There have been really good moments and there have also been moments where we have had to sit down and seriously figure out how we were going to keep moving forward.

When we opened, we knew owning a restaurant wasn't going to be easy. My family has been in the restaurant industry for years, so we weren't going into this thinking everything would be perfect. But knowing something is going to be hard and actually living through it every day are two completely different things.

At the end of the day, Curry in a Hurry New Generation is really just a father and daughter trying to keep something going that means a lot to our family.

My dad is the one in the kitchen. These are recipes and ways of cooking that have been in our family for generations. I work on the business side and everything that comes with trying to keep a restaurant running and growing. That is really where the "New Generation" comes from. I am learning from him while also trying to figure out how we take what our family knows and build something that can continue into the future.

One of the hardest parts of this past year has simply been how expensive everything has gotten.

Food costs keep increasing. Meat is expensive. Produce is expensive. Rice, spices, packaging and supplies are expensive. Then you have rent, utilities, payroll, insurance, repairs and all of the random expenses that come with running a restaurant that most people never have a reason to think about.

The difficult part is that we don't want every increase that happens to us to automatically become an increase for our customers.

We know things are expensive for everyone right now. We know people are looking at their grocery bills and wondering how they spent that much. We know families have rent, mortgages, utilities, kids and their own responsibilities. We also know that going out to eat is something people have to budget for.

So my dad and I are constantly trying to find that balance.

How do we keep our prices reasonable while our costs keep going up? How do we keep giving people good portions? How do we continue buying the ingredients we actually want to use? How do we keep making our food the way our family has made it without cutting corners just because something else would be cheaper?

Those conversations happen more than people probably realize.

We could make things cheaper. There are always cheaper ingredients. There are always shortcuts. We could change portions or change the way certain things are made. But then we have to ask ourselves what the point would be if we slowly changed everything that makes our food ours.

These are generational recipes. My dad didn't learn how to cook these dishes because we opened a restaurant one year ago. This is food he knows. This is food our family knows. We want to be able to continue that while still making it affordable enough that people in our community can actually come and enjoy it.

And that has been hard.

We are still figuring it out.

On top of the normal struggles of trying to keep a small restaurant going, this first year also gave us some things we definitely weren't expecting.

In December, around the holidays, we were robbed. We had only been open for a few months at that point. When you are already putting everything you have into trying to establish a new business, having someone break into it is a different type of feeling. There is the cost of the damage, but there is also the feeling of walking into a place your family works so hard for and seeing what someone else did to it.

We cleaned everything up, dealt with what needed to be dealt with and kept going.

Then in July, right before our one year anniversary, someone drove into and destroyed our outdoor seating.

Again, we had to deal with it.

And again, we kept going.

I think that is probably the biggest thing I have learned about owning a small business. Something happens and you don't really get the option to stop everything. The bills are still coming. People still need to be paid. Food still needs to be ordered. Customers are still expecting you to open. So you figure it out and you keep going.

The robbery and losing our outdoor seating are the things people can physically see, but there is so much more that people don't see.

They don't see a slow week and how much that can affect a small restaurant. They don't see us checking food costs or deciding what we can afford to replace right now and what has to wait. They don't see my dad working long days in the kitchen or the conversations we have about whether we should raise a price because an ingredient has gotten more expensive again.

And I don't think I fully understood how much supporting a small business mattered until I became the person on the other side of it.

When someone chooses to eat with us instead of going to a big chain, it matters. When someone comes back for the second or third time, it matters. When someone orders catering from us, brings their family, tells a friend about us, shares one of our posts or leaves us a review, it matters.

Sometimes one really good weekend can help a small business breathe a little easier. Sometimes a catering order comes at exactly the right time. Sometimes seeing a familiar customer walk through the door on a slow day gives you a little reminder that people do care about what you're doing.

That is why I also want this to be bigger than just our restaurant.

Small businesses are struggling everywhere. A lot of us are trying to compete with large chains while paying prices that keep increasing and working with resources that are nowhere near the same. At the same time, many small restaurants are trying to preserve food, culture and traditions that don't always fit into the cheapest or easiest way of doing things.

So when people say support local, it really does mean something.

We aren't sharing our story because we want anyone to feel bad for us. We made the decision to open this restaurant and we are proud of what we have built. But I also don't want to make a one year anniversary post pretending everything has been amazing when that isn't the reality.

We are struggling.

There are days when it is hard. There are months where the numbers are stressful. There are things we wish we could do for the restaurant that we simply can't afford to do yet. There have absolutely been moments where I have wondered how we are going to make all of this work.

But we are still here.

My dad is still in the kitchen cooking. I am still trying to figure out the business side and how we grow. We are still making the recipes our family has made for generations. We are still trying to keep our quality without pushing every increase in cost onto the people who support us.

We were robbed in December and we're still here.

Our outdoor seating was destroyed in July and we're still here.

Everything keeps getting more expensive and we're still here.

And after one full year at 31st and East Franklin, I think we are allowed to be proud of that.

More than anything, I am proud that I get to do this with my dad. The restaurant isn't perfect and neither was our first year, but there is something really special about watching him cook food that comes from generations before me while I am trying to figure out how to carry that food and our family forward into the next one.

That is Curry in a Hurry New Generation.

To everyone who has supported us during our first year, thank you. Whether you have been coming to our family for years or you just found us recently, every order, every catering request, every review, every recommendation and every person who walks through our doors makes a difference.

As we go into year two, we are hoping for growth. We are hoping more people in Minneapolis discover us. We are hoping we can keep improving and continue making this restaurant something our family and our community can be proud of.

But most of all, we are hoping we get to keep doing what we have been doing for the last year.

Cooking our food, keeping our family's recipes alive and welcoming people through our doors.

One year later, Dad and I are still here. And we're going to keep trying.