Today we’d like to introduce you to Russell Birk.
Russell, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
I started my career in Finance but left the corporate world behind when I realized that I hated it and wanted the chance to own my own business. I had the opportunity to run a small restaurant group with the goal of selling off most of the restaurants and I ended up buying one of them. My travels around the country led me to believe that Dallas was sorely lacking in Middle Eastern/Mediterranean food in a fast-casual setting but done really well. I borrowed bits and pieces from other concepts I saw and created Maya’s Modern Mediterranean, named after my firecracker of a daughter, Maya.
One of the most important aspects of Maya’s theme is that we want to make food from the Middle East far more approachable. Fifty years ago, a Deli has considered a very cultural restaurant with foods distinctly from Eastern Europe and thirty years ago a taco was something you bought only in a Mexican or Tex-Mex hole-in-the-wall type restaurant. Now they are both mainstreams. We want to do the same thing, so we simplify some of our food names. We don’t want to you have to know what Kafta is to try it but we know you will definitely know what a Beef Kabob is when you read that name on our menu. We list out the cultural names to the side but all the foods we have selected are just good and they are loved by everyone.
Additionally, we want to provide healthy foods so the restaurant is based on the principals of the Mediterranean diet (recently named the #1 diet recommended by doctors for overall health) but with some additional modern twists. One of these modern upgrades involves the use of an industrial Air-Bake Oven that gives foods, usually fried, the crispiness of frying without the oil, tasting much better than traditional frying. We are especially proud of the Falafel which took “a long time to perfect but is really awesome. It will never be deep fried crispy but you can actually taste the ingredients with none of the unhealthiness of deep frying which is pretty much the worst thing you can do to food.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
The path to success is rarely linear. I didn’t sleep a lot in the first six months and wasn’t very pleasant to be around after I left work. We opened to a great first two weeks and then saw sales plummet as we scratched our heads to figure out what went wrong. It turns out that we just needed to build a following and that takes a lot of time. We also saw rain and cold weather for the first five months of our existence, which didn’t help. The biggest problem has been staffing. Finding an awesome team to live our values has not been easy but, right now, I think we have assembled an amazing team.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
Maya’s Modern Mediterranean is a fast casual, family-friendly, Israeli-style Mediterranean restaurant. We are known for having a small menu that focuses on doing a few things really well and the use of an industrial Air-Fryer. We are the only restaurant in Dallas using an Air-Fryer with a fresh product (others use a pre-fried frozen product). From the planning stages, building our menu was not a matter of finding the cheapest and most accessible ingredients for our Mediterranean menu. Our choices came after a relentless search for what we considered the best we could find.
As an example, Tahini (ground, toasted sesame seeds) is the key ingredient to making really good hummus. We researched Dallas distributors for the tahini for our signature Hummus but, after not finding exactly what we wanted in the flavor, we reached out to a business in Philadelphia known for their tahini, set up a distributor to get it to Dallas and found what we were looking for. Same for our Pita bread. We could have easily had Pita bread delivered locally but, again, researching to find exactly what we wanted to lead us to a Richardson business noted for their fresh pita, and now we drive each morning to have the freshest and best Pita bread for our customers. Our beef is premium grass-fed, the salmon is Norwegian Farm-raised, and the chicken is hormone and antibiotic-free. The Harissa Chicken Soup is Award-winning according to the Eater’s Dallas website. It’s all about the quality.
What were you like growing up?
I would say that I was always the funny kid, a little geeky, always good-natured and positive. I was never very good at sports and was probably destined to be a lawyer at one point because my friends said I would argue with a stop sign but I chose a business career instead. I was, however, always very good at public speaking and ended up majoring in Communication in College.
Contact Info:
- Address: 9540 Garland Road, Suite C362
Dallas, TX 75218 - Website: www.mayasmediterranean.com
- Phone: 972-707-0646
- Email: manager@mayasmediterranean.com
- Instagram: @mayasmediterranean
- Facebook: @MayasModern
- Other: https://ordering.chownow.com/order/13010/locations
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