Weekly Newsletter #1: The Intro
It all begins with an idea.
Alright Folks, here we are. Well over 6 months after I promised to start a newsletter, I’m inside a hotel in Cochin, Kerala (India), writing the inaugural edition during our first break since Char opened. So not quite on schedule but it’s here and that’s what counts. Before I get to the substance, I want to preface it with a few things.
This won't be your typical newsletter. I have no plans to turn this into your ‘run-of-the-mill’ marketing pamphlet. Obviously, this is viewed as an amazing vessel to keep y’all in the loop about specials and changes to the menu but it also is an opportunity to give you guys an insight into the inner process of Char.
Don’t expect this to be particularly well written. The limits of my formal education are a high school diploma and I can say with utmost certainty that if you roamed around the halls of Springfield High School (Delaware County) and interviewed my former teachers, they would describe me far from a journalist in the making.
This is just as much for me as it is for you. I’ve been given an incredible opportunity to open a restaurant in the city of Philadelphia but, as a 21 year old with a total of 10 months of non-pop-up restaurant experience, I have far fewer answers than one who opened a restaurant could be expected to have. However, this feels like a public way to figure out the answers to take us where we need, and I hope that if we end swimming (instead of sinking) that this can become a resource for others journeying down the same path in the future.
It would truly be a beautiful thing if the past 8 months since signing the lease, could be conveniently summed up in a simple theme or aphorism but alas that’s not how this game works. So perhaps the easiest thing to do is write about what it is at the moment and what I hope for it to be. At the moment, Char is a fresh new pizzeria in the Olde Kensington neighborhood that makes really good pizza but has loads of kinks to work out. What we are looking to be is undeniably the best. Not just a great pizzeria but a genuinely great restaurant that stands out in a sea of great restaurants (…cocky perhaps). Sometimes I feel like the mom telling the other parents that her chubby unathletic kid is definitely going to the NFL when he grows up. At the moment this seems loud and brash, and not quite rooted in reality, but that’s my intention and I’m not typically one for beating around the bush.
So this is our introductory newsletter — something perhaps a little more intense than our subsequent newsletter will be — but one that lets us set the foundation for what this will be. Hopefully this something y’all are getting even a little something out of but, at the very least, it's an entertaining and possibly mindless read. This will be sent out as a regular email at some point. However, for the time being it’ll be posted on the website as a Tuesday weekly.
Cheers,
Viraj