The part of Ballard that we're in is very residential, but there is this one block of single-story commercial buildings and that's where we are located. It's been really wonderful. There's this old dive bar across the street. Next to us on one side is an umbrella shop owned by a woman who designs her own umbrellas and carries beautiful designer umbrellas. On the other side is a young baker, and diagonally across the street is a young woman who owns a little café that's doing entirely local food. So it's been a great neighborhood because we're all sort of young business owners and we can help each other out, and sometimes we will receive deliveries for each other, or if we need a dozen eggs, we can run across the street and get them.
Really everything that brought us here to live here is what made us want to open a business here. It's very much its own community; people in Seattle really like to support the independent businesses. We've really loved getting to know the neighborhood through the process of building out the restaurant and now getting to cook dinner for all those people. One thing that was amazing to me was the generosity of the people here. We were just about to open and were over at the restaurant late one night, and this guy sticks his head in the door and it was the owner of the other wood fired pizzeria in Ballard, and he was bringing us a bottle of wine. We all tend to feel that the more small businesses the better, so we all want to support each other even when we're in the same line of work.
Is there a lot of competition when it comes to pizza in Seattle?
Among the pizza places that people talk about in the same sentence as ours, there's a place called Serious Pie, which is owned by Tom Douglas and he has a restaurant empire that includes five other Seattle restaurants. Their style is different; the dough has a very pronounced olive oil flavor. In terms of the Neapolitan places, there's Veraci, which is very popular in Ballard. They have a mobile pizza oven that they take around to farmer's markets. But in general, we have been really lucky that's we haven't had to do a lot of work to differentiate ourselves. Our product is very different from what everybody else is doing here. It's more a Brooklyn style pie (as opposed to a New York style pie), and it's really influenced by Di Fara's, with the thin crust, but it's not cracker-y.
While the concept for Delancey is very New York-centric, how have you aligned your cooking practices with the Seattle culinary scene?
We buy as much of our ingredients as we can from local farmers. A lot of the farmers at the farmer's market distribute through one of the produce vendors we use. So we are able to get big cases of all the stuff we buy at the farmer's market directly through one of our produce vendors. We make our own sauce using a brand of tomatoes from California called Alta Cucina. We have very few things that we use in the restaurant that are not domestically produced. It's been really important to us where possible use domestic, and even better west coast products. So our mozzarella comes from Los Angeles, we get it Fed-Exed in twice a week. And our olive oil comes from California, and our flour is from Washington State.
That's something that's really important to people in Seattle. The people here are in general very well educated and very informed and pretty liberal in their feelings about environmentalism and sustainability. So it's really important to us and also really important to our community that we choose not only food that's delicious, but food that we can feel really confident serving because it comes from farms that are doing things the right way.
How did you finance the whole operation?
We did it on a major budget and we pulled money from a number of different sources. We had a small loan to cover the cost of the oven, which was about $12,000. We had a $15,000 line of credit through our bank, we borrowed small amounts of money from our parents, and I put in a chunk of money that I had in savings, and basically that was it. It limited our options quite a bit in what we could do. It was difficult; we had very little spending money ourselves. But it was totally worth it. We paid back the majority of our loans in three months and I think we paid everything off in six months, so it's doing well now.
I think we were very lucky in that we did it on such a budget, and our designers who designed both the dining room and whole kitchen area worked for free. We also had a plumber work with us on a trade (He worked in return for pizza!). My former boss taught us how to install tile, so we tiled a lot of the pizza oven ourselves. We had probably tens of thousands of dollars of free labor from good-hearted people.
What has been the most challenging part of owning a restaurant?
The most challenging part is probably employee turnover. I think when you start any business you probably make a lot of mistakes in hiring, and we certainly learned the hard way that it's really important to call people's references. We have been open for just shy of a year and we only have one employee with us who we've had the whole time, so that is really hard.
What's been the most rewarding part?
I would say there's a lot of great things about it, but probably getting to serve people food that we love to eat ourselves. Also, getting to run this business our own way, and getting to know regular customers. That is really wonderful. There is no greater compliment than seeing a regular walk in the door, that's an amazing feeling, and to me, that's what it's all about.
