Abraham Salum has one rule he wishes every restaurant would adopt. A friend of his makes everyone pile their phones in the middle of the table before dinner starts. First person to reach for theirs pays the bill. Nobody ever touches their phone.

That same instinct for reading a room runs through the whole conversation. Salum opened Salum in Dallas 21 years ago on a block his own realtor questioned and a commercial broker publicly predicted would fail. He ran into him years later. The broker told him he had taken his foot out of his mouth a long time ago.

• Why he banned the words no problem in his restaurant and trained every server to say my pleasure instead
• How servers at his restaurant made more money in 2020 than they did the year before, even as the restaurant itself brought in 40 percent less
• The exact leverage he used against an insurance company after a flood to make sure his servers still got paid

Andre Natera and Abraham Salum cover growing up between Mexican, Lebanese, Italian, and Spanish grandmothers who all wanted to feed him, running 300 staff across seven restaurants in Cancun by his mid twenties, the kitchen design mistake from opening night that he is still working around two decades later, a storm that punctured his roof and shut the restaurant down for four and a half months, and the two year process of writing his first cookbook, A Spoonful of Everywhere, a project he kept completely secret from his own business partner.

It ends where every episode ends, with the Mount Rushmore.

Guest

salumrestaurant.com

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https://www.instagram.com/asalum/

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