We were lucky to catch up with Maryam Khan recently and have shared our conversation below.

Maryam, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

I was sixteen when I was standing in my parents suburban Michigan kitchen sometime between midnight and 1am, eating a Shrimp Masala Slider; one of my many concoctions that took a dish my mom made and flipped it on its head into some culmination of the glorious junk food I was getting through drive-thru’s and the traditional Pakistani dishes we had every night at home – and it struck me that every bite of what I was eating was honestly better than most of the food I paid to eat anywhere, and that people everywhere needed to experience this. Granted, I was admittedly getting into recreational pot use at this point in my life and that might have had some influence on the epiphany I was experiencing, but that moment revisited me and started taking up a lot of real estate in my mind the summer of 2018 while I was going through a particularly earth shattering break up and doing whatever I could to distract myself and recuperate on the path to healing.

A relatively new friend at the time asked me what I wanted to do with my life during a walk one day following my admittance of feeling quite directionless in life at the time, and I half jokingly told him that I always had this dream of serving up the Pakistani food I grew up eating at home in my weird stoner Westernized renditions. His response was “Cool, let’s do it”, and just like that we did. We called up our friends at our favorite Detroit watering hole, Kiesling, and we set up a date to pop up for one night. What was meant to be a heathy and fun distraction from the current stressors in my life turned into a wildly successful night of serving food to a wildly packed bar and line that sold us out in 2 hours with no lull. The thrill and success of that night was wildly unimaginable, and all we could do was start planning another one.

Shortly after the initial pop up, we started getting messages from local businesses all over the city who wanted us to come pop up at their establishments. The first time we reached out to Kiesling to do a pop up was the last time we ever reached out to anyone to host us (with the exception of Turkey and the Wolf – I am forever at their whim), and I think that was a huge indicator to us that we knew what we were doing and we were doing it pretty well.

Maryam, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Khana was a passion project turned full time hustle. It eventually became impossible to treat it as a side gig, and I was able to leave my part time serving job to pursue residencies in fully equipped kitchens where we could return on a weekly basis and still do one-offs at other locations.

It started as what is to this day – Not your mother’s Desi food. “Desi” being the umbrella term for the Southeast Asian diaspora, but we focus primarily on revamping Pakistani recipes from home and giving them a Western makeover to make the already exciting food more approachable and identifiable by a larger mass. I like to think of it as nontraditional food for nontraditional folks (such as myself).

To be one of the very few eateries putting Pakistan on the map in Detroit, and to be the only ones churning out the food we make, has become a huge sense of pride and joy for me. I struggled a lot with my identity growing up, resenting my background and wanting to be as Americanized as possible. Growing up in a first-generation American Islamic household and going through the life-altering events surrounding the tragedy of 9/11 had a terribly negative impact on my relationship with my culture starting at the age of 9. I started to hate it because it felt like the world hated it, and I wanted to feel accepted by my peers. It took years of circling back to my heritage after writing off religion and many cultural ties, and realizing there was a wealth of things to take pride in as a Pakistani, starting and ending with food for me. Khana has been so instrumental in bringing me closer to my culture, and I take pride in the fact that there are others out there who feel that sense of pride and acceptance despite our personal struggles when they eat our food.

Any advice for managing a team?

Be the team member you want on your team. It’s as simple as that. You want people to show up on time? Be early and prepared when you show up. Do you want honest and open communication across your team? Exhibit that behavior by knowing the time and place for certain conversations, comments and general check ins. It’s easy to become the bad guy on a team when there is any sort of hierarchy in the workplace; team mates may all bond with each other and you might not feel like you’re one of them because your responsibilities are somewhat or completely different from theirs, and there are times you may even have to have some tough conversations in order to maintain the best work environment you can have. A good leader will always pay attention to the small details and offer help or resources before reprimanding someone for falling short. At the very least, it pays to try and understand why something fell short of the expectation, or what have you.

It also goes a long way to place trust in your team and step back to give them more responsibility when they’re ready and willing. As a small business owner in the restaurant industry, this is huge because it’s very easy to be the orchestrator of every tiny detail (trust me, I was the orchestrator forever). To place trust in your team with the bigger details you typically handle yourself fosters a healthy relationship where they can take ownership and pride in the work they do.

We’d love to hear the story of how you turned a side-hustle into a something much bigger.

My side hustle turned full time on a very organic trajectory. I was working at a high-end sushi restaurant as a server, essentially just using that job to fuel the pop up. It got to the point where we were getting asked to do pop ups so frequently that I was getting multiple shifts every week covered just so I could do them. As great as my relationship was with that workplace and the staff, my manager eventually tired of me constantly moving my schedule around and let me go in hopes to find someone more stable. Totally understandable, and also one of the best misfortunes I’ve ever experienced. Following the end of this job, we were offered a residency at the Elephant Room downtown where we would do weekly pop ups, and I now had the capacity to amp up our menu and add things we could only cook with the access we gained to a full kitchen, and was also able to continue accepting offers to pop up in other establishments in Detroit other days of the week.

Unfortunately, Covid had other plans and wiped our slates clean for 6-7 months when we went into lockdown. Following that, however, we landed another residency, this time at Batch Brewing Co. where we really leaned into some of our greatest growth. We were there for a little over a year, taking over their kitchen every Tuesday and packing the patio out most nights. Following that, we were offered a residency as the takeover restaurant at FrameBar, where we ran service 5x/week for a full month. This was the first time that we were doing that much volume and consistency, and actually plating food on beautiful dine ware rather than paper ware. It all felt like a giant snowball effect, and has even brought me to where I am today – running service out of the og Ima location on Michigan Ave. in Corktown, Detroit on a weekly basis. Over the summer we were open 2x/week with djs for every pop up throwing down on the enormous patio.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/khanadetroit/?hl=en
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/khanadetroit/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/khanadetroit

Image Credits
Lizz Wilkinson, Chris Gerard