We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Ali Waks Adams a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Ali , appreciate you joining us today. Can you tell us a story about a time you failed?

When I was 31 years old, I am now 54, I opened a restaurant. At that time I had worked in theater, special events, trade shows, offices but never in a restaurant. Actually that is not true, when I was 19 I bartended one night a week for the summer at a restaurant that was 100% laundering drug money. I think I worked there a total of 6 times.

So yeah, I knew NOTHING about the restaurant business from the inside. I LOVED restaurants, and I read Soul of a Chef and Kitchen Confidential, I wanted desperately to be on the inside, just not desperately enough to do it the right way. I came to this business completely ass backwards.

I started at the top knowing nothing.

MISTAKE #1 = Opening a restaurant in the first place.

Ok originally I wanted to open a gourmet market, fancy cheese, lovely local breads, beautiful jars of exotic jam, a Spanish ham on one of those special jamon hanger things. I’d never worked retail but I did go to Europe and spend lots of money buying adorable items I thought I could just have sent over. OK maybe in retrospect it’s better that I didn’t open a market since I literally had no idea how they worked.

MISTAKE #2 Not listening to my gut

I found a restaurant for sale. Yeah, it was a little out of the way but still in a wealthy neighborhood, and yeah it smelled bad and needed work, but oh the possibilities. The gentlemen who owned it and the building stopped behaving like gentlemen once negotiations started. The floor in the dish room required repair, and there were a few more structural things that I wasn’t comfortable moving forward until they were fixed. They yelled, they cried actual tears and they threw fits. This is when I should have just walked away rather than getting involved with those people.

MISTAKE #3 Not buying the building

They would have sold us the building. I could have compounded the two, gotten a mortgage and started off my life as a business owner with property and cash in the bank. Stupidly I paid cash for the business so I had really no more cash once I handed over the check for $150K. I had to bring my plumbing and my electrical up to code to get my licenses and permits. That was not inexpensive.

MISTAKE #3 – The liquor license.

Philadelphia loves a BYOB but I purchased a Philadelphia Liquor License for $45K – yes you make more money from alcohol than food but the thing you forget about is that you are constantly sitting on thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars in inventory. Plus you have to manage that bar, its hours and hours or time. A BYOB, you can have a small menu, focus on food, you can be cash only.

MISTAKE #4 Hiring the wrong consultant.

I hired a consultant, His name was Clark. He and his partner cost thousands of dollars, they provided a 300 page employee manual, which may or may not have been a photocopy of a chain restaurant’s with my local photo shopped on the front. They set me up with a 40K POS system and introduced me to a chef as well as a guy who would sell me meat out of the trunk of his car and then they disappeared.

MISTAKE #4 I spent a lot of stupid money

I had a 15K sign in the shape of a pear, because I like the look of pears but my restaurant was not named after a pear, this was confusing to oh, EVERYONE. I brought an artist from NYC to paint little twee pears on the walls, he was a tremendous drunk and they looked terrible. I bought the wrong plates, the wrong glasses, a ridiculous carpet, I put Pirelli tile in the kitchen.

Two months before we opened my father’s business partner said he was done. no more money would go to the restaurant. we should just sell it and move on. I borrowed $7000 from my grandmother to cover my opening expenses. I had designed a menu, I hired a chef and wait staff, a PR person, and I made friends with journalists. We had to open!

Bella, an American Bistro opened in September of 2002 with much anticipation. We made $12K the first week, the second week we made $10K. The first set of paychecks bounced because I didn’t know how to batch out my credit card machine. We weren’t doing too bad in the beginning, my staff knew more than me, enough to keep things professional.

MISTAKE # 3 BAD CHEFS

My chef, who was now making a fairly good living, discovered that she was making enough money to start doing meth again! She and her sous were dispatched after quite a few disastrous services. I hired a new chef, Amanda. At first it seemed like a great idea, we were having some fun, we had a good bar crowd. However new chef Amanda was greedy, dishonest and messy and she thought I was a millionaire and so did not care about my money, only her money, and having enough time to see her boyfriend..

It will come to no surprise that things spiraled, the food got worse, it was never clean enough, we couldn’t keep the wait staff. The ones we had were terrible and they stole and lied.

I couldn’t make rent. (see MISTAKE #2) My already contemptuous relationship with my landlords got even worse. They would call my cell phone all day and the restaurant line all night. When I would pick up they would scream “Bitch PAY Your Fucking Rent”! They would hang up and call back, it would go on all night. At this point I was a month behind on my rent (A SINGLE MONTH!). Each morning when I would open my email I’d find 200 emails that repeated the sentiment over and over and over in 25pt bold type. When they were in town (they lived in Florida) they pulled up our plants in the middle of the night and spit on the windows.

I felt like I was going crazy. I wanted to check myself into a mental institution for some rest. My father had a “friend” go talk to my landlords, an ex-cop he knew, to ask them to stop harassing me. They called the Philadelphia AG and I received a cease and desist letter citing mafia connections and implied threat of violence, I also received several requests from the press. I became a minor celeb for a bit, it didn’t help business much,

I was working 6 days a week, spending 1 day a week just staring, one of my cats died, I had to move out of my apartment into a cheaper place, I was smoking and drinking and sleeping around, anything to numb the pain.

I was flailing… I couldn’t pay the yearly fee for my liquor license, so we became a BYOB. I fired the chef who was bleeding me dry I hired a new chef. I tried to stay afloat. One day I came to work to find my restaurant boarded up with an eviction notice on the door. When I finally got access I found that the landlords had ripped every single one of the family photos that hung on the walls into shreds, smashed my laptop and destroyed everything of worth . I had nothing left, nothing but bills. They sold the restaurant and all of my equipment to someone else, there was a provision in my lease that allowed that.

I had wandered over to Rittenhouse Square Park a few blocks away and sat on a bench sobbing, when I was approached by a very well known restaurateur who had just gotten out of prison for tax evasion.

I told him my story. He looked me right in the eyes and said “So what are you crying for? Everybody fails, all the time, the only way you are guaranteed not to fail is not to try. You failed at a business with a 90% failure rate, learn from this and move on and one day you will be successful.”

And ever since then I have failed at so many things, but I have never stopped learning. I’ve now worked every station in restaurants from hostess to exec chef, I’ve bartended, waited tables, washed dishes, been prep chef, pastry chef and commis. And through it all I found my calling which is catering and pop-ups.

I love what I do. I’ve started my own business. Balaboosta, Food Made for You is in its first year. I have an excellent reputation, two corporate clients, terrific people who love working with me and I did it all on a shoestring.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

A balaboosta is a woman who makes things nice, she cooks lovely food, she sets a nice table, she’s welcoming, she’s warm and that is the Balaboosta brand of catering.

I’ve tried a number of different identities, my first Pop-Up business was Butter & Salt, it was a partnership and we produced high end themed Pop Ups out of a restaurant back in 2015. My next Pop-Up business was Willie & Chet’s, we sold fancy junk food during the pandemic on Saturday Nights out of a coffee shop. After Willie & Chet’s disbanded I searched for an identity, I was just Ali Waks Adams, Caterer but it didn’t feel right. One day I was thinking about my grandmothers, my aunts, my mother all of who had passed and I pictured myself as the Ukrainian nesting doll that I have on my shelf. It was my great great grandmothers, its symbolic of all the women in my family who came before me who were balaboostas, they are all nested inside of me and from there Balaboosta, Food Made for You was born.

At Balaboosta, Food Made for You, we take care, we pay attention to the details, the food is delicious and pretty, we bring flowers, we look after you and your guests. Our menus may be a bit out of the ordinary, especially for Maine but they taste great and we use as much local product as we can. I’m proud of what we do, of the relationships I’ve built with producers and farmers and fishers and our whole food ecosystem.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

I moved to Maine in 2013 after a tragic year,.

I was working as a Chef in a modern Jewish deli, acquiring a bit of acclaim from my fellow chefs, getting there, doing the work.

My father got sick, stage four cancer. I took a leave of absence for a few weeks to spend his last days with him. He died the very next day, when I woke up after spending 13 hours at his bedside my phone was blowing up. I had multiple texts from the Philadelphia food press asking what my plans were mow that the Deli had closed.
I had lost everything in 24 hours, my father was my best friend, my closest ally and he was gone, my job, the one he was so very proud of was gone. I had nothing.

I got married, I moved to Maine, I got a boring office job. I got a series of jobs, I started doing pop ups I got a better job , I left that job for what I thought was an amazing opportunity, it was a ruse, I was cheated, treated terribly and lied to again I found my self with nothing ahead of me, then my beloved Aunt Sandy died, I took a terrible job, a job I new to be terrible, after several months I begged my bosses to please fire me. They did.

Pandemic happened a few months later, I started my pop=up, then I started catering, I tried a meal service , it did not bring me joy, I circled back to catering. It brings me joy,

I was never really 100% sure of what I should do. I can turn on leading player energy when I want to so I gravitated towards sales, but I really hate it.

I have been an actor, a stage manager, sold trade show exhibits, been the Director of Events for a building in NYC, until I moved to Philadelphia to work for a company that wanted to throw a HUGE millennium party. The owner really just thought I would make a great assistant, his assistant at the time had the same name as me, but she had cancer and he wanted to fire her.

I opened a restaurant, I closed a restaurant, I worked as a sous chef, a server, a bartender for was that person who you see every couple of months and they are always doing some thing different, working for a Political Campaign, doing PR for a BBQ Restaurant promoting a grocery delivery service, a kosher beer (He’Brew) stuff like that.

I finally settled on selling Signs & Graphics, I knew the business, I was good at it. I made good commissions, until the owners up and closed the business in order to avoid paying a large workman’s comp bill. They owed me 25K in commissions, and I could get in line behind all of the other companies they owed money to try and recoup some of it or I could just move on.

The siren song of the food business was hard to resist. I read an article about Nigella Lawson, where she said she went into food because it was the one thins she felt absolutely certain about, she was absolutely certain that she was an excellent cook. I went to culinary school.

I’ve pivoted back and forth so many times, always returned to the thing I know, I make good food, I make things nice, I am a Balaboosta, This is my calling, my purpose here is to feed people .

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.balaboostame.com
• Instagram: @balaboostamaine @aliwaks