We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Susie, Andy & Ziggy Szymczyk a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Susie, Andy & Ziggy, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today How has Covid changed your business model?

Our company opened in August of 2019, about 8 months pre-pandemic. We set out to establish ourselves as a small Polish delicatessen with eat in dining. We scratch make all of our food using our family’s recipes passed down from generation to generation. Polish food in Austin is almost non-existent and we were excited to share our food and heritage with the community. We hired a staff of about 8 and got to work making kielbasa, pierogi, potato pancakes, pickles and more. We were off to an amazing start, We were voted Austin Monthly’s Readers Choice for Best Deli 2020 and were approached by Food Network to take part in an episode of a very popular show. Once March of 2020 arrived, restaurants were shutting down or operating at minimal capacity for indoor dining. With just 14 seats inside, we would need to shrink down to only about 3 or 4. Even then, most people were weary about eating out, even groceries were scary. In April of 2020 we decided that we needed to let our staff go in such uncertain times. We decided to close for a month to figure out how we would keep our passion alive during a pandemic. It was then that we decided that our small indoor dining area needed to go and that a market may be a better option for us to survive. We took all of our small bistro sets outside for customers to eat in, out. We replaced them with shelving units, our soda fountain with freezer merchandisers and started contacting importers. It was truly the best decision we have made for the survival of our business. We now offer our customers over 200 unique items imported from all over Europe, as well as all of our scratch made family recipes served hot or frozen to reheat at home.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Andy & Ziggy are first generation Polish brothers whose parents brought them to the United States in the mid 1980s to plant roots as American citizens. Susie is Andy’s wife of nearly 20 years. They all grew up in the Northeastern United States where Polish food, especially delis offering Polish kielbasa and pierogi were a dime a dozen. The family moved to the Austin TX area in 2015 and were shocked to realize that they could not find the quality and authentic taste of the food they were so familiar with back home. Andy set out to recreate those authentic flavors he was so dearly missing in his home kitchen. Once he perfected his recipe, he started sharing his sausage with friends and neighbors. They all loved it and asked for more, he eventually found himself surrounded by 90 lbs of sausage and was emptying out the fridge to find a place to store it before passing it along. Many of them had never even tried Polish food before and didn’t even know what a pierogi was (which is extremely interesting as the first Polish settlement in the US is located in Texas). This is what prompted us to open Ziggy’s Kielbasa House, our love for making food, sharing it and passing on our family recipes.

The most rewarding part of what we do is recreating flavors our customers have been missing from childhood. We have had many customers in tears because they haven’t experienced these flavors since their younger years, as many of the recipes and procedures have been lost over time. Some even say we do it better (Ssshhhh!) and plead with us not to change. We have even had a few customers volunteer to help in the kitchen so that they can learn how their babcia made all of those authentic dishes.

What sets our business apart from others is also our sense of community. We are a mom and pop shop that provides the utmost level of service. It doesn’t matter how busy we are or what needs to get done, if there is a customer in our shop we are there to make small talk and get to know them. We try our best to remember all of our customers by name and to take the time to get to know them and what they like.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

There are a couple of instances of resilience in starting and growing this business for us. The first would be cancer, Andy was diagnosed with Stage 3 Non Hodgkin’s Lymphoma in July of 2019, just one month before our soft opening. He underwent 6 months of chemotherapy, during which time we were launching this new and exciting business. He is by nature a very energetic go getter, but he was knocked down a bit by the diagnosis and treatment. Our family really had to come together to get through this difficult time while still maintaining a level of professionalism for our staff and customers.

The second instance would be losing our staff during the pandemic. The three of us would work hard to make all of the food to sell and serve during the day, but did not have the staff or the time to remake it for the next day. Often times we would be working late into the night to make product for the next day, sometimes even sleeping in the shop to be ready for sales in the morning. It was extremely exhausting, but it was what we were willing to do to keep our passion alive. Once we were ready to rehire staff, the labor market crashed and jobs were readily available at larger companies that were willing to pay more for less work.

Okay – so how did you figure out the manufacturing part? Did you have prior experience?

As mentioned prior, we started in our home kitchen serving our authentic kielbasa to friends and neighbors. The kielbasa was a product we needed to learn how to manufacture, including health department procedures and such. We manufacture all of our products and they are based on recipes passed down from our grandparents and parents. We make golabki (stuffed cabbage), kopytka (potato noodles), potato pancakes, blintzes, fermented and vinegar pickles, pickled beets, sauerkraut, schnitzel, and a variety of Polish sausages and lots of other authentic recipes. We have learned some short cuts along the way, but we still do everything the old fashioned way because we have found that that’s what really makes the product. We grind, stuff and hand link every single sausage in small batches and every pierogi is hand pressed. We offer authentic flavors of these dumplings as well as our own unique American twist of flavors. We have learned that good food needs love and care. We have tried to mass produce our products and it’s nothing like our grandparents or parents made. We realized that in order to produce the highest quality product that our customers come to expect takes time.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.ziggysatx.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ziggyskielbasa/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ziggyskielbasa
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/ziggys-kielbasa-house-leander-2?osq=ziggys+kielbasa+house

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