We were lucky to catch up with Yuichi Iida recently and have shared our conversation below.

Yuichi, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s start with a story that highlights an important way in which your brand diverges from the industry standard.

Our goal is to serve high quality food with affordable price. We use high quality ingredients and make most things from scratch. I know the most restaurants with our price range (under $20 ticket size) usually try to minimize the cost of ingredients and look for the cheapest thing in the market. And I know if we buy processed sauce and pre-cooked food, and just warm them up with microwave in the kitchen, we can lower the cost of ingredients and labors, and also make operation much simpler. But that’s not what I wanted to do. We don’t have microwave in our kitchen because I know it kills all good things we value in the food.

And for packaging, it’s much cheaper to use plastic containers and bags. But we use compostable paper containers, biodegradable utensils, etc… though it costs much more than plastic ones.

To lower the price, we don’t use fancy tablewares, and we use very simple bowls.
And we don’t have servers. It’s self-service. So we can cut the labor costs of servers and we share all tips between kitchen staffs. When we are busy, kitchen gets busy and work harder, and they are rewarded by tips.
Usually the wages for the kitchen staff are fixed in typical restaurant, and when the restaurant is busy, server makes much more money than kitchen, although the most hard work are done by kitchen staff. When I was working in the kitchen years ago, I was earning $8/hr, $64/day while I heard the server made $200/day in same 8 hrs shift. I didn’t like that system.

Yuichi, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

My name is YUICHI IIDA. I’m from Japan. I’m musician and play percussion. In my music career, I studied Jamaican traditional drum from master drummer from Jamaica and through that, I learned about Rasta culture and ITAL (vital) food. And I wondered what is ITAL food for me as Japanese? and started studying about Japanese traditional and modern food, macrobiotic food, etc… and reached the conclusion that Organic Brown Rice is one of the ultimate food. I formed the company called Brown Rice Family when I was in college, and Brown Rice Family had own music band, catered food with organic brown rice at the event we performed, made merchandise, and we were promoting healthy and conscious life style. The music style we played was world roots music which fused roots music from different part of the world. Refer this link about band. https://www.brownricefamily.com/band
After graduated college, I traveled with band a lot and learned more about different music, food and culture. I got a Green Card in 2017. Same year, my long time friend who went to same high school in Japan called me and said “I rented a spot in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn and looking for someone to do business together”. I felt it was a guidance from the universe and told about it to my wife, and we decided to do the restaurant WARUDE. WARUDE serves Japanese bowls and tacos using organic corn and flour tortilla. And the music playlists I make for WARUDE represent world roots music. With music and food, we empower your body and spirit.

Do you have any stories of times when you almost missed payroll or any other near death experiences for your business?

While we were building a restaurant, our initial funds run out. So I asked one of our partners to loan additional fund to complete construction. When we opened the business, we didn’t even have money to buy glass window, so we put a plywood to cover it, then put brown paper over it and let our customers and their kids to draw arts. The first year, we didn’t have profit as we planned. I worked 14hrs a day, my wife worked 8 hrs a day, 7 days a week without getting paid for 18 months. We maxed out three credit cards we had (about $60k), and used all of our savings. We learned that our initial menu couldn’t survive NY’s cold winter. So we started serving ramen from 2nd winter. From 2nd year, the business started picking up and making profit, so we could start collecting unpaid salary for me and my wife to pay our debt. Then from 3rd year, the cash flow became positive. Now it’s our 5th year and we have over 30 employees, and we are making the 2nd location.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

Career of my life, before I started the restaurant, I was musician and I thought I could balance between restaurant and music. Now I’m too busy to run the restaurant and don’t have time to play music, tour with my band, create new songs, etc…

I started the restaurant right before the pandemic. Most of my musician friends lost their gigs during pandemic. I was busy running the restaurant during pandemic. I called my band members and other musician friends and organized some virtual live music from the restaurant, too.
I missed the time I was busy doing gigs every day, touring different festivals, making music, etc… and I feel sorry for the band member that I can’t book gigs right now.
But I can’t complain. I’m still around the music and food I like, and when the customer were happy about our food, space, music, etc… I get a same feeling I get after I perform music.

I’m tying to build reliable team, so I can leave the restaurant sometime to do music.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.warude.com
• Instagram: @warude_ny

Image Credits
Photos by Dan Ichimoto