Rent hike forces family to close restaurant
For the last 20 years, Persian Garden Cafe has been a cozy staple in west Phoenix, attracting vegetarians, Phoenix College students and workers from the nearby St. Joseph’s Hospital.
But sluggish sales and rising rent during the coronavirus pandemic will bring an end to this mom-and-pop restaurant.
Mahmoud and Afsaneh Jaafari, immigrants from Iran, opened the restaurant in 2001. The space was once home to a burgers and billiards joint, a place for people to smoke cigarettes and play pool, Mahmoud remembered. When he and his wife Afsaneh took over the property, they tore the building down and built the restaurant from scratch.
They had a brick floor laid down, hung up sheer drapes and brought in decorative rugs from Iran. Vegetarians flocked to the restaurant for the grilled eggplant, shirazi salad and dolmeh. International students from nearby Phoenix College, homesick for kababs, led the couple to add meatier options, such as lamb stew, gyro platters and kabab koobideh seasoned with Persian spices.
But come Jan. 30, Mahmoud and Afsaneh will say goodbye to their last customers. “I spent $250,000 making it what it is and I’m leaving empty handed,” Mahmoud said.
‘We can’t do anything about it’
Persian Garden Cafe is located in a small strip mall on the southeast corner of 15th Avenue and Thomas Road. The block features a few other shops, including another restaurant Original Hamburger Works.
Mahmoud said he had a positive relationship with the longtime previous property manager, MPB Realty. The agency was empathetic and negotiated a lower rent when the Great Recession hit in 2008 and Persian Garden Cafe, like many businesses in Arizona, were struggling financially, he said.
MPB Realty sold the property in February 2020 and Arizona Partners, a real estate developer based in Scottsdale, took over. Shortly afterward Arizona restaurants were ordered to shut down because of the COVID-19 health crisis. When restaurants were allowed to resume dine-in services with limited capacity, the restaurant couldn’t recapture business, even with delivery and takeout services, Mahmoud said.
Then in the fall Mahmoud and Afsaneh received two notices: One, their monthly rent of $2,517.41 would be lowered to $1,500 for October through December 2020, he said.
More shocking for them, however, was the other news: Their rent would not only jump after that, but continue to increase over the next five years.
Mahmoud shared a photo of their lease renewal letter, which proposes a five-year term starting with a monthly rent of $2,841 — $300 more than what they paid at the beginning of 2020. Arizona Partners also proposed an additional rent increase each year, ballooning to $3,472.33 per month in 2025.
His contact person at Arizona Partners, Bob Rusing, explained the higher costs matched the neighborhood’s market value, Mahmoud said.
“My wife says sometimes, why should we accept it?” Mahmoud said. “Because they have the power. The building is theirs and we can’t do anything about it.” The Arizona Republic left messages with Rusing and Arizona Partners, but did not hear back.
The restaurant is the couple’s only source of income and they worry now about whether they can make future mortgage payments on their house.
“With the COVID-19 pandemic, which affects all human life on earth, I think instead of helping each other, some people purposefully just want to push us out of here, just want to destroy our life,” Afsaneh said. “This is mathematics. If you don’t have income, you will lose your home. I need to pay my car. If I lose my income, how can I pay my car?”
‘They just think about money’
Further losses blow to the couple.
Persian Garden Cafe owed its landlord $6,337.83 in past due rent, according to an extension of their lease agreement dated Sept. 1, 2020.
“In this pandemic there’s no revenue to pay this rent,” Mahmoud said Dec. 30. “Today my customers, we only had two tables and three takeout orders. Five transactions all day. You can imagine a business like this cannot support this rent. It’s just not there.”
To have their balance forgiven, the restaurant owners agreed to leave behind “fixtures, furniture and all other personal property listed” when they terminated their lease, including their oven and range top, fryers, pizza oven, all refrigerators and washing machine.
delivered
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Their son, Joseph Jaafari, has been in town helping them sell what’s left over on Craigslist and OfferUp: mostly kitchenware, plates and silverware, tables and chairs.
Mahmoud said two potential buyers wanted to purchase the restaurant, which gave them hope they could come away with more money. One of the offers came from ZK Grill, a fast-casual Persian and Mediterranean restaurant with two locations in east Phoenix, Mahmoud said. But Arizona Partners rejected the prospective buyers, he said.
Selling the restaurant would have made them happy and perhaps given them enough capital to start looking for a smaller restaurant to open, Afsaneh said.
“They just think about money, they don’t think about us,” Afsaneh said. “They just think to make some profit.”
What’s next for Persian Garden Cafe?
Mahmoud moved to the United States decades ago from Ahwaz, a city in western Iran. To support himself, he started working as a cook and eventually made his way to Phoenix, where the climate reminded him of his birth country.
In 1991 he opened Greenleaf Cafe, a vegetarian restaurant on 19th and Campbell avenues — the place where he also met Afsaneh, who came in as a diner. A pescatarian himself, Mahmoud said he wanted to offer Phoenix “an alternative to the meat and potato diet.”
When he closed Greenleaf Cafe and opened Persian Garden Cafe, he kept some of the original menu items, such as the spinach herb, or kookoo sabzi,
burger. It’s tough to give up the business that’s supported him, his wife and their three children, as well as their community, for so long. In the past few weeks, customers have come in to say their goodbyes. “It hurts my heart,” Mahmoud said. “It saddens me to leave this place. And then one other thing is, besides this emotional roller coaster I went through ... at this time, I have no plan what I will do. I don’t have the capital to open another restaurant.”
In October, the Arizona Restaurant Association estimated that 9 to 11% of restaurants in Arizona had permanently closed since March. That estimate includes food trucks and bars.
A COVID-19 relief package, signed at the end of 2020, offers a second round of paycheck loans, but notably left out the provisions of the RESTAURANTS Act. The bipartisan bill, introduced June 2020, would have established $120 billion in grants to food service and drinking establishments through December but was never passed.
Americans are under stress, whether financially or from mourning the more than 300,000 lives lost to COVID-19 — this should be the time when people should come together like brother and sister to help each other, Mahmoud said. He hopes his family can find another way to remain a part of their neighborhood’s community.
Persian Garden Cafe is located at at 1335 W. Thomas Road in Phoenix and the last day of service is scheduled for Saturday, Jan. 30.