San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
BRIDGING CULTURES
Flux: Tripoli’s Mediterranean Grill aims to connect South Side to Middle Eastern flavors.
Most of the customers at Tripoli’s Mediterranean Grill are service members from Joint Base
San Antonio-Lackland — many of whom acquired a taste for the cuisine while serving overseas.
“One of the biggest compliments that I can get is when somebody comes in here and says, ‘This food tastes like when I was in Lebanon, or when I was in Syria, or Iraq,’ ” said Howaida Werfelli, who owns the Southwest Side restaurant with her two brothers and another partner.
For nearly 11 years, the restaurant has served dishes from her Libyan heritage — including family recipes for grape leaves and baklava — and other Mediterranean and Middle Eastern dishes such as baba ghanoush, gyros and lamb kebabs. On a stretch of Valley Hi Drive dominated by fast-food joints, it offers an authentic cultural experience.
Werfelli and her brothers didn’t plan to go into the restaurant business until an acquaintance asked them to be partners in a hookah lounge in the Medical Center area. They opened Tripoli’s after noticing many of their customers were coming up from Lackland.
The three siblings now share an entrepreneurial drive: Werfelli runs a public health consulting firm while one of her brothers is in the solar power business and another operates an auto shop. The other partner has become like a brother to them, she said.
“You don’t go into business with somebody and not turn into family at some point,” she said. “You either turn into family or
you’re turning into enemies — it’s one of the two.”
The business has changed over the years. It once featured a hookah lounge in a space that has been converted into a coffee shop offering Mediterranean drinks such as Turkish coffee and espressino, a double espresso with steamed milk served over Nutella.
Werfelli now takes the lead in running the business, after her partners did while she was pursuing her doctorate in public health from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.
“They afforded me the freedom for many, many years to be able to pursue my own education and my own interest,” she said. “Now that I’m done and I’ve got my consultancy, I can just do that from anywhere. And now it’s their turn.”
Werfelli recently sat for an interview to discuss delivery platforms, the growth of the South Side and plans for the restaurant’s future. The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Q:
There’s a lot of talk about inflation and labor shortages. Is that something you’ve struggled with?
A: Yeah, 100 percent. Prices are starting to come down, but I don’t believe the prices are ever going to be what they were preCOVID. I think these big businesses have a profit that they have to recoup, and the way that they’re going to do that is by keeping their prices higher.
And then shortages — I’ll give you a prime example. Over the last two weeks we’ve been trying to hire. I’ve gotten résumés and screened them, called people and set up interviews. This morning would have been my 10th interview. And I have yet to have anybody actually show up.
Q:
How have you coped with that?
A: I’ve got a pretty amazing team of people on staff right now, so people are picking up wherever they can. I always, as an owner, make the assumption that I’m going to be the one that fills in any of the gaps.
Q:
Do you find that companies like Uber and Grubhub are good for businesses like yours?
A: I don’t think so. One of the things that we saw during the pandemic is, No. 1, most people don’t read the fine print in companies like Uber and Grubhub, and they know that.
Over the years, they’ve steadily increased their commission rates. On the customer-facing side, you pay a fee to have it delivered, right? What people don’t realize is that on the restaurant-facing side it’s 30 to 40 percent commission — that’s the typical average.
Then you have to depend on is there a driver available? You put your faith in the driver. There’s a protocol that they’re supposed to be following. For example, with Grubhub, they ask you to separate your hot and cold items, which absolutely makes sense. But then their drivers come in and toss everything into the same hot bag. So people, by the time they get it, their cold items are warm, their stuff doesn’t look nice. And they think that that’s the responsibility of the restaurant and forget that there’s this middleman that’s making the delivery.
It’s just a messed-up system all around when you’re putting your faith, the reputation of your establishment, in somebody else’s hands.
Q: Can you choose not to deal with those companies?
A: That’s the direction we’re moving. We’ve already gotten rid of Grubhub. We just had too many problems with them.
We are working on revamping. We’re doing the whole rebrand. Our new website, new online store, we’re waiting on that to be done. As soon as that’s done, then we’re just going to go to direct ordering from us into Square. I’ve been with them for a long time. They’ve always had an online store, but now they do delivery also. They’ve partnered with DoorDash and Postmates. Those two will do the delivery, but Square holds full responsibility, so they’re accountable to Square 100 percent. According to them, they’re going to introduce the option of being able to deliver your own stuff or opting to have a driver come and pick it up, but it’s through them. The commission on it is literally $1.50 per order, and then it’s the standard transaction fees.
Q: Tell me more about the rebranding.
A: We feel like we’re in a growth phase. I don’t want to be oblivious to the reality that we have spikes and delta right now and everything, but we’ve survived it. I feel like we’re coming out of it much stronger than we ever were, and we’re just ready to grow and level up. We want our new image to reflect where we’re at, maturity-wise, emotionally, 10 years in.
Q: What is the new vision for your business?
A: The idea is for us to be even more involved with the community. Really try to bring things back to an even more authentic level.
We constantly talk about this place as being the bridge between East and West. The service members come in here, with their experience overseas, and we get
to take them back, at least through the taste of the food, the ambiance that we have. But for a lot of people, when they come in here, this is the first time that they’ve had Mediterranean food. Sometimes, you see them really apprehensive. They’re coming in because their friend wanted them to come in. So this is an opportunity to raise a level of awareness. Sometimes we get customers that come in here, and they’ve never met an Arab person, or they’ve never met a Muslim person. People get to ask questions, and sometimes the conversations that come out of all of it, it’s so beautiful.
There’s such a beauty to life overseas that we miss out on every single day here. So people come in, and they’ve never heard the Arabic language, but they hear it in our music. And all of a sudden, you see people just starting to sway, and get really happy and bop their heads and all that kind of stuff. I feel that this place helps break barriers in that sense.
Q:
You have said that 90 percent of your client base is military, right?
A: That’s definitely changed. I’d
say we’re more around 80 to 85 percent now. One of the positive things of the whole pandemic has been the focus on social media, because that was one of those things that we really didn’t care about too much. We depended so much on word of mouth. But (the pandemic) gave us the time to focus on that, and so that expanded our reach.
Q:
What is it like operating a restaurant on the South Side?
A: It’s hard, I’ll tell you that. We hear this all the time from people that are coming in: “Oh, I didn’t know you were here.” But we’ve been here for 10 years, right? Then we’ll hear from customers that come in, they’re trying to get their family to come in, but they don’t want to. They just want to go to a Mexican restaurant, something like that, American comfort food. They’re hesitant about Mediterranean because this is not typical for this area.
I do have people that drive from University City down here, I do have people coming in from Stone Oak, and from Alamo Heights, Alamo Ranch. But that’s not the overwhelming majority. Once this area has something that I think has just a little bit more appeal to it, then we will reap the benefits of it.
I’m super excited for some of the stuff that (District 4 City Councilwoman Adriana Rocha Garcia) is working on. Hopefully people will recognize the beauty of it, because this is a great place at the end of the day. Down this way, it’s multigenerational homes. So there’s a camaraderie and a level of compassion in this area that you don’t necessarily see everywhere else.
Q:
A: That is the plan, yeah. Without saying too too much, we want to do Alamo Ranch. And then hopefully, at some point when other parts of District 4 get developed, looking at opening up — I don’t know how much I’m allowed to say about certain things, but I know Texas A&M has a project in the works right now. And that whole area where Palo Alto is, they’re looking at really developing that, so that would be a beautiful place for us to to relocate to.
Do you plan to expand? Q: Is it difficult to run a business with your brothers?
A: Early on it was. My advice to anybody that ever goes into business with family is to have that conversation early on. We didn’t — we’ve always grown up super, super close, and then when the business started to happen, it was, you know, carrying business stuff into our personal relationships.
At one point, we just had to sit and have that conversation and say, “We cannot allow this to happen anymore.” So personal is personal, and that’s where it stays, and business is business, and that’s where it stays.