Business in Vancouver's "How I Did It" feature asks business leaders to explain in their own words how they achieved a business goal in the face of significant entrepreneurial challenges. In this week's issue, Victor Bouzide, founder of Nuba Lebanese restaurants, talks about his decision to move from Ontario to Vancouver, where health consciousness helped his Lebanese restaurants prosper.
"Before I came out here I had a little Lebanese restaurant in Windsor, Ontario. I was born in Windsor. My parents came from Lebanon.
"It was near the University of Windsor. Many of the professors were from Vancouver, and they're the ones who convinced me to come out here. They used to come in and eat almost every day, and they would tell me, 'You need this kind of food in Vancouver.'
"Windsor was not very vibrant. The growth there was limited. I figured I needed to go to a bigger centre, either Toronto or Vancouver. I had always read about Vancouver having a healthy lifestyle. I thought what they really needed here was something where you can do the foods and salads and dinners the way my mother used to cook them.
"Lebanese cuisine is very healthy. I'm selling a great deal of chickpeas, fava beans, green lentils, red lentils. All my dishes are made with my family's recipes. All our carrots, greens for salads, are all organically grown.
"The challenge is I couldn't get any help from the banks. I had limited funds, so I sold my business in Windsor and came out to take a look. At the time I arrived in Vancouver, I started making organic hummus for Mandeville Gardens in Burnaby in 1998. That is when I came up with Sans Souci Organic Foods.
"I opened up [Nuba] at 322 West Hastings Street in 2002, which is across the street from where I'm at now. I started out with a 15-seat little place and worked there for three years. It got to the point where we were feeding 150 to 200 people a day with 15 seats. I thought, the food's catching on really well, so we opened a second store in 2006 at 1206 Seymour. It didn't take long for that to catch on.
"I had the opportunity to move into the Dominion building across from the original first store into a 111-seat establishment at Hastings and Cambie. I took on a partner, and we raised enough money to get this place across the street open. On December 13, we served 561 people. That's turning your seats five times in a restaurant – that's unbelievable.
"We were so busy, we needed a bigger kitchen, so I found a location on 3rd Avenue [in Mount Pleasant]. I opened up a 45-seat restaurant there, and I've got a 5,000-square-foot commissary in the back of it.
"Now we had a commissary, so we had big rents to pay and we needed more business. So a year and a half ago we started catering. That's grown unbelievably in the last year and a half. In October we did two weddings in one day – 160 and 150 people each."
