The future looked bright for Dina Daniel in early 2020. Fava Pot, the Falls Church restaurant she had opened three years earlier, was thriving—its loyal and growing customer base delighting in the Egyptian cuisine of her homeland. Diners couldn’t get enough of dishes such as koshary (lentils, macaroni, chickpeas and rice in tomato sauce), táamya (fava bean falafel) and fluffs of aish baladi (flatbread) served piping-hot from a stone oven.
The Fava Pot food truck, which Daniel started back in 2013, was preparing to emerge from its winter hibernation. A Fava Pot pop-up in Washington, D.C.’s Union Market had been well received. Now Daniel, 51, was finishing up negotiations to open another brick-and-mortar eatery, Egyptian Street Food by Fava Pot, in Rosslyn this fall.
“Sales were unbelievable in February,” she recalls during our Zoom interview. “I was extremely thankful that I would start to see a profit in 2020 and that my labor of seven years would finally pay off.”
And then. Well, we all know what happened next.
Daniel realized Covid-19 was serious by the end of February, but didn’t panic. “I thought it would affect us for a month or so. I didn’t imagine it would be a global pandemic,” she says. “The weekend before we shut down, we had a full house at Fava Pot. By St. Patrick’s Day, we were closed.” (On March 17, Gov. Ralph Northam imposed a 10-person maximum for on-site dining. His subsequent stay-at-home order on March 30 limited restaurants to takeout and delivery.)
Daniel was scared but couldn’t show it to her staff. “You don’t want them to be afraid, to have the uncertain feeling—Are we going to get paid? Do we have a job? But I was wondering, Is this the end?”
Reluctantly, she sprang into action. Although it broke her heart, she laid off three full-time and three part-time workers, leaving her entire operation with a staff of six, including herself, to perform various jobs in rotation—cooking, dishwashing, delivering.
Realizing she had to convert phone ordering to online, she put her website developer to work, bartering a deal—$39 per month for each of her three locations, plus 99 cents per food order (with no cap) in exchange for his services.
To bolster cash flow, she began offering free delivery within a 30-mile radius of the restaurant. She and her staff took turns making deliveries. “We had DoorDash and Uber Eats and Grubhub before, but they take 30% of sales,” she says. “Before Covid, that was okay as a marketing tool, but now we would be losing money on each sale.”
While the drives were a grind, delivery exposed her product to people in places like Woodbridge, Middleburg and D.C. who had never been to Fava Pot. And even though delivery was free, she found grateful customers leaving enormous tips, essentially paying the delivery cost anyway.
“All of this is light in the middle of darkness. I see people have great love in their hearts,” says the chef/entrepreneur.
One day, a regular customer came to pick up an order and handed her what she thought was a postcard in an envelope. She thanked him and threw it on the passenger seat of her car as she headed out to deliver food. At a traffic light, she opened the envelope and found a check for $1,000, along with a note expressing how much he and his wife believed in her and her goodness.
They wanted her to use the money as she wished—to share it, pay bills or take care of any needs.
“I broke down in tears,” Daniel says. “That is the moment that I thought, God is taking care of me.”
Fava Pot’s sales dropped precipitously during quarantine (as of late June, they were at 40% to 50% of normal). Yet Daniel remains resolute about maintaining her full menu and not raising prices, even though the costs of goods and disposables have shot up.
“Here’s how the equation is still working. We put in extra work on our side, rotating all the jobs to be able to serve the same quality without increasing prices,” she explains. “You can’t raise prices. Not even 10 cents. This is a survival struggle.”
She insists on using compostable takeout products. “A dinner container costs me $1.10. Styrofoam would be less than 10 cents, but I chose to go green and [provide] a nice, appetizing presentation. I don’t want you sitting at home in the middle of a pandemic and eating out of foam and foil.”
In March, sourcing ingredients such as halal chicken and meat, grass-fed veal, and wheat bran and yeast for the bread became difficult. Daniel recalls schlepping all over the DMV in search of specific items, to places like Restaurant Depot (a wholesale food supplier) in Alexandria and Capitol Heights, Maryland; H Mart supermarkets in Annandale and Falls Church; and Aphrodite Greek Imports in Falls Church. Yeast was particularly scarce. She’d comb multiple grocery stores and buy up all the packets she could find.
“Then my contact at Restaurant Depot in Alexandria, with whom I’d been doing business for six years, called me and said, ‘Hey! The truck will be here at 6 a.m. tomorrow. You need to be here!’ And I went, because you have to understand, bread is a main item in our restaurant, not a side item. It’s so important to Egyptian food.”
Packaging posed other hurdles. Her supplier, Acme Paper & Supply Co., ran out of the recyclable paper to-go bags she normally uses, and no one else had them. For a month, she had to use the ubiquitous white plastic bags that she abhors. Disposable gloves were also hard to come by, as was hand sanitizer, deemed a necessity at any cost.
And then there was the rent. Daniel reached out to her landlord, EDENS, with a copy of her sales report from March. They initially offered her a two-month postponement, but no lease forgiveness.
In June, she reached out again. “I said, ‘I’m not here to go out of business; I’m here to stay in business. So postponing the rent is not a solution. Let’s talk about solutions.’ ”
This time they came to an equitable agreement, the terms of which are confidential. “They made a very reasonable offer that is fair for them and for us,” Daniel says. “I can say that this company is a business partner, not just a landlord. I am so blessed.” (EDENS is also the lessor of the pop-up space at Union Market, as well as her apartment building in Falls Church.)
Daniel, who is a Coptic Christian, has faced other life challenges before. In 2004, she sought and received asylum in the U.S., leaving her friends and family—and support system—behind, for religious reasons. In 2007, after holding a series of jobs in the D.C. area, she became the director of donor relations for Coptic Orphans, an American-Egyptian nonprofit organization based in Fairfax that provides aid to orphaned Christian children in Egypt.
Six years later, the food truck tsunami took the Greater Washington area by storm, and with it came another calling. Daniel decided to introduce her culture to the American public through food, putting to use the culinary know-how she’d acquired from growing up around great food. “Extended family and friends were always delighted to get invited for dinner at our house,” she reminisces. She had also learned a thing or two from the chef of an upscale Lebanese restaurant she once owned in Cairo.
The executive director of Coptic Orphans thought she was crazy, questioning why, at 44, she would do something so risky. She told Daniel she’d hold her job open for six months.
But Daniel forged ahead. She tracked down a food truck company in Miami, flew there one weekend and put down a $10,000 deposit on an $85,000 truck. That Monday, she took a food manager course in D.C.
A friend picked her up from the Metro and said she looked ashen.
“I looked and felt terrible,” Daniel recalls. “Something was really wrong with me. My friend took me to her home and I broke down. I was crying. I couldn’t breathe. I thought I was having a heart attack.”
In the ER, her symptoms were diagnosed as acute anxiety. “Apparently, it was because of a lot of change in a very short period. When I saw the truck in Miami, it hit me—Am I able to do this? I always kept things bottled up and it came out as panic attack.”
She canceled the truck and lost her $10,000 deposit. A psychologist helped her work through her anxiety and fear of failure. So did Falafel, the 6-week-old beagle she adopted, now her faithful companion for the past six years. (For her Fava Pot truck, she ultimately bought a used one in Pennsylvania and had it outfitted in Manassas.)
When Covid-19 arrived with all its uncertainty, Daniel remembered the panic attack and how it felt as her empathy for her staff kicked in. “I feel responsibility toward them. I don’t want the atmosphere of the pandemic to be forcing anxiety,” she says. “That’s why it’s important we all do deliveries, so we won’t always be stuck inside. It helps keep minds fresh to be outside.”
The claim that “employees are just like family” is often a hollow one in the restaurant business. But with Daniel it rings true.
Two of her employees, Elmer Ramos and Cintia Lemus Ramos, have been with her since the food truck began in 2013. Elmer started off as a cook and helper; now he’s the restaurant’s sous-chef. Cintia was a cleaning lady; now she’s a chef supervisor and Elmer’s assistant. The couple met while working on the truck, married last year, and now have a 1-year-old son, Dylan Samuel.
Two other employees, Stephen Samuels and Ingres “Flor” Prada, have been working for Daniel since 2017. Samuels started as a cashier and is now an area manager, overseeing the Union Market operation. Prada, originally a dishwasher, is another chef supervisor. Sara Reyes, who came to the U.S. from El Salvador in 2018, joined the team eight months ago as dishwasher, and now works prep.
Daniel does not believe the relationships are coincidental. “This is God, 100 percent,” she says. “I’m alone here from Egypt and have no children. He has chosen for me these people of different backgrounds, different educations, different cultures, different everything. He gathered us to run a family business, even if we are not family by blood. If, at any point, I go to heaven, these are the people who will run the restaurant. I’m happy that they contributed to my success and my life and that God used me in their lives. It’s a very beautiful picture.”
She speaks of her staff with the adoration of a proud mother. She got to know Elmer as the two worked long hours, side by side, in the early days of the cramped food truck, hearing how he had suffered in his native El Salvador. “Even though he’s been through so much…he gives the benefit of the doubt to everyone. When my brother passed away, and then [later] my mom, I had to go to Egypt. On these two occasions, his eyes were red. He hugged me and said, ‘You go.’ ”
Samuels, whose family emigrated to the U.S. from Egypt when he was 5, was on the construction site, helping the contractor, when Daniel was building out Fava Pot in Falls Church. She noticed what a hard worker the 17-year-old was and told him to call if he ever wanted to get into the restaurant business. He emailed a week later.
“He is a very smart, responsible young guy. He told me he wants to go to college, but prefers community college to not overwhelm his parents with tuition. Then, after that, he will go to George Mason. I just fell in love with him and hired him. Now he is my left hand. Elmer is my right hand.”
Amid the pandemic, Daniel applied for the federal government’s Paycheck Protection Program and received $36,600 in May during the second round of funding. She used 25% of it for rent and the rest for payroll, meeting the government’s requirements to have the loan forgiven. Whereas many businesspeople have expressed frustration with the program, Daniel lauds it.
“I am in touch with other Egyptian-American business owners [she became an American citizen in 2015] and we all have a similar viewpoint—only in America do you find a government that supports small businesses and gives them forgivable loans during crises.”
She is moving ahead cautiously.
For now, her food truck is limiting its rounds to private functions and special occasions. Fava Pot Union Market reopened at the end of June, but only on weekends. The Rosslyn restaurant project is totally on hold.
She did not open her Falls Church eatery for indoor dining during Phase 2 or Phase 3, even though the governor’s order allowed it. “Now I’m able to operate with almost 50% of my income doing curbside pickup and delivery,” she says. “We will stick to that. If one of us gets sick, we will have to shut down, and I feel we deserve not to have another hit. I won’t put my staff and guests at risk and create more anxiety and stress.”
In June, Daniel started working out with a trainer to get back in shape and renew her mind.
“After I had that panic attack, I decided I will never let myself get to that point again,” she explains. “I’m not allowing any negativity around me. I’m not living in denial; I’m protecting myself and my staff. Even listening to a radio show, if people just want to say, ‘We’ve got problems! We’ve got problems!,’ I turn it off. I only listen to people saying ‘We’ve got problems’ if they are looking for solutions.”
Although she considers herself optimistic about the future, she’s reluctant to even think a week ahead.
“There might be a vaccine in four or five months, or it might be two years. I like to plan, but you can plan only if you have most of the elements under your control, and I don’t,” she says.
“Delivery and takeout are the only elements I can control; everything else is loose. If another wave comes and there is no PPP, how will we pay our rent, our personal bills? These are unknown things I’m not in control of, so I’m taking it one day at a time.”
For now, at least, there is koshary and táamya and hot aish baladi from the oven. And there is comfort in that.
David Hagedorn is the restaurant critic for Arlington Magazine and Bethesda Magazine. He is the co-author of several cookbooks, including Rasika: Flavors of India.