Portraits by Megan Mumford
It didn’t take Bashir Chedrawee long to become one of the leading lights of the Capital Region restaurant scene.
He opened his first restaurant, Simone’s Kitchen, in Coxsackie in 2018, to showcase his mother’s Lebanese cooking. Two other Simone’s Kitchens soon followed, on Jay Street in downtown Schenectady and at Stuyvesant Plaza, and a fourth location is set to open in Glenmont next year. Visit any of these locations, and you’ll see an eager line of diners waiting to order the flavorful, healthy, and affordable Mediterranean food Simone’s has become known for.
But Chedrawee, a Guilderland resident who moved to the US from Lebanon with his family at the age of 8, believes there’s more to success than a bottom line. He strives to provide a welcoming restaurant experience delivered by a helpful, friendly staff. Central to his philosophy is the idea that treating people well goes hand in hand with success, as do a healthy workplace and healthy food. In an industry where complaints about low pay and poor working conditions are all too common, this ethos distinguishes Simone’s from the restaurant pack.
“Our hospitality doesn’t start with the guests,” says Chedrawee, who’s now 33. “It starts with our team members. From the beginning, we wanted a place where people feel valued, where people feel taken care of, where they get out of the business what they put in. And the business takes care of them the same way they take care of the business.”
In the spirit of giving back to his staff, this summer, Chedrawee shut down all three Simone’s locations for a week and brought 50 employees and 23 plus-ones on vacation to Greece, giving up approximately six figures in revenue to do so. He also offers a base pay of $21 per hour (“whether you’re tipped or in the kitchen”), health benefits, and personal time off, as well as subsidized gym memberships and subscriptions to streaming services like Netflix.
“You’ve got to be healthy in every aspect of your business,” Chedrawee says. “Otherwise, you’re going to lose the heart that it takes to do this.”
Becoming a restaurateur was never in Chedrawee’s plans.
“My background has nothing to do with the hospitality industry,” says Chedrawee, who graduated from Troy High School and the University at Albany. “Biochemistry and molecular biology and neuroscience—that’s where I was.” During the gap year Chedrawee took to apply to medical school, his mother—Simone, for whom his chain of restaurants is named—asked him to help her open an eatery to share her cooking.
“When you come from the region of the world I’m from, you have a familiarity with food because cooking is very important for our culture,” Chedrawee says. “It’s one of the few things we can showcase in Lebanon. There’s not really an abundance of natural resources. You get into cooking because that’s how you share your love. It’s how a lot of people make a living—by opening up restaurants or bakeries.”
Chedrawee’s parents worked in restaurants after immigrating to the Capital Region; his dad started out as a dishwasher, and eventually became a chef at Villa Valenti’s, an Italian restaurant in West Sand Lake that has since closed. They also ran a short-lived eatery specializing in Lebanese food that never quite caught on. “They were successful for a while, but their food was too traditional,” Chedrawee says. “There was a customer base, but not enough of one; they couldn’t appeal to the mass public. When I opened up Simone’s, that was the thing to solve.”
To make his zesty dishes approachable to Upstate diners, Chedrawee opted for a fast-casual model—Chipotle-style, if you will—where customers order at a counter, see the ingredients, and pick what they want.
“We thought: How do we capture these flavors and some of the essence of this region of the world, but make it familiar enough, affordable enough, quick enough, and healthy enough?” he says. “When you walk into Simone’s, it feels like your modern dining room or café space. It doesn’t feel like you’re walking into something that you’re not familiar with. It’s not until you’re walking up to the counter that you may see foods that you’ve never tried before.”
Simone’s Kitchen’s food is Mediterranean-inspired, borrowing from the many different cuisines of the countries that comprise the region—Spain, Italy, Morocco, Lebanon, and Greece, to name a few—and emphasizing fresh ingredients and food made from scratch. “We get inspiration from everywhere,” Chedrawee says. “We have a tomato salsa that’s inspired by bruschetta from Italy. We have hummus made in the traditional Lebanese form. We have our tzatziki, which is Greek.”
Simone’s is known for its mezza bowls, which are inspired by the small, shared plates diners in the eastern Mediterranean region select from to build their own meals. The restaurant’s most popular mezza bowl is the chicken shawarma: greens, basmati rice, seasoned chicken, roasted lemon potatoes, tomato salsa, and more. All food served at Simone’s is made in-house, and the company is in the process of building a production kitchen in Schenectady to centralize prep work and distribute fresh, scratch-made food to its restaurants every day.
Chedrawee also runs Lily P’s Wood Fired Pizza Co. at Frog Alley Brewing in Schenectady, and is working to open a dessert shop, Connie’s Confectionary, a couple of doors down from Simone’s on Jay Street. Through Simone’s Dining Services, he contracts with Schenectady County to serve and deliver wholesome, high-quality meals to low-income seniors. He also has plans to open a sit-down restaurant in Saratoga Springs. All of his projects fall under his umbrella company, Saucy Hospitality.
Chedrawee says his goal is to create the healthiest food possible. Even the pizza at Lily P’s is made with care and attention to the quality of the ingredients.
“We don’t use anything with preservatives,” he says. “We use the highest-quality flour imported from Italy. We use tomato sauce made out of actual tomatoes. We use cheese without any additives. That philosophy of putting out a product that doesn’t, at a minimum, hurt people—that’s something you can do with anything. You can do it with pizza; you can do it with burgers. You just have to choose the right ingredients and the right approach.”
Saucy Hospitality aims to leverage the company’s success to support local charities like The Mooncatcher Project, which donates reusable menstrual products to developing countries, and teaching students from the Schenectady City School District to make food from scratch. On the day I was scheduled to meet with him, he was busy transporting chicken to other restaurants that were participating in Schenectady’s annual Wing Walk to help reduce their costs.
“It’s being part of the community,” he says. “A lot of our self-worth as human beings comes from being able to give to other people.”
