
Last year, Chef Omar Anani of Saffron De Twah purchased a property for two new east-side Detroit eateries set to open sometime in 2025. But it’s not just the restaurants, which are housed in the same building at 16620 E. Warren Ave., that he’s focused on. Anani wants to push the entire industry forward.
It’s a vision that starts with people — that’s why plans are for the top floor of his new venture to feature three or four single apartments, which the company intends to subsidize for employees.
“To give that excellent experience — and be mindful of sustainability and waste management — requires people who are very passionate about what we do,” Anani says.
The restaurant industry is fraught with unpredictability. Wages are low, benefits are often nonexistent, and restaurant profits are dwindling.
A recent survey in Michigan showed that 60% of restaurants are seeing fewer customers than they were a year ago. And in an interview with ABC12 News in Flint, Justin Winslow, president and CEO of the Michigan Restaurant & Lodging Association, said that Michigan is in the bottom third of all states in terms of restaurant industry workforce growth since the pandemic.
Low pay and lack of health insurance, plus the physical and mental demands of the industry, have made restaurant life less and less desirable. It’s an occupation that has developed a nasty reputation — work hard and work often at the expense of your happiness and well-being.
Anani hopes to change that. He is changing that. At Saffron De Twah, the chef takes care of his employees in exemplary fashion, offering excellent pay ($15 an hour), health insurance, and paid time off. He also invests in his employees personally, often nurturing their interests.
At Saffron, Anani talks about an employee, Emily Crombez, whose passion is photography. Instead of sourcing out the restaurant’s photography to a freelancer, he has Crombez take the photos. It feeds her passion and also puts some more money in her pocket.
Anani understands that his people are the key to creating a sustainable and equitable restaurant industry. What if you could eliminate the highest cost of all: rent?
According to Rent.com, Michigan saw a 12.4% increase in rent costs from 2023 to 2024. A study done earlier this year by Harvard University showed that half of all U.S. renters were cost burdened. Rent unaffordability has hit an all-time high, and people are finding themselves having to work multiple jobs just to make ends meet.
“When you’re selling $10 to $15 sandwiches, you can’t afford to pay someone $20 to $25 an hour, right?” Anani says. “And so how can we pay them less is by subsidizing the most expensive cost of living, which is your rent.”
When asked whether the living situation would be considered a landlord-tenant relationship, how the restaurant would determine which employees would receive the housing, and what would happen if a housed employee quit or was fired, Anani says, “Let’s say you live there and you quit, right? I can’t just kick you out. There’s a lot of legal stuff that needs to happen, too. I don’t know what the final structure will be, to be honest.”
Anani dreams about a new, better restaurant model to take the place of one that’s outdated, that doesn’t serve its community as best it could.
“Our mission is to break barriers through food,” Anani says. It’s a sentence often uttered by restaurant owners, sometimes rather vacantly, but there’s a steadfast tone in Anani’s voice. He means it, and he believes there’s a barrier between restaurants and their employees that needs to be torn down.
This story originally appeared in the January 2025 issue of Hour Detroit magazine. To read more, pick up a copy of Hour Detroit at a local retail outlet. Our digital edition will be available on Jan. 6.
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