Ramzi Budayr doesn’t write down orders dictated across the register. He chalks this up to years of working front-of-house at the kind of fine-dining restaurants where using a notepad would seem uncouth.
He now works the whole “house,” ringing up groceries, baking cookies and slathering sauce on bread at his Dolores Heights corner store, Dolores Deluxe, while casually rotating through a Rolodex of languages.
English is spoken with the kids who drop their backpacks in a pile at the door and run in for a so-called $1, a blood-orange-flavored slushie that is an after-school special from the man they call “Mr. Deluxe.” Perfunctory kitchen Spanish is used with one of the three cooking staff, easy-flowing French with another. (His own nationality? “French, Lebanese, American, whatever,” he laughed.)
Budayr says he hasn’t seen the Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning show “The Bear,” which recounts a similar tale of a gourmet chef turned sandwich-shop owner. But then again, he says, he doesn’t need to. He’s lived all the stress and excitement that comes with having big food ambitions and a very small kitchen.
“It’s about leading with your intention,” Budayr says, “and hoping that enough people buy into it in enough time that you don’t close.”
‘I wasn’t the butter noodles kid’
Budayr’s first conscious memory is of staring down the barrel of a chocolate croissant in the apartment he lived in as a small child, at Sutter and Steiner streets. There were crumbs on his face.
“I don’t remember anything before that,” Budayr said, sheepishly. “Food has just always been the fuel of my particular engine.”
By age four, Budayr remembers “helping out” in the kitchen. For his eighth birthday, Budayr’s aunt gifted him a three-day pastry class in Paris during a layover on the family’s holiday trip to Lebanon. The following year, he was given “Larousse Gastronomique,” a French food encyclopedia.
The familial investments paid off. By age nine, he was making dinner. “I wasn’t the butter noodles kid,” Budayr shrugged. “I was the pasta with pesto sauce, pine nuts, and parmesan kid.”
At 15, Budayr downloaded a stock photo of a green apple and superimposed his cell phone number over it in Helvetica font. “Granny Smith Catering” was born. He found gigs on Craigslist, and outsourced rides to Budayr’s stepsister; Budayr didn’t have a driver’s license. “I had no idea what I was doing. I still had braces.”
After high school, Budayr wanted to go to culinary school. His parents, Lebanese immigrants who had completed their medical residencies at the University of California, San Francisco, were not thrilled. Do something you can fall back on, they said. Business school it was.
After graduating, the first place he landed a job was at — “I shit you not,” Budayr recounted — Weight Watchers International. The dieting company was launching its 2013 “Weight Watchers for men campaign,” featuring Charles Barkley in a wig and little black dress, bragging about how he lost 40 pounds while still eating “man food” like pizza. As “the only cis-male under 50 in the building,” Budayr was asked to sit in on marketing meetings.
To celebrate the promotion, his boss took him out to the restaurant in the office building’s lobby. It was the Michelin-starred Eleven Madison Park.
Budayr can still describe that first meal: A three-course prix fixe with crab and avocado roulade, pasta, and a dark chocolate shortbread for $56. They sat at table 60, a two-top corner banquette beside a window. Miles Davis played.
“I was just blown away,” Budayr said. “By everything.”
It was the end of the line for Budayr and Weight Watchers, but the beginning of his real-life connection to ‘The Bear.’
The then-22-year-old quit his corporate job and started checking coats at Eleven Madison Park for $5 an hour, plus tips. By the time he left, he had worked his way up to head maître d’. From there, he began working at luxury hotels and consulting for restaurants in places as far away as Dubai.
“What the hell were you doing in the Middle East?” Budayr recalled Will Guidara, Eleven Madison Park’s then-owner, asking when he returned to the states. Guidara would go on to co-produce “The Bear,” drawing inspiration from the dining room Budayr served. “Come back home!” the restaurateur pleaded.
Budayr was general manager of Guidara’s upscale restaurant at the NoMa hotel in Los Angeles when the pandemic struck. Forced to return to his at-home catering roots, he and a former sous chef at the hotel started making meal kits, pasta, and sauces. It was scrappy, largely run out of his partner’s Los Angeles studio apartment, but successful, until they had to return the borrowed pasta machine that had fueled the pop-up business. Budayr used all the money he had made to, finally, attend culinary school in Paris.
In 2021, he landed at Marlena, a Michelin-starred bistro in Bernal Heights, running front-of-house. And then, in 2022, he began looking for a storefront to open a wine shop.
Budayr stumbled upon a Craigslist post for 3500 22nd St.; the corner store down the street from where his father lived was available for lease. The tightly packed aisles and black-and-white tiled floors beckoned.
Deluxe is reborn
Budayr found a photo from 1911 showing a neon sign on the facade that read “Dolores Deluxe.” That, he decided, would be the eatery’s name once again. Later, he saw a ’70s-era photograph of a drag queen named Dolores Deluxe dancing on the counter of Andy’s Donuts in the Castro; apparently, she had lived near the corner store, too.
The store’s location, in the hills connecting the Mission and Noe Valley, means minimal foot traffic. “The topography of San Francisco makes it such that your neighborhood is actually extremely small,” Budayr explained. He needed to “create destination-worthy stuff.”
So, after eight months of permitting battles, setbacks, and two near-closures, Budayr upgraded his $150 Target toaster oven and, last September, began selling sandwiches.
Even the classics have a twist: The turkey sandwich comes with Calabrian chili-orange jam. The caprese is made Lebanese-style with whipped labneh, za’atar and mint.
The new menu caught the attention of a heavy-hitter in the Bay Area sandwich world. Ken Turner, a former chef at Zuni and the founder of his own sandwich shop, Turner’s Kitchen, cheered him on from the beginning. When Turner closed down his own business a few weeks ago, he directed his devastated clientele to Budayr. “He’s a community-oriented guy,” Turner said. “We need more of that.”
“He’s paid it forward in a way that makes it impossible for me not to pay it forward to somebody else,” Budayr said of Turner.
The long-term vision for Dolores Deluxe is to offer a platform for up-and-coming chefs. “How can we lift each other up?” Budyr often asks other local business owners he interviews on his podcast, “Forever Neighbor.”
The sandwich maker still has weeks when he worries no customers will show up. But on a sunny late-February day, the small, round tables underneath the shop’s green-striped awning were filled with couples eating sandwiches, and Budayr admitted that, with each passing week, he allows himself more time to think about the future.
“It’s just beyond my imagination that we’re here,” he said. “That it’s maybe happening for real.”
Happy to see this store resurrected in such a loving, positive and communal way! DD has live music some weekends, so I will be sampling the food soon! As for “super pricey”? Food prices are higher across the board–several contributing factors are responsible for this, so both purveyors and chefs have to pass on those costs on to customers. IMO, the only way to get thru the next few months will be by supporting local businesses and generating goodwill.
We stopped by before the park and super pricey. It’s not your regular corner store.
Great piece. Ramzi I is doing it right. Cafe tables, food, coffee, a quality selection of essentials, dope playlist, and most importantly, a proud fact connection with the local community.
Everything you could ask for in a corner store.