Alumni News

by Alexander Gelfand

Michael Farah ’99 left Wall Street to build a Brooklyn restaurant around the flavors of his mother’s table.

Having successfully made the leap from financial analyst to restaurateur, Michael occasionally gets asked for advice by people who harbor similar dreams of leaving their desk jobs and opening an eatery.

“I always tell them, ‘You really shouldn’t do it,’” says Michael, who left Wall Street in 2017 and now runs a Lebanese restaurant in the same Brooklyn neighborhood where he lives with his wife and their two sons. “‘But you should definitely do it!’”

Those conflicting impulses stem directly from personal experience. Since opening in 2022, Nabila’s, which is named after Michael’s mother and pays homage to her cooking, has earned rave reviews and a devoted clientele. It has also given Michael the satisfaction of building something tangible in his own community, a place where he can share the food he loves with others. “There is something deeply satisfying when you have a busy night and you hear laughter in the dining room and you see a lot of smiling faces,” he says.

But getting to that point—let alone opening Nabila’s doors—required dealing with many hurdles and a lot of stress, neither of which have entirely evaporated. “It’s a fantasy when you run a restaurant to think that it’s ever going to hit cruise control. It doesn’t. Every week, you have new challenges and new problems,” says Michael, who describes his new equilibrium as “a sort of managed anxiety.” 

Michael’s previous occupation wasn’t exactly stress-free either. After Potomac, Michael attended the University of Virginia and stepped straight into a 15-year career in finance, much of it spent as an energy company analyst at hedge funds. “It was some of the most intellectually fascinating and challenging and dynamic work I’ve ever done,” he says.

After a while, though, the pressure and intensity of Wall Street began to wear on him. “Even if you love it, you will run out of steam,” he says. “I think a lot of people in the industry struggle with the question of, ‘Can I have a second career, and what do I do?’”

In Michael’s case, the answer lay in his mother’s kitchen. Nabila Farah was born and raised in Beirut, where she met Michael’s father and gave birth to his older brother George ’96. In 1978, several years into Lebanon’s civil war, the Farah family took flight, first to Egypt and Cyprus, then to the Bay Area, where Michael was born, then to Saudi Arabia, where he spent his early childhood, and Nabila established herself as the doyenne of the Arab expat dinner party scene, serving guests the dishes she had learned to cook at her own mother’s side.

This was not the standard fare offered at most Lebanese restaurants: a handful of dips, a couple of salads, and a bevy of grilled meats. Instead, it leaned heavily toward the complex, multilayered dishes lovingly produced in home kitchens by Lebanese mothers and grandmothers. Many of these can now be found on the menu at Nabila’s, such as sheesh barak (baked beef dumplings spiked with mint-yogurt sauce), kousa (baby zucchini stuffed with seasoned beef and rice), and the fragrant okra stew known as bamieh.

Those same dishes anchored the catering business that Nabila launched out of a tiny storefront in McLean, Virginia. In time, it attracted clients such as the IMF, the World Bank, and various Arab embassies.

Michael knew that this sort of homestyle Lebanese cooking was largely unknown to New York diners. And having watched his mother build a successful business serving customers in the nation’s capital, he figured he could do the same by delivering Lebanese dishes to curious foodies in Brooklyn.

“For many years, I didn’t have a clear plan of how I was going to make it happen, whether I was going to make it happen, or what it would even look like,” he says. “But I had great passion for the food world. My whole family does; we’re all kind of obsessed with food.

And in my dream, I would bring what I thought was a compelling idea to the neighborhood where I live in New York.”

The risks were high. Michael’s children were toddlers, he had no food-industry experience whatsoever, and while he had saved enough to self-finance the attempt, his pockets were not infinitely deep. “If it failed, it would’ve been pretty punishing on us as a family,” says Michael, who adds that there were “a million reasons to think this was a bad idea.”

By 2017, however, he had burned out on the Wall Street lifestyle. And more than anything, he feared waking up one day and realizing that he’d missed his chance to make a go of the restaurant business.

So he took the same disciplined approach to launching Nabila’s that he had applied to his work as a financial analyst. Beginning in 2018, Michael spent more than a year commuting between Brooklyn and DC, shadowing his mother several days a week to learn about her operation. His chef de cuisine, Luis Ahuet, eventually made a similar pilgrimage, following Nabila around her kitchen and painstakingly quantifying the unwritten recipes she held in her head and hands.

The COVID-19 pandemic temporarily derailed the process of renovating the space Michael had found in Cobble Hill, and once the work began, it proved to be a nightmare. “I thought, ‘Hey, I’m a finance guy; if there’s one thing I’ll be able to do, it’s project the costs right,’” Michael says. “I was way off.”

Even after Nabila’s opened to instant acclaim, challenges remained. The classic Lebanese dishes that Ahuet had translated and refined required an inordinate amount of time and effort to produce at scale without compromising on quality, particularly given New York City’s high labor costs and the limits of what most diners are willing to pay for even the most refined Middle Eastern cuisine. “People don’t want to spend what they spend when they go to a French restaurant,” Michael says. “There’s this assumption it should be cheap.” As a result, pricing the food in a way that would make Nabila’s profitable posed what Michael calls “a unique mathematical problem”—one that took nearly a year and a half to solve.

In addition, while Michael had originally intended to offer counter service only, it quickly became clear that customers wanted a full-service experience, lingering at their tables amid the restaurant’s Lebanese- inflected décor, which includes teal- and-cream tile flooring and wallpaper bearing floral and geometric patterns. So he redesigned the setup, allowing diners to peruse the restaurant’s dishes on a countertop much as they might have at one of his mother’s dinner parties before being served their selections back at their tables.

“The whole restaurant has been a problem-solving challenge,” he says. Michael has solved at least some of those problems. Nabila’s is now in the green, and he no longer has to spend every waking moment on the job. He has hired a restaurant manager to help smooth out the day-to-day issues, and when things get really tricky, he still has his mom to lean on.

“Every now and then, we’ll reach out to her if we’re struggling to figure out a new dish,” Michael says. “We’ll call her, and she’ll have some secret sauce that only a Lebanese grandmother knows.”

Read more stories from The Term.