The realities of owning a restaurant and why we should support local

Coralie Satta was 22 when she opened Ghini’s French Caffe in 1992. She can’t remember exactly why she wanted to open a restaurant, just that she had been cooking her whole life and had a knack for it.

“I just figured, I’m 22. If I fuck this up, I can always do something else,” she says.

Now she’s going on year 34 of running a restaurant that has since become a beloved staple in midtown at 1803 E. Prince Rd.

About two miles away sits Kingfisher at 2564 E. Grant Rd., which Jeff Azersky and Jim “Murph” Murphy opened just one year after Ghini’s. The iconic seafood spot was sold in 2022 to Jacki Kuder and Ted Burhans.

“It’s always been a dream of mine to have a restaurant,” says Jacki, who has a long history of working in Tucson’s restaurant industry. “I love cooking, I love food. It’s just part of my soul.” 

When Jacki and Ted hopped on BizBySell, a website in which owners can sell their businesses, they came across Kingfisher — though they had no clue at the time that that’s what it was.

“(BizBySell) is basically real estate listings for businesses of all kinds and there’s generally no names associated,” Jacki says. “It’ll just be like, ‘a restaurant’ or ‘a car wash’ or ‘a liquor store.’ We didn’t know it was The Kingfisher when we put the offer in because of NDAs. We didn’t know it was The Kingfisher until quite a ways into the process.”

The reveal was a welcome surprise. Jacki had been a diner at Kingfisher for the last 25 years and used to live nearby. She was excited to keep an icon alive — “You can’t let this beautiful place go by the wayside,” she says. “It’s an institution.”

“Owning a restaurant was just something I felt like if I didn’t do, I would always regret not doing or at least not trying,” Jacki says. “I have a chef background, I have a business background, I felt like I had all the tools in my tool kit to be successful.”

Jumping through hurdles

You don’t open a restaurant hoping to get rich. 

Restaurant profit margins are known to be incredibly low. If Coralie takes in a dollar, she keeps maybe five or six cents of it. At Kingfisher, the profit is maybe 2-3% of the total bill. 

“Back in the day, a good restaurant margin was 5-10%. Now we’re looking at 2-3% on a good day,” Jacki says. “The cost of goods has gone up. The cost of labor has gone up. We try to pay everyone a living wage. We provide health care and the cost of insurance has gone up. The cost of everything, frankly, has gone up, as well as environmental conditions being a seafood restaurant.” 

We feel the rise of food costs when we’re checking out at the grocery store. Jacki and Coralie feel it when they’re stocking their kitchens with ingredients for our favorite menu items.

Both owners do a careful dance when pricing their menus. If they have to pay more for ingredients, sometimes they have to raise the cost of a menu item — but both try their hardest not to. 

“I really struggle raising my prices. I don’t like raising my prices. I don’t think any restaurant owner likes raising their prices. It’s not something we look forward to doing,” Coralie says. “I just ride it out until I can no longer truly pay the bills and then I’m like, ‘OK, shit, we need to reassess now.’ It’s a struggle all the time.” 

Jacki echoes that same struggle. 

“We can’t pass all the costs (onto the consumer) because there’s only so much the market will bear. People are not going to pay $50 for an entree, so you have to be reasonable,” Jacki says. “We try not to price anything out of bounds of what people can afford so it’s constantly this battle. We’re never trying to gauge people or rip people off. We’re just trying to make enough of a profit to stay in business.”

I asked both women how they find the right balance — how do you keep the menu affordable while still making enough money to pay your staff and keep the lights on? 

There’s no real answer.

“I don’t know, honestly. Since COVID, things have gone bonkers. This is no longer the business I got into,” Coralie says. “Food costs are insane, but it’s not just food costs — everything went crazy, all costs went up. How much are you willing to pay for an omelet, really? How much are you going to pay for bacon and eggs? At some point, customers will stop paying for it.

“Our menu is hugely labor intensive because we make every single item from scratch. I can’t even put a price on that but there’s probably several man hours in every plate,” Coralie continues. “It’s not just putting (the plate) together — behind that we’re making sauce, there’s chopping involved, slicing, portioning. There’s so much up until we assemble the plate.”

Soda, on the other hand, has a larger profit margin. You might pay for a more expensive bottle of root beer at Kingfisher, but that’s because you’re not paying quite as much for something else. That’s part of the juggle. 

“We don’t always hit it 100%,” Jacki says. “In our order inventory in the building, there’s about 2,500 things to keep track of — dry goods, fish, vegetables, alcohol, non-alcohol. You’re keeping track of those things on a daily, weekly, monthly basis because things fluctuate and sometimes things are popular and sometimes they’re not. It’s impossible to predict what people will have some nights. If I knew exactly how many people were coming in and exactly what they were going to order, I would be successful.”

To add salt to the wound, distributor prices don’t just change once — they change constantly. In one instance, slipper lobster from Kingfisher’s purveyor went from $6 to $24 per pound overnight. Jacki had no choice but to remove the lobster from her menu and then spent additional dollars to reprint the menus. 

“It’s tariffs, it’s overfishing, it’s a number of factors. I don’t think there’s one specific thing,” Jacki says. “I think people go to the grocery store and buy this for this much so (they think our menu) should be equivocal to that. But you’re paying for your delivery drivers to warehouse it, cool it, get it from their purveyors and bring it to you. You’re paying for the driver, you’re paying for the warehouse, you’re paying for the employees to check it in. You’re paying for the manager, you’re paying for the expertise of your chefs. You’re paying for the building, you’re paying for the lights.”

Hurdles are thrown at the women all the time. Kingfisher sits in a 100-year-old building, which means the restaurant is packed with unbeatable history and charm. But that also comes with near-weekly repairs.

“This fridge is about 60 years old,” Jacki says, pointing to a fridge behind the bar. “It’s an amazing piece of history, but maintaining it is challenging. It uses a type of Freon that doesn’t exist anymore. Generally it’s a Friday or Saturday night and your refrigerator is on the fritz. It’s never on a Monday at 10 in the morning. You inherit things, you have new things and sometimes those new things don’t work. We tried to use energy-efficient fryers and that was a nightmare. They just could not perform — we had a week of fries being awful and fried things being off and so many complaints.”

The very day I talked to Jacki, a delivery was placed haphazardly in the kitchen and a seafood shipment was late by hours.

“It’s just rolling with it every day. The cost of equipment repairs is completely insane. I think restaurants pay way more than anybody else for equipment and repairs,” Jacki says. “It’s just little things. Who called out? What’s breaking? Who’s sick?” 

Kingfisher can’t open the doors without at least seven people clocked in. A fast-casual restaurant might have one person at the counter and one person in the kitchen, but Kingfisher has line cooks, dishwashers, bartenders, servers and bussers. Ghini’s is a full-service restaurant too. 

“If somebody calls out, I’m the dishwasher, I’m the busser, I’m the bartender, I’m the cook,” says Jacki, who works more than 100 hours every week. Coralie works the same. “I’m not just checking in and then leaving. You’re running food, you’re shaking hands, you’re kissing babies, you’re talking to people. You set an example from the top down and that makes people care — because you care.

“I think people are going to have to reevaluate whether a full-service restaurant is valuable to them because if it is, then there are costs associated with it,” Jacki says. “We try not to pass those costs on but at some point the market has to bear something.”

The importance of supporting local

Maybe chain restaurants also feel the hit of rising food costs — but they have a cushion to help them bear it.

“We don’t have the luxury of having a bunch of locations and being able to distribute our losses among a bunch of other locations,” Jacki says. “And banks are not stupid. In the restaurant industry, margins are small and as they get smaller, you have less and less banks and lenders willing to work with you to either start up a restaurant or to give you a little temporary funding during summertime when it’s rough. Your safety net is less and less and less as an independent business.”

“Chains have buying power which we don’t have,” Coralie says. “If they’re buying for several restaurants, they can negotiate with the people they’re buying from. That vendor might take the hit for that restaurant group because they’re going to get a million dollars per month as opposed to $10,000 a month from someone small.”

I love our local restaurants and I know you do, too. If we want Tucson to stay fiercely local, that means we need to be fierce about supporting local.

“I would hate to see the Applebees-ification of Tucson,” Jacki says. “Local restaurants are what give places their flavor. It’s a silly pun, but (local restaurants) are really part of the community. Our food is how we express ourselves and who we are and what makes us special. I think if we lose that, we lose a huge part of what makes our community interesting.”

Restaurant owners like Jacki and Coralie work hard to make sure diners continue to walk through their doors. They stay consistent with the dishes we know and love. They stay creative and inventive with new menu items for us to try — for example, Ghini’s has French-Mex specials and Kingfisher is the fourth restaurant in the country to offer lab-cultivated salmon.

“You find ingredients and prepare them in a way that makes them interesting and special,” Jacki says. “You try to stay relevant — that’s why we’re really active on social media. We try to provide the best experience so people keep coming back.”

If you can’t dine at a local restaurant, you can still show your support through shares on social media and word of mouth — tell your friends if you love a local spot, write a positive review, give feedback to restaurant owners so they know how they can improve. 

Both women know people are struggling right now. They know you might not be able to afford eating out, especially as frequently. When you do eat out, they know you might have to skip the cocktail or dessert. 

“Understandably people are having a rough time right now,” Jacki says. “Even if it’s stopping in for five oysters and a glass of wine and you spend 20 bucks, that’s important. It’s thinking about, ‘Would I rather give this money to some billionaire on Amazon or would I rather put someone’s kids through mountain biking lessons?’ Let’s be cognizant that the people who are serving you are part of the community too.”

“If we’re not supporting our community, then we have nothing,” Coralie says. “I’m really proud of our city and I think it’s important to support local — otherwise the community just starts to fail. If people understand how important it is to support their community, they’ll have a better community to live in.” 

Tucson has so many pockets of community. There are third spaces scattered around town, mutual-aid groups who deliver needed items to people in need, volunteers who pull buffelgrass from our beautiful Sentinel Peak every spring.

That strong sense of community also bleeds into Tucson’s restaurant industry. 

“I feel like the restaurant community here is so collaborative. We’re all competitors — but we’re really not,” Jacki says. “I’ll call up Doug at Feast or Ken at Dante’s or Casey at Pinnacle. I’m like, ‘Hey, we’re missing a box of gloves or towels. Can you help us out?’ Yes, we’re all in competition but as far as local restaurants go, we either thrive together or we die together.”

Both Jacki and Coralie know the hardships of running a restaurant very well — too well. Despite the long hours and sleepless nights, they wake up the next morning and choose to do it all over again. 

“I ask myself at least once a week — why do I keep going?” Coralie says. “I love what I do. I honestly really love it. It’s not just a restaurant for me, it’s a family. I have my family of employees, I have my family of guests, even my vendors are family. The stories I hear from our guests — some of them don’t have families and they come and talk to our servers and I feel like it’s an entire community. It would take a lot for me to just give it all up.”

“You don’t open a restaurant to make a bunch of money,” Jacki says. “You open a restaurant because you love food and you love feeding people.”

🐟 Kingfisher is located at 2564 E. Grant Rd. Ghini’s French Caffe is located at 1803 E. Prince Rd. Find more information about Kingfisher here and Ghini’s here. 🍳