If there’s one thing junior Eddy Sharifkhani has learned from being a child of restaurant owners, it is that “waking up early makes you successful.” For Sharifkhani, the Downtowner Woodfire Grill and Burger Moe’s have become the center of family activity for him and his parents.
“I go to the Downtowner Woodfire Grill every morning for breakfast,” Sharifkhani said, “and work there on Sunday’s helping to manage the restaurant.” For the past twenty years the Downtowner has become a landmark restaurant for diners along West 7th Street in St. Paul.
In addition the Downtowner Woodfire Grill, Sharifkhani parents also own Burger Moe’s, a burger joint named after his father, across the street.
The Downtowner Woodfire Grill and Burger Moe’s have played a dominant role in Sharifkhani family history. When asked how his father, Moe Sharifkhani, got into the restaurant business, Sharifkhani responded, “My father didn’t want to run a business… he had to.”
“When my father came to America from his homeland, Iran, he only had two or three hundred dollars. He had planned to study medicine but because he wasn’t a U.S. citizen and didn’t have enough money he couldn’t. So he had to do something that didn’t cost as much,” Sharifkhani said. “He attended the University of Wisconsin-River Falls and studied business, in which he ended up opening a restaurant soon after.”
After opening his first restaurant, Moe Sharifkhani returned to Iran and married Eddy’s mother, Nazi. “For years the restaurant had been called the Downtowner Cafe, but when my mom and my father came back and made renovations to the place, it became the Downtowner Woodfire Grill,” Sharifkhani said.
A few years after the changes to the Downtowner Woodfire Grill, the Sharifkhani purchased the property across the street and opened Burger Moe’s.
Since last year, Sharifkhani has been helping out at the Downtowner Woodfire Grill, where he is learning more about the workplace and his parent’s business.
“Sometimes we get to meet senators, lawyers, and owners of teams like the Minnesota Wild,” Sharifkhani said. “But once when I was working at the restaurant, I was seating customers and tripped them by accident.”
Despite the restaurant becoming a major part of Sharifkhani’s daily life, he has other aspirations and plans to diverge from the restaurant business. “I personally don’t want to run a family business. My parent’s have been in the restaurant business for so long, I think I want to do something different,” Sharifkhani said. “But I have learned a lot from my parent’s business, especially that in order to be successful you have to wake up early cause my parent’s wake up early and are usually at the restaurant before six in the morning to make sure everything is okay when the servers come at seven.”
