Famous for their mouth-watering range of doughnuts, Easy By Fatsos has become the go-to doughnut place in Karachi. As the tagline goes, ‘A Friendly Carb-Factory’, Easy stays true to its essence. Chef Maha Jawed opened up her restaurant, Easy by Fatsos, almost two years ago and besides their most scrumptious doughnuts, the eatery offers a variety of comfort food including Hot Dogs, Bao Sliders, pizzas, refreshing beverages and much more.

Talking to Instep about how it all started, Maha Jawed shares that she had always been a fan of cooking but never really thought it was a viable career option in Pakistan. “However, I ended up going to culinary school. I studied cuisine at Le Cordon Bleu London and then got trained at 360 in Istanbul. After coming back, I started a home-based catering business called Fatsos,” she says.

Maha, who has recently completed 10 years of cooking professionally, shared that after spending many years cooking from her own home along with making menus for different restaurants, she decided to open up her own restaurant.

Why did she go with the name Easy By Fatsos?

“The name Easy was mainly due to the nature of the food we were offering,” she responds. “It was comfort food and hence I went with Easy; and By Fatsos comes from Fatsos, which was my home-based catering business. I always knew my first restaurant would have Fatsos in it,” she explains.

As far as recipes are concerned, according to the chef, she has created 99 per cent of everything served at Easy. “Having said that, I have finally started encouraging bakers who have been with us for a while to try and come up with different flavours. Some of the results have been very good and will be on our menu soon,” she shares.

Maha recently expanded her business and opened up another branch of Easy in Karachi as well as a Chinese Hot Kitchen, called La Zi. Speaking about her new eateries, she shares, “We just opened up our second branch on Shahrah-e-Faisal and also built a 3000 sq ft. central kitchen right next to it.”

She continues, “I always had plans of opening up a Chinese dine-in restaurant, but decided to start off with a delivery only operation. It was purely a Covid business and I am happy that so far it is doing quite alright. La Zi mainly offers Sichuan style Chinese food, along with some Cantonese and Hong Kong style dishes.”

As for managing the business, Maha reveals that she has an investor who helps with admin related work. “I also have a very good team. It’s hard but we seem to be managing pretty well up till now,” she adds.

Maha also believes that to balance work and personal life, it’s important to put in quality hours at work. “I could be at the restaurant for 12 hours and not do much; and sometimes I get in a lot of work in just a few hours. I think that it’s important to delegate and work very hard in building a solid team. Ultimately, our team will help us grow and prosper. So working hard to keep them happy and motivated is something that helps me take time off for myself,” she asserts.

On how Covid-19 and the torrential downpour affect her business, Maha informs, “I think all restaurants got hit very badly, sales dwindled and there was general uncertainty all around. We seem to be doing better now, but wouldn’t particularly say we’re back to how it used to be. We have been lucky in the sense that at no point did it get so bad that we had to lay off people. But yes, we had delays in paying our staff and some employees left to go to their villages.”

She furthers, “We also had closures, delays in orders and we were severely understaffed for several days during the torrential rains. Luckily for us, unlike other places, our restaurants didn’t get flooded but roads around Easy 1 were badly affected which led to poor turnout of customers.”

Maha’s restaurant offers dishes that are a bit on the expensive side, so how does she deal with complains?

“We are somehow told that we’re expensive, but it’s actually out of our control. We try our best to use the best quality ingredients and also pride ourselves in giving many benefits to our staff so costs automatically go up,” she stresses, adding that we ignore trolls and try our best to not let it get to us.

On what struggles she has faced, being a female entrepreneur, to establish her business, Maha is of the view that it’s equally hard for both genders. “It’s just a very tough industry to be in. But consistency and not taking no for an answer helps one go a long way.”

On a parting note, Maha Jawed advised young chefs - especially women - who want to start their own businesses, to think out of the box and never fall into the pattern of copying something that’s doing well. “Nothing sells better than originality. It’s also very important to have a part of your personality in your brand. People relate to that a lot more than simply opening a business that is a direct copy of someone else.

Also, I have always maintained that it’s very important to put in the work and hours for the first few years. Just show up to work every day and deal with any and every issue that comes your way. It’s a hard field and the weak cannot survive,” she concludes.