Local Restaurant Now ‘Officially’ Open
Joe's Family Restaurant is now open on the East side of Oskaloosa in the building last occupied by Bonanza. (photo by Ginger Allsup)
Oskaloosa, Iowa – The restaurant business runs through Ristem ‘Joe’ Dika’s blood. He’s now opened up several restaurants in the state of Iowa, and looks to add another soon in Ames.
Back in the middle of May, we first ran into ‘Joe’ and talked to him about his restaurant. At that point, he asked us not to make a lot of noise about his newly opening restaurant as he was wanting to “soft open”. A term used by businesspeople who are looking to work the kinks out of a new establishment before officially opening to the public. “I wanted softer than I got”, he said. “This restaurant was the one I feared the most when I opened.” Pointing towards concerns with staffing, particularly in the kitchen to handle breakfast. This location was his first to serve breakfast and required finding the staff and equipment to pull it off. “We gave bad service the first Friday, we were here,” Joe said in reference to the process of figuring things out. “It’s nobody’s fault but mine,” he says.
“Now I feel like we have the right staff, front and back,” says Joe about the process of finding staff and placing them in the position that will utilize them the best. “Your never 100% in a restaurant, your always 99%. Somebody’s gonna mess up, whether it’s a cook or a waiter, the waitress or the hostess or the owner. Somebody’s always gonna mess up little things here and there. The idea is to correct them as we go along.”
“This is probably the best staff I’ve had in Iowa,” Joe says about his current group of employees. “Of all the restaurants I’ve owned, this has been the best front staff I’ve had in Iowa.”
Joe says now that he’s ready and more comfortable with his new staff and location, he will soon be holding a grand opening in the near future.
Dika and his family made the move to Iowa when his son started playing football for the Iowa State Cyclones. The Albania native, who has owned restaurants in New York and Texas, made the move to Iowa when the rest of his children made the move to Iowa State as well. “Hopefully next year they start graduating,” saying that two should be graduating next year, with two more graduating the year after that, leaving him with one more attending the university. “I’ve probably built some kind of building there by now,” Dika joked. “But it’s all good and I’m all happy for it. It’s something that I work for and I’m proud that my kids go to Iowa State, I’m proud that my kids go to college.”
The initial few weeks have been somewhat bumpy for ‘Joe’, especially when a story surfaced that at a previous restaurant he had not been compensating the staff correctly in wages. “They are correct,” Joe says. “That did happen the first couple of months I was in Marshalltown. I asked the owner that I got the building from, ‘what do the waitresses get paid?’.” Being this was his first restaurant in Iowa after moving from Texas, Dika says he relied upon the word of the former restaurant owner as well as his accountant.
The advice of both people was that the wage for a waitress was $2.15, Dika said. “Actually, I was paying everybody $2.50.” Dika says that, after two or three months, some released staff came forward and challenged the wage saying it was suppose to be $4.35.
Dika said once it became evident that the wage was in fact $4.35, “we went back with the accountant with all the hours they had. Dika then compensated all past, as well as current, employees for the hours they had worked.
Dika said it wasn’t done on purpose and that it was an honest mistake, “It wasn’t being done because I’m trying to cheat anybody.” “We paid everybody the checks that was due to them, and it was due to them.” saying that the underpayment wasn’t done maliciously.
Look for an official grand opening in the near future.
