Today we’d like to introduce you to Pete Amadhanirundr. Them and their team share their story with us below:
We are a couple who have been in the food and beverage industry in Athens for quite a while now. Ally has worked all over Athens but most notably as the Cocktail Manager at The National and the Bar Manager at The Old Pal. Pete was the Sous Chef at Seabear Oyster Bar from 2018-2021. We met at a burger joint in town (Grindhouse Killer Burgers) in 2015 but didn’t start to take food and bev seriously until we co-started a pop-up group in town called The Side Hustle.
The group consisted of Ally Smith (Bar), Pete Amadhanirundr (Chef), Kenny Nguyen (Chef), John Grubrek (Chef), and Maddie Bilderback (General Manager). The Side Hustle aimed to create special dining experiences for people by popping up at local bars/establishments to bring a one-of-a-kind food and cocktail menu. We never repeated a menu item. The Side Hustle served as a creative outlet for all of us. We also donated portions of our proceeds to mutual aid groups and nonprofits; over the four-year run we donated over $10,000. It was a very rewarding experience.
Members started to move away and do different things so that’s when The Side Hustle ended and that’s when we started our journey on opening Puma Yu’s. We knew we wanted to open a bar/restaurant in Athens because we wanted to be a part of pushing the food and beverage scene forward. We also saw an untapped market of Asian fare using local ingredients while also having an amazing bar program. We started a Kickstarter campaign to gauge the market and ended up raising $50,000 towards our goal.
Our restaurant opened at the end of August 2022 and have been operating ever since! Our goal now is to provide customers with the best experience possible and introduce Thai/Southeast Asian foods to Athens. We also focus a lot on providing for our employees and teaching them about food, wines, cocktails and spirits. We also focus a lot on collaborating with other local businesses whether they are artists, musicians, or other local chefs and bartenders. We look forward to what 2023 brings us!
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Since opening it has not been a smooth road. It took a lot of trial and error to get to where we are now and we wouldn’t say that we know everything at this point, but we know a lot more than we did when we first opened. Learning to manage people and the business is very hard for first-timers like us but we are working every day to become better employers, chef, bartender, and people. We are also having to learn how to manage our own lives while owning a business. Making schedules for ourselves and time for family, friends, pets, exercise, diet and more can be very difficult when both of us are borderline workaholics. With time we hope to become more routined and be better employers to our dedicated and hard-working staff members.
We’ve been impressed with Puma Yu’s, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
Puma Yu’s is a cocktail and natural wine-forward bar accompanied by a Thai/Southeast Asian food menu. It’s a small and intimate space with friendly staff and a well thought out menu. We hope we are bringing a missing cuisine to Athens and also trying to create a work environment in the food industry that is long-lasting and provides people with a more comfortable living wage.
We think what sets us apart from others is our drive and intentions. We are very hard-working people and we work to give others a better quality of life through food. We want to bring more to the food scene of Athens and we want to be the people who get to shape this beautiful community going into the future.
Can you talk to us a bit about the role of luck?
We think luck has a lot to do with most businesses, whether that be timing of opening, staff hiring, customer base and more. For us, the good luck came from community support and staff hiring. We couldn’t imaging having a better staff than we do right now, they are all so dedicated to the vision that we have and have all become very good friends with each other and it makes us feel really good when we can foster that kind of environment. Community support is also very important because without the local support, we wouldn’t have even been able to opened Puma Yu’s. Bad luck, on the other hand, has also played a role in our business. We opened during Fall and although our first couple of months were really busy, we were hit with the holidays and winter where business really fell short of what we expected, so timing played a crucial role in that. we are now learning and strategizing on how to combat this problem for later this year, but as of now we are having to learn the hard way of how the ebb and flow of restaurants work.
Contact Info:
- Website: pumayus.com
- Instagram: pumayus
Image Credits
Rinne Allen Kristin Karch
