Today we’d like to introduce you to Corban Irby.
Corban, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
It all started with a study abroad to Osaka, Japan. I had been studying Japanese language for two years at Georgia State and was awarded a scholarship to spend my junior year in immersive Japanese language study at one of the top universities in Japan: Osaka University. While I was soaking up the language and culture, I fell in love with Japanese food. Since I was lucky enough to be living in “The Food Capital of Japan,” I decided to take the opportunity to learn everything I could about Japanese cuisine. I started throwing dinner parties for the other exchange students and would invite Japanese friends to come and show us how to cook. Being in Osaka, the locals took a lot of pride in their regional dishes, namely Takoyaki (Octopus Balls) and Osaka style Okonomiyaki, and I bought electric griddles so we could cook them together. When came back to Atlanta a year later it became my dream to open a restaurant one day and share these experiences with my home city I love so much.
Out of college, I took a few detours before starting out on this journey. I spent a year abroad in Beijing studying Chinese and I contemplated pursuing another passion of mine by getting a masters in linguistics there. Ultimately, I decided to come back to the U.S. and got a job as a salesman for a Japanese Restaurant Distribution company in Atlanta. The job sent me down to Miami and later Orlando, and by the end of the year I was managing 150 sushi restaurants from Daytona to Pensacola. During this time, I learned so much about the Japanese restaurant industry in America. The type of products and ingredients used, where the food comes from, and how the restaurants are run. However, working 70 hours a week and constantly traveling and staying hotels started to get to me and I got burnt out. I moved back to Atlanta and got a job working in an office for an international container shipping company.
I was glad to be back in Atlanta, but working a 9-5 always left me feeling like something was missing. What was I contributing to my community? Why had I spent all those years studying foreign cultures, languages, and cuisines if I was just meant to sit in front of a computer and make excel files? I needed a creative outlet.
Then in the summer of 2016, it hit me. If I had a dream to open up a restaurant in Atlanta, why should I wait till later in life to begin? I decided I had to start doing something, no matter how small, so that I would at least be moving towards that goal. I went from random okonomiyaki dinner parties for my friends to renting out the kitchen weekly at We Suki Suki in East Atlanta Village. I would leave the office on Thursday nights and go straight to Buford highway farmer’s market, prep until 1am and be back at the office at 6am the next day so I could leave early for my popup on Friday 5pm-3am. It was challenging, it was exhausting, but something inside me turned on and I loved that energy.
I did this from July 2016 until thanksgiving, took a break over the holidays, then started a new Sunday popup at Amer in Inman Park after New Year’s. I kept developing and tweaking my recipes, and in the spring, I took all of my vacation days at once and spent three weeks in Japan conducting more research. If I was going to be an ambassador for okonomiyaki in Atlanta, I wanted to make sure my recipe was authentic. I tried eight different okonomiyaki restaurants in Osaka, and the one thing I realized was that there wasn’t such a thing as an “authentic” okonomiyaki recipe after all. Every restaurant I went to was completely different from the last, and even the very name okonomiyaki literally means “cooked how you like it.” But I did try a few recipes that were very similar to recipe I had developed, and I came back with a new confidence on presenting my creation to Atlanta.
I realized that in order to do this, I had to quit my job and focus on it full time. I knew it would be a struggle. I knew it would be a huge risk. I knew that I might have to eat leftover cabbage until I started making enough money to support myself. Then two things happened that gave me the courage to take the big leap. My job announce that our office would be closing in April 2018, and I was offered a chance to do a popup two nights a week at Noni’s on Edgewood Ave. I knew wouldn’t be able to do that and keep up with the office job so I made a decision and turned in my notice at work. It was a really stressful transition, but eventually other opportunities started to appear for me to do more events. We’ve done events at 8am, Eventide, Sun in my Belly, and have some more events planned for The Shave Barbershop and Little Trouble.
I’m just at the beginning of the real journey now, but things are expanding rapidly now that I’ve made myself available to it. My current mission is to build a following through events until I get to the point where I can open a successful restaurant. I know the success rate is very low for new restaurants so I want to make sure that I do it right.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
It’s been a constant challenge. In the beginning it was physically challenging to balance starting a new project with the demands of a full-time job. Lack of sleep and then working sometimes from 6am to 4am. I would usually just lock myself in my room and sleep all day Sunday to try and recover. The good thing was that these obstacles at the beginning actually encouraged me instead of deterring me because despite the struggle I enjoyed it so much.
The next big struggle was giving up my security to chase my dreams. Everyone I talked to thought I was crazy but in the end, I knew I would never be happy unless I tried. And I if I was going to try, I had to give it my all. I had some money saved up, but when I quit my job and the paychecks stopped coming in it was stressful to see how fast that money started to go away. I had to change my lifestyle and focus on what I wanted to accomplish. I budgeted myself $75 for each event I did. It was tough living on $150 a week and whatever leftover food I had from the popup events, and the stress started to get to me. Luckily, I had a free plane ticket from a cancelled business trip at the job I had just quit, so I decided to take a few weeks off to get my head straight. If I was going to succeed, I had to be mentally strong. I went to stay with a best friend in South Korea for three weeks. I ate amazing food every day, rode bikes along the Han River in Seoul, went on numerous hikes, and stayed in a Buddhist monastery. The stress gradually went away, and I came back with a whole new perspective on life. I started meditating every day after I came back. Business started picking up, and I started making enough money to get by.
The current challenge is to keep up with the expanding business. I wish I had a business partner, but it’s just me. I’ve been paying random friends $10/hr. to help, but now some of the events I need up to 3 helpers to handle the demand. I don’t have enough events to hire someone full time, so I’m always looking for help.
Please tell us about OK YAKI.
My business specializes in Japanese street food from Osaka. Our signature dish is Okonomiyaki which is a Japanese savory pancake. It’s made from a broth batter, cabbage, other ingredients, choice of meat, and it’s topped with a special Japanese BBQ sauce, imported Japanese mayo, seaweed flakes, and roasted bonito fish flakes. Our mission is to introduce new foods from Japan to people here in Atlanta. This dish is starting to get popular, but there are still a lot of people that don’t know what it is. There’s only three Japanese restaurants I can think of in Atlanta that serve this dish. So instead of just opening a restaurant we do events around town where we can introduce okonomiyaki. We usually set up a tent with gas griddles so we can cook in front of people, and show people how it’s made. I’m proud of how quickly we are growing and the positive responses we have been receiving.
If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
I don’t know if I would do anything differently except to start the journey earlier. If I had started six years ago after coming back from Japan I can’t even imagine where the business would be now.
Pricing:
- Okonomiyaki $10
- Yakisoba Noodles $10
- T-Shirts $20
Contact Info:
- Website: okyakiatl.com
- Phone: 4045140706
- Email: okyakiatl@gmail.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/okyakiatl
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/okyakiatl
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/okyakiatl
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/ok-yaki-atlanta-3
Image Credit:
Michael Kai
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