Food & Drink

Birth of an Empire (Biscuit)

It’s  1:30 on a crisp, breezy Sunday afternoon, and Empire Biscuit in the East Village is packed.
A line of peckish New Yorkers stretches to the back of the brand-new biscuit shop, spilling out the door onto the sidewalk. At the front wooden counter, a lanky 20-something in a baseball cap is apologizing to his less-than-pleased girlfriend for dropping her biscuit on the floor. She pouts, taking the slightly bruised biscuit from his hands — and eats it anyway.

In the city that never sleeps, New York has its fair share of 24-hour conveniences. But if you’ve ever found yourself craving a Southern-style biscuit slathered with bacon butter and fig jam in the wee hours of the morning, you would have been out of luck — until now.

Empire Biscuit, a brand new biscuit-centric eatery on Avenue A, is the first venture by owners Jonathan Price and Yonadav Tsuna. The pair immediately hit it off when they met waiting tables at Bouley in 2009. Even though Tsuna was an inexperienced, 23-year-old student at the NYU Stern School of Business at the time, Price knew he had something special.

“Really young people, they have this bright charisma about them because they take pleasure in everything. And he was so enthusiastic about so many things, and I just thought that was irresistibly charming,” says Price, a 34-year-old restaurant vet.
The owners of New York’s Empire Biscuit, Yonadav Tsuna and Jonathan Price, have a hit on their hands with their new single-product restaurant in the East Village.

Price, who has been in the business as a waiter and captain for twelve years, was ready for a change.

“I was thinking about the restaurants that I would want to work at, and I couldn’t think of any anymore,” he recalls. “I was at that point where I had to do my own thing.”

For the fledgling team taking their first foray into restaurant ownership, a single-product restaurant made sense. Price — who cut his teeth at the famous Magnolia Grill in Durham, N.C. — and Tsuna, a Memphis, Tenn., native, both knew the magic of the Southern biscuit and how well it would resonate with New York City’s consumers.
“It’s a food that works for everything: breakfast, lunch, dinner, drunk,” said Tsuna.

The owners of New York’s Empire Biscuit, Yonadav Tsuna and Jonathan Price, have a hit on their hands with their new single-product restaurant in the East Village.

But, as with many new businesses, raising capital was a struggle.

“We come from middle-class families, and no one’s got a lot of money,” explains Price, an East Williamsburg resident. “And when we started, we had no idea where the money’s going to come from. We didn’t know how to raise money, we didn’t know how to find investors, and there’s sort of like a blind leap aspect to it, you know? There’s almost a desperation to it.”

So the pair surrounded themselves with a team of advisers to make up for the skills they lacked, including design and real estate. To raise funds, Price and Tsuna created a crowd funded Kickstarter campaign page with a video of the enigmatic pair describing the concept.
“Making the video required us to think really hard about articulating our core values — creating high quality food and being part of this great neighborhood,” Tsuna notes.

To build buzz, Price and Tsuna hosted tastings out of Price’s apartment.
Once they secured their storefront, “People around us would come in to chat. We would spend hours everyday chatting with people. We love Avenue A because it’s so neighborly,” says Tsuna, who recently moved into an apartment down the block from the shop.

Price believes taking their time was crucial for starting the new business. “We came up with this a year and a half ago,” he explains. “We thought out everything as carefully as we possibly could. We made a couple mistakes, but even the mistakes we made, I’m glad we made them. We did it slowly, and carefully, and so we didn’t rush.”

As news spread of Empire Biscuit’s pending arrival, foodies across the city pined for a taste of Southern-baked bliss. When it finally did open two weeks ago, demand was so overwhelming that they sold out of everything within hours.

Realizing they were wildly unprepared for the biscuit frenzy they created, they closed the shop for a few days to regroup. Since every product is made by hand, the kitchen initially struggled to find an efficient way to mass-produce, so they changed some of their methods and added several more members to the staff. A week ago, they reopened their doors at 8 a.m.
By 8:07, a line reaching the back of the store had already formed.

Robert Sanes, an enthusiastic employee with a customer service background, was even posted outside as the official “Biscuit Bouncer,” to control the flow of traffic and answer questions from curious passers-by.
“I never expected that a biscuit shop would need a bouncer, but this is awesome!” exclaims Sanes, a Washington Heights resident.

Adriana Kertzer, a design entrepreneur who lives around the corner, is thrilled to have the new option in the neighborhood.
“I was sick and tired of pizza places popping up during the recession,” says the 34-year-old. “It’s so nice to have some variety.”

Chef Karl Wilder and his team make all of the biscuits and fixins. With 24 different kinds of butters, spreads, jams and marmalades, deciding what to put on your biscuit can be daunting. Thankfully, Empire Biscuit created some pairings to help you choose, like The Snuggah Boo, which combines plum, prune and port jam with goat cheese and black pepper butter. For something more substantial, Wilder pulled from his New Orleans roots to create his take on the chicken biscuit, a spiced fried chicken with pickled carrots and sauce à l’orange. For breakfast, the Scotch egg with cheddar and whole grain mustard oozes yolk from each satisfying bite.

After dropping a tiny piece of biscuit, Max Hatfield-Biondo, 28, an engineer from Soho, took a moment to think before declaring, “I’m going to eat that off the floor.”

For now, Empire Biscuit is open from 8 a.m. until midnight, and they hope to be operating 24 hours a day in the coming weeks.
As their website states, “We just want to make sure everything is perfect.”

As the shop closed on its second day of operation, Price and Tsuna surveyed the empty space with satisfaction as it was scrubbed clean for the next day of service. Price exhaled — exhausted but happy.
“We wouldn’t do anything else differently,” he says. “This is exactly what we wanted to do.”