BRYCE RADEMAN, 26, and ROBERT WICKLUND, 27: co-founders, Spitz: Home of the Döner Kebab
Business: Restaurants in Eagle Rock and Little Tokyo specializing in döner kebab
Employees: 30
Financials: Close to $2 million in 2009
revenue; profitable
Fact: Like former President William McKinley and Lakers coach Phil Jackson, both are alumni of the fraternity Sigma Alpha Epsilon
Bryce Rademan was just another exchange student in Spain when he had the same late-night epiphany that all American twenty-somethings have upon encountering the street food known as döner kebab: They should have this back home.
The thought stuck with him the more he traveled – it seemed everywhere he turned he saw the Turkish variant of the gyro. When he got back home to Occidental College, he pitched it as a restaurant idea to his frat brother, Robert Wicklund.
Like Rademan, Wicklund was a senior who was planning for law school – except neither of them really wanted to go.
“We sat down, Robert and I, at the beginning and said, ‘Look, neither of us are actually planning on being lawyers, so why not try this?’” Rademan said. “My first thought was, ‘I can do this. Maybe I won’t be the first to do this type of food in the United States, but I can be the first to brand it.’”
The two wrote up a business plan, and got seed money from Rademan’s parents. Rademan and Wicklund graduated in May 2005. A year later they opened their restaurant, Spitz: Home of the Döner Kebab, in Eagle Rock, their old college stomping grounds.
They didn’t aspire to serving döner kebab the way it’s done in Europe. The idea was to approach the food the way the Chipotle chain serves burritos – not in the usual Mexican fast-food manner, but with more of an American accent.
“It’s been a big trend in the food industry to take street food items and put a little twist on them and elevate them,” Wicklund said.
Wicklund joked he still has post-traumatic stress disorder from the long hours and sleepless nights of the year they opened. But the most difficult part came before that, while they were navigating L.A.’s notoriously obtuse permitting process.
Spitz opened up another location in Little Tokyo last year, and Rademan said both restaurants are now profitable. Plans to open a third site could be completed in the next six months, Wicklund said.
“Something about being so young when you’re opening a business, is that you kind of have this time in your life when you really have your finger directly on the pulse of what young people are wanting, and what they’re not getting,” Wicklund said.
