Roselle Park

Pastrami & Pickles

Nomination from Dora O’Neil

Restaurants everywhere are making difficult decisions to survive. One decision that was not hard for Ahsan to make was putting his community and employees first. He provided meals to frontline workers and local families in need during the pandemic. He continues to give back to his community even during tough times and has a positive outlook.

He kept his entire staff employed during Covid, a tough decision for any owner to make. He created an App to facilitate online ordering, keeping the number of people in the store limited. They were able to stay open and are looking forward to what the future holds!

Union County Small Business Community Champion’s Story

The following changes were made during Covid in our store to help our employees and the customers. I couldn’t be more thankful to my staff and the customer to support the business.

We created our own app so that people can order from their phones, without touching a menu or a piece of paper. The employee hours were reduced but I didn’t layoff any of my employees. They understood the situation and was very cooperative.

We were already equipped with Apple Pay and stuff like that from day one when we opened the store. It is the future and I was right about that Covid 19 just accelerated the process.

Thankfully, I didn’t have to take any small business loan and I am very grateful to my customers for that.

We did our bit to help the community by providing meals to our healthcare professionals.

We provided meals for Trinitas hospital employees several times. We also did a big meal for Veterans’ Hospital in East Orange. The first few weeks we provided family meals for some families in need and we did it for 6 weeks straight.

To conclude, it’s been a life changing experience as a business owner. Thankfully the worst is behind us and we have look positively how to become better and safer.