Willie Schatz is a university lecturer and owner of Amsterdam Falafelshop in Adams Morgan.
University professor Willie Schatz leads a double life.
By day, he teaches students legal writing in College Park. But when class lets out, Schatz heads to Washington’s Adams Morgan neighborhood to check on the falafel restaurant he co-owns. Called Amsterdam Falafelshop, the little franchise is known for some of the city’s best falafel. A trip to Amsterdam — a “falafel mecca” — inspired Arianne Bennett and her husband Scott to open the restaurant, and Schatz and his wife invested in the shop in 2004.
The group decided it was tired of the standard burger-and-pizza routine in the United States, so they set up shop in Adams Morgan, one of the trendiest and most diverse neighborhoods in Washington, and followed the business models of the top-it-yourself joints that seemed to dot every corner in Amsterdam.
“I thought it was a terrific idea,” Schatz said. “It would fill a niche that hadn’t been filled yet in the neighborhood.”
Schatz thought a falafel shop would fit well in the up-and-coming neighborhood, where young 20-somethings were catching on to healthy eating trends.
“More restaurants that weren’t paying attention to vegetarians have to now, because the trend is so strong,” he said. “The market is too big to ignore.”
Schatz himself is a pescatarian — someone who supplements a vegetarian diet with fish but no other meat. He changed his eating habits in 1984 after suffering symptoms of multiple sclerosis — and he hasn’t had another episode since he gave up meat. He hopes that by offering customers food that is both nutritious and tasty, he can encourage others to make healthier choices.
The shop, and its sister location in the Boston area, is a vegetarian paradise. Customers can buy a pita full of falafel and then choose from a buffet of 21 sauces and toppings, each freshly sliced, chopped and cooked that day. Chefs spend seven hours a day chopping vegetables and five hours a day grinding chickpeas, seven days a week — the key to great falafel, Bennett said. They went through 19,000 pounds of dried chickpeas in 2012.
Taylor Robey, sophomore environmental science and policy major and vegetarian, is excited to try the falafel shop, as it can be hard to find restaurants that are vegetarian-friendly.
“When you go to a restaurant, there’s normally only one or two vegetarian options,” Robey said. “The fact that there’s a restaurant with so many options, that’s amazing to me.”
A regular size sandwich is $6.55, while a small is $5.55, and customers can choose as many toppings as they want at no extra cost, Schatz said.
His personal favorite topping is Turkish salad, a tomato-based salad with onions, other vegetables and spices. He encourages customers to keep coming back until they find a topping combination that is just right.
“Just don’t go overboard or you’ll smother the taste of the falafel,” he added.
Even though it is located in an area with many unique eating options, including a French place and an Ethiopian restaurant down the street, the falafel shop always gets plenty of traffic — more than 13,000 people every month, Schatz said.
The falafel is so good that people come from all over the country just to try it. In 2008, the Los Angeles Times placed eating at the Amsterdam Falafelshop on its “Top 10 Things to Do in Washington” list, and once someone called the shop to ask for directions, as they had come to the city just for the falafel, Bennett said.
Schatz visits the store on days he’s not teaching and spends about an hour mingling and chatting with customers and sampling the food.
Though customers range across all ages, many are students, Schatz said, joking that he tells them they have to visit the shop or they’ll flunk his class. He said he was even considering giving a test at the end of the semester to make sure each student had gone.
Co-owning a small business and teaching college students may seem unrelated, but they actually aren’t so different, he said.
“I love the interaction with my students. I love helping them get their message across the way they intend to,” Schatz said. “And I love interacting with customers. It’s an extension of interacting with the students.”
Bennett said Schatz’s career as a professor shows in his personality.
“People become a professor because they have something they want to teach. Willie is a body of knowledge and an outlet for information,” she said. “As a professor, he has an avenue to give that knowledge to people.”
Students in his classes say he can be tough, but seeking perfection is an important trait for both a professor looking to inspire his students and a businessperson hoping to succeed, Bennett said. The failure rate for independent restaurants is so steep that in order to be successful, owners and managers must have very high standards.
Nina Cooperman, a senior government and politics major, took legal writing with Schatz.
“He’s a disciplined professor [who] definitely provides rigorous coursework for those interested in pursuing law,” she said. “When I found out he owned a falafel shop, I was kind of surprised, but when I actually saw the shop, I was even more surprised, because it looked like a really nice place.”
Schatz said he would like to see Amsterdam Falafelshop open a franchise in College Park because he thinks it would be popular with students, but he added it could be a difficult move because business is so seasonal. In the meantime, the shop has sold 11 franchises, with one set to open in the spring at the Market House in Annapolis, he said.
Bennett said she is extremely happy with the popularity of the restaurant and hopes it continues to grow as people become more aware of what they’re eating.
“It’s a very unique restaurant. If someone hasn’t come here, they should,” she said. “It will open their eyes to what kind of eating is available to them.”
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