Take a young Frenchman, a hankering to run a business, stir in $1,000 in parking tickets and what do you get?
For 28-year-old Jean-Paul Dan Zerdoun, it was a sure-fire recipe for a new kosher crepe restaurant.
Decorated like the streets of the owner’s native Brittany, Café de la Terrasse recently swung open for business at 5217 Geary Blvd. in San Francisco’s Richmond District.
Serving savory and sweet crepes, pizza and organic salads, the former Internet cafe has a kosher stamp of approval. Dan Zerdoun hopes the cafe will become both a local gathering and eating spot.
It’s a story that began last May when Dan Zerdoun, a French transplant running two Internet cafes, fell on some tough times.
One of his businesses suffered a fire and was forced to close temporarily. Then Dan Zerdoun was hit with the parking fines — the result, he said, of multiple back-and-forth trips between his cafes on Geary Boulevard and Polk Street.
“I was considering bankruptcy,” said Dan Zerdoun, who arrived in town seven years ago to spend his last semester in college at the University of San Francisco and then decided to hang around. A few years back, the international business major opened up Next Game, a computer game room in Japantown. It evolved into the pair of Internet cafes.
But then came the fire, which damaged all the computers at the Polk Street location. And while he was waiting for an insurance settlement, the matter of the parking tickets cropped up.
At the city’s Department of Parking and Traffic, Dan Zerdoun explained his financial plight to a clerk and was offered the option of working off the fines through community service.
Dan Zerdoun, who celebrated Shabbat and holidays growing up in Paris and Brittany, scanned a list of participating agencies and decided to perform 80 hours of computer work for Chabad of San Francisco.
It apparently was a good match.
At their first meeting, Chabad Rabbi Yosef Langer invited Dan Zerdoun to come for Shabbat and he became an instant regular. “When I went to Chabad House, it brought back the memories of what Shabbat was,” said Dan Zerdoun, a young man with jet black hair, oval glasses and a French accent roughly as thick as ripening brie.
He also got to know the eclectic crowd of locals and out-of-town visitors who show up at Chabad. Dan Zerdoun realized that there weren’t many places in San Francisco to socialize over a kosher meal.
“I was like so touched by the goodness of Rabbi Langer, I wanted to give something back to him and the community,” he said.
Why not, he wondered, convert his Internet cafe on Geary, which already was serving crepes, into a kosher crepe place?
Dan Zerdoun hopes to attract a broad crowd to not only dine on savory and dessert crepes, but then linger in the 50-seat cafe. He would like to play club music in a back room for gatherings on Thursday nights. He also hopes to start open mike sessions on Saturday nights with poetry readings, singing and instrumental music.
Dan Zerdoun learned about crepe-making from his mother, Bernadette Zerdoun, who keeps kosher. She flew out from Paris with her recipes “to show me everything.”
He hired muralist Riccardo Spizzamiglio to paint the walls and give the feeling of a street in Brittany. The cafe closes before Shabbat on Fridays and reopens around 8 p.m. Saturdays. Phone: (415) 379-9588.
Meanwhile, Dan Zerdoun wants to reopen the Polk Street place as a kosher cafe, serving sandwiches and coffee. He’s offered to let Langer set up an office in a back room.
A one-time dabbler in options trading, Dan Zerdoun said he’s not banking on riches from the kosher cafes. “As long as I break even and can pay the bills,” he said laughing.