In season five of the hit TV show “Seinfeld,” the title character Jerry Seinfeld and his friend Elaine Bennis stop at a bakery to get babka to bring to a dinner party. Upon the employee informing them that they are out of chocolate babka and will have to settle for cinnamon, Bennis titles it the “lesser babka.”
What might just be a quick joke in one of hundreds of Seinfeld episodes served as the inspiration for local Knoxvillian Emily Williams to name her small babka business “Lesser Babka.”
Williams began Lesser Babka in Oct. 2020, according to Knox News, and her partner Laurence Faber joined in on the baking and sales. Faber was previously a head pastry chef at Blackberry Farms. The small business run on Instagram with online orders and personal deliveries only grew.
What started out of Faber and Williams’ kitchen is now a completely reinvented idea of a Jewish deli. Potchke Deli opened in the historic Regas building on March 18, taking over the space that was previously Vienna Coffee.
Williams and Faber worked diligently over the past three months to fit their culinary ideas into the space but did so with the help of their business partners, Brian and Jessica Strutz, the owners of A Dopo Sourdough Pizza.
Since 2016, A Dopo has been one of Knoxville’s most popular pizza restaurants — and was even recently placed at No. 38 on Yelp’s list of the country’s top-100 pizza places.
Williams and Faber started off as loyal customers of A Dopo, going almost weekly. They forged a relationship with the Strutz’s, aided by the fact that both Brian Strutz and Faber had learned many of their culinary skills working at Blackberry Farms, even though they were not there at the same time.
Strutz was encouraging of Faber and Williams’ culinary dreams and was a fan of their food.
“One day he Instagram DMed me, and I was cooking like Jewish Israeli, Eastern European food, and he was like, ‘why don’t you do this as a restaurant?’” Faber said. “And it was like right when I was putting in my notice at Blackberry that I was like, ‘why don’t I do this?’”
From then on, Faber turned to Strutz as a mentor and looked to him for advice on starting his own restaurant, since his expertise was with food, rather than business. They soon decided, however, to become partners, which was an obvious choice to all of them.
“We were like, ‘wait, he’s being my mentor and I’m working with other people, and I keep coming back to him for questions. It would be easier if we all just worked together,’” Faber said.
Before launching any big ideas for a restaurant or a deli, A Dopo hosted some pop-up opportunities in their space to test out Faber and Williams’ ideas. They called the pop-ups “Hi Baby,” derived from the Arabic word “habibi,” which means “my friend” or “my love.”
“Those pop-ups led to all of us thinking we could do more together,” Strutz said.
Soon after their pop-ups and “local viral” Lesser Babka business, as Strutz called it, Faber and Williams took a two month trip visiting Ukraine, Georgia, Turkey, Paris and New York. They wanted to experience all these different food traditions, and Faber got the opportunity to understand his family’s Jewish history as they originated from Ukraine and Moldova. That trip inspired the majority of their menu at Potchke, which has a bit of culinary influence from just about every country bordering the Black Sea.
Although Potchke is a Jewish deli, their menu might not be exactly what you’re expecting. Faber explained that in kosher Judaism, you can have meat and dairy separately, but not together at the same time. While many Jewish delis take the meat route, offering options like pastrami and brisket, Potchke is taking a different approach.
“What we’re doing at Potchke is we’re taking the idea of the Jewish deli, and we’re taking inspiration from it, but we’re kind of cooking what we want to eat and how we like to eat, which is a little bit healthier and vegetable-focused than the traditional deli,” Faber said. “We decided to stick with the dairy side and kind of honor the traditions of kosher. We’re not exactly kosher, there’s no rabbi coming in and blessing everything for us, but we stick to the dairy and the fish.”
Although they’re not “exactly” following kosher laws, Faber sees a need for a space for Knoxville’s Jewish community to come together.
“Lots of people just don’t really wanna be religious, they want to hold on to their cultural Judaism but not necessarily the religious aspects of it, so a place like Potchke — which is open for everyone, like most people have no idea what Jewish food is and love it — but for Jewish people they get a place to come see other Jewish people they know,” Faber said. “So, I think every city needs a Jewish gathering place. Knoxville didn’t have that.”
Appropriately enough, a former café at the Regas building was called “The Gathering Place.” The building is home to countless Christian non-profits and is owned by Knoxville Leadership Foundation, another Christian non-profit, “with a mission to be a gathering place for the community.” Potchke adds a layer of inclusivity to the building, providing a space for the Jewish population in Knoxville.
On the surface, it might seem unusual for a sourdough pizza place to partner with a place like Potchke. The four owners, however, have a great deal in common, in terms of their experiences, culinary visions and personal relationships.
Years before opening A Dopo, Brian and Jessica Strutz got married and booked one-way tickets to Italy. They lived there for a year, working on farms and gaining inspiration for cooking their own Italian food.
Although he worked in personal finance before pursuing his restaurant dreams, Brian Strutz learned countless little things that are now integrated into A Dopo’s pizza style. Everything from their mozzarella-making methods to the name of the restaurant was at least partially inspired by their time abroad.
“(‘A dopo’) wasn’t used all the time and we started asking around and translating it, and to us, we heard that phrase when people were gonna meet you for dinner and I was like that’s sweet, it’s this phrase that is kind of colloquial, but it generally means I’m going to meet you later,” Strutz said.
Similarly, Faber and Williams’ time abroad had a great influence on their ideas for Potchke, as they utilize so much of what they learned in other countries in their current menu.
While you often see business collaborating and owners forging friendships, it seems less common that restaurants owned by couples get to work together.
Although Jessica Strutz was a teacher while A Dopo was in the process of getting off the ground, she joined Brian as an equal partner in 2018, which he is incredibly thankful for.
“Her joining the restaurant was just a huge, momentous thing for the restaurant, for me, for us, and so now, we’re really just partners in everything we’re doing together, and it’s a lot of fun,” Strutz said. “We get to live a fun life and we’re very happy. We’re happy to be able to contribute to the community and put ideas into execution and take risks.”
Faber said the time spent with his partner has only increased since going into business together, and she plays an integral role.
“It’s great, we spend every waking moment together, and we love each other,” Faber said. “It’s cool because we also really complete each other with her at the front of house and me at the back of house, like she’s amazing with design and marketing and all that stuff. We fill in each other’s gaps really well.”
Faber said they also admire the Strutz’s vision for food and agree with them wholeheartedly, which positively influences the partnership and their decision to do this together. If Williams completes Faber, A Dopo completes Potchke.
“I think we kind of complete each other’s things and how A Dopo treats their staff, how they pay their staff, how their restaurant is run and how they are as managers and owners is all what I look up to,” Faber said.
While both restaurants’ visions align, the Strutzes are also interested in opportunities like this as one of their goals is to help other businesses get going.
“Long-term, my wife and I want to find ways to support the local food community, and whether that be through mentorship, partnership, financing, passive investment or hosting pop-ups or whatever it is, that’s kind where we wanna focus the future of our career,” Strutz said. “A Dopo is a really solid foundation for us, and having that real estate just sort of gives us a lot of confidence to be able to pursue these types of things.”
In terms of capitalizing on the success of A Dopo, the Strutzes are less interested in franchising their business or talking to developers.
A Dopo, located in downtown Knoxville, provides fresh pizza for customers to enjoy.
“We are very much more interested in, like, independent concepts that happen to create a better community for a lot of people: for the diners, for the farmers, for the employees, the cooks,” Strutz said. “It’s just really satisfying to be able to build a food and beverage concept that can A: be profitable, B: be a place people wanna work at and C: be a place that people wanna go, like at least where I want to go, and I think the nexus of those three things is the sweet spot.”
Like “A dopo,” “potchke” also has a meaning relevant to the restaurant. The Yiddish word “potchke,” meaning to make a mess, oftentimes in the kitchen, reveals quite a bit of meaning in the mission of Faber and Williams’ new project and future ideas.
“I could walk in that closet, and I could just be like moving around, touching stuff, not really sure what I’m doing, I’m ‘potchke-ing,’ that’s another way of saying it, when you’re just kind of like wasting time,” Faber said. “So this, to us, is wasting time while we build a restaurant. That’s where we got the name.”
Indeed, this is not how they meant to use their time. Potchke was not the original plan to begin with. Faber and Williams’ actual goal is to open a restaurant, as opposed to a breakfast and lunch café. The four were working on other plans, but quickly shifted gears to have something up-and-running in the meantime.
“Laurence, Emily, Jess and I are hopefully working on a bigger concept down the road together,” Strutz said. “When this space became available, I sat down with them, and I was like, ‘I’ve got this idea, this is crazy, this is throwing us all off-course, but what if we took over that space?’ And, you know, Laurence and Emily are so creative and it didn’t take them long at all to basically fit a concept for this space.”
“This little place kind of plopped in our lap,” Faber said.
So for now, Potchke Deli is a “year-long residency,” and depending on the success of it and the development of future plans, they will evaluate if they want to hold on to or let go of it.
Not only did Potchke have to work quickly to restructure their plans and move into a new space in a few months, but Faber and Williams seem to unintentionally start their eastern European business ventures in times when humanitarian crises plague the areas the food is inspired by.
According to Faber, they launched Hi Baby in the wake of Israel beginning to bomb Gaza. Potchke Deli opened just a week after Russia invaded Ukraine.
They used profits from the Hi Baby pop-ups and Lesser Babka sales to donate $7,000 to both Israeli and Palestinian organizations in the wake of the Isreal-Palenstine conflict. So far, they have raised $5,000 for both Ukrainian organizations and people they know in Ukraine but have plans to continue fundraising.
Fundraising though, is not the only thing they are trying to do to help the conflict.
“I think one of the biggest things they need is just awareness because of all the Russian misinformation, like Russian people a lot of them don’t exactly know what’s going on because of all the propaganda, and so we talk to our friends in Ukraine all the time and they are like, ‘we just want you to tell people,’” Faber said. “So we’ve raised awareness, we send money to people over there as they need it. It’s still going, so we’re going to do more.”
Faber said one of their main goals is to make sure they are giving back to Ukraine for the inspiration the country has given them in their business ventures, culinary visions and design ideas.
“We always just try to do something good with what we’re doing, so it’s not just like we take inspiration from Ukraine,” Faber said. “And so, for us to take that inspiration and not pay something back, especially when they need it … basically we would feel like if we didn’t do something that we were not being respectful for taking inspiration from them.”
Potchke Deli is open Wednesday through Sunday as of right now. Their hours are 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. on weekdays and 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. on weekends. You can visit their website and follow them on Instagram @potchkedeli. A Dopo Sourdough Pizza opens every day for dinner at 5 p.m. You can make reservations or place online orders on their website and follow them on Instagram @adopopizza.
