Ashling Kitchen
Address: 1286 Route 3 South, Suite 3, Crofton, MD 21114 Menu: ashlingco.com, (443) 332-6100
When it came to opening Ashling Kitchen & Bar in Crofton, Elise Letavish and her fiancé, Saeed Ashrafzadeh, made a perfect team. The 38-year-old Ashrafzadeh had the food service experience, and Letavish developed the music contacts that proved vital to lifting their business off the ground.
“When we toured, we never got a great meal—a home-cooked meal,” says Letavish, 33, who worked as a music tour manager all over the world for six years. “Catering wasn’t the best out there for the artists.”
The two saw an opportunity and started a catering company based at the Lyric Opera House. They called it Ashling Marketing and Catering, and they focused on providing high quality meals to touring musicians.
The Lyric was one of their first big clients and Pier Six Pavilion (now MECU Pavilion) followed. Since December of 2016, they’ve served a number of well-known acts: the Barenaked Ladies, Chicago, Diana Ross, Steve Martin, and The Beach Boys. Out of the catering company came their restaurant, which opened in April in the spot formerly occupied by the well-known Christopher’s restaurant.
“It’s an evolving menu, Americano,” Letavish says. “I did not want to pigeon hole us.”
We recently sat down with the couple to chat about their catering company (which makes up about 60 percent of their business), what’s new with the restaurant (the other 40 percent), and the respective backgrounds of the two entrepreneurs.
Saeed, can you tell me about the catering company?Once we had the second account at the MECU Pavilion, we started thinking about our next move. You couldn’t use one place (Lyric) as a central location to service other accounts. We had the dilemma of, what’s our next move? In the catering world, what do you do when the business is not there and there are no tours in the wintertime? That’s when we came up with the restaurant. We have a full kitchen trailer next to the restaurant for catering.
What was the theme of the restaurant? We wanted to create a homey atmosphere and have home-cooked meals. That’s how we transferred it from the catering company into the restaurant.
How do you differentiate yourself from other restaurants?What really makes us unique is the ability to look at everything we do on a daily basis and ask, “What works, what is not working, and what can we do to make it better in order to find that sweet spot to really make it a destination for customers?” It’s that mom and pop feeling that people want.
What is your most popular item?Crab cakes. It’s all prepared with love. We don’t skimp on the product. We use the top ingredients. There is no filling in the crab cakes.
What are some other customer favorites?Our mac and cheese balls. They are unique. No one is putting duck inside them. Poutine is another unique thing. Not a lot people do it. It’s basically gravy fries. It’s not just regular plain gravy. We use demi-glace and melted cheese curds inside of it.
Anything new on the horizon?We are going to roll out brunch in the fall. It will probably be a big thing that will keep us hopping. There will be a flair to it. It’s not a traditional breakfast where you get omelets, or eggs benedict. We are doing things like huevos rancheros, vegan burritos, and nachos and churro waffles. And we will have music. It will be soft. We will do jazz or an acoustic set.
Saeed, what’s the biggest challenge in opening a new restaurant?We are a lot more stable than a couple of months ago. We have a flow; we have built a team and we have the trust. One of the hardest things to do when you are starting something new is building that core trust around your team and having everybody fall back on each other and working in unison. If your kitchen is not cohesive, you are not going to have that great experience because the food is going to take a while.
Elise, what was it like meeting some of these musicians and cooking for them? It’s hundreds of people and our website has a list of them. We get to do all kinds of genres of music. We have done some legendary acts, and I am so thankful for the opportunity to be able to work alongside so many legendary people. What we try to do is let people know who we are feeding. When you come into the restaurant, you see (backstage credentials from the shows) of what musicians we are feeding on the wall. Everybody has a love for music. What we are trying to do is incorporate what we did with the catering into the restaurant and bring it to the community. We plan to give tickets away to shows.
What did you do before starting the catering company?I worked in the box office at Rams Head Live! and worked my way up to a production assistant to runner. I met a lot of people. I spent some time with Robin Williams when I was a production assistant. I was a tour manager and worked with rapper Mac Miller.
Saeed, what was your background before your new ventures?I owned two 7-Eleven franchises (in Deale, Prince Frederick). I wanted to phase out of out the 7-Elevens and food was always something I was passionate about. When we started the catering company, I was down to one and I sold the other one when we started the restaurant. I paid for college working in restaurants for five years. Food and beverage and retail has always been at the core of my existence.
Ashling Kitchen's Crab Cakes
Yields 16 crab cakes
3 lb. Super lump crab meat 1 lb. Jumbo lump crab meat 1.25 cups of Old Bay crab cake classic seasoning mix 2 cups of mayonnaise 1/2 tbsp lemon juice 1/2 tbsp Tabasco sauce
Take a big mixing bowl and place your crab meat inside the bowl. Add your mayonnaise, tabasco sauce, lemon juice, and the crab cake classic mix into the crab meat and mix together gently so you don’t break up the crab meat into small pieces. Once everything is mixed, form your crab cakes into a circle patty. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Use pan spray and spray your pan, along with both sides of the crab cakes. Place crab cakes on the pan and insert in oven. Cook for five minutes on each side, leaving the crab cakes with a golden-brown finish on both sides.
