Special Edition: Interview with Arnon Oren
Owner of Anaviv Catering, Ta’yeem, the Sailing Goat, and More
Feb 5, 2025
Today’s newsletter includes an interview Q&A brought to you by… Anaviv
Anaviv is a California-based premier, customizable catering experience utilizing seasonal locally sourced ingredients combined with a restaurant for more intimate dinners. Their chefs are passionate about their cooking and creativity with the dishes produced—each menu and each event is unique and special. “We believe you can see and taste the difference in our food.”
The interview Q&A provides a founder’s viewpoint on critical business, strategy, and career decisions based on decades of experience in the culinary industry. Key points discussed today include:
- A unique perspective on hiring new employees as a small business owner
- Key sources of differentiation present and their impacts on business success
- In-depth analysis of the culinary industry with a focus on restaurants and catering businesses
👋 Hello friends,
Thank you for joining this week's edition of Brainwaves. I'm Drew Jackson, and today I’m bringing you insights from a lovely conversation I had with Arnon Oren, founder and owner of multiple businesses, including Anaviv.
Before we begin: Brainwaves arrives in your inbox every other Wednesday, exploring venture capital, economics, space, energy, intellectual property, philosophy, and beyond. I write as a curious explorer rather than an expert, and I value your insights and perspectives on each subject.
Time to Read: 19 minutes.
Let’s dive in!
Q: Background on Arnon and His Companies
Arnon’s parents weren’t a part of a restaurant, so growing up he wasn’t directly familiar with the culinary/food service field. However, he wasn’t on his own; according to his company’s website: "I grew up in Rosh-Pina, a small town in the Galilee. We had fig trees, pomegranate trees, citrus, plums, and olive trees. From a young age, I was exposed to pure, great flavors."
In 1993, he sort of fell into the culinary field, starting as a dishwasher. Then he moved on to cleaning vegetables. “I enjoyed the environment, the artistic part, and the physical aspect.”
Initially, Arnon was working these jobs to pay for engineering school. He quickly questioned if that was what he was interested in. Meanwhile, he progressed at his restaurant, a local Italian restaurant, and began to love it more and more. But, before he jumped head first into this world, he decided to take a 2-year break to travel around the world and see if when he came back, the restaurant/culinary world was something he was truly interested in.
Arnon worked in a couple of restaurants in France then moved to the United States, to the Bay Area, where he worked in a good Italian restaurant called Oliveto Cafe & Restaurant (pictured below), and at Chez Panisse where he was a Senior Cook for 4 years.
Credit The Wall Street Journal
Following this, Arnon opened his own restaurant and spent 2 years refining and growing his practice. He quickly realized “restaurants are not for me.” Elaborating, he discussed how restaurants are more of a way of life compared to purely owning a business. With 2 young kids, he realized he couldn’t have a family life like this and decided to make a bit of a change.
In 2006, he opened a catering company, originally called Oren’s Kitchen (logo pictured below)—a better business model for him where he would have more control of his schedule and time. This business grew into a corporate lunch business before the COVID pandemic, cooking for ~600 employees daily for companies like 23andMe.
Credit Oren’s Kitchen
In 2014, Arnon invested in a new space in Richmond, and in 2016, he founded Anaviv Catering & Events—a catering business focused on premium, customizable catering services—to take over Oren’s Kitchen.
According to their website, “The new kitchen space gave Anaviv the flexibility to host smaller gatherings on-site in a formal dining room or outdoor pavilion, and in 2018, Anaviv’s Table, a private fine dining experience with a tailored menu and chef’s table experience, was born.”
Credit Anaviv Catering
The business was going great until early 2020 when the COVID pandemic happened and their main corporate lunch clients went to mainly remote work, they lost most of their clients, and the clients that remained had very scaled-back demand.
In a surprising turn of events, Arnon decided to expand his business offerings. In March 2020, right when the country was shutting down, they opened a drive-thru pizza business using a mobile pizza oven they had.
As demand was lower during the pandemic, they decided to have this new outdoor restaurant only open on the weekends. They had live music and were successful for the next two years. During this period, Arnon also focused on rebuilding the catering business.
Then Arnon received an offer to open a much bigger restaurant in a new location. He decided to take the offer and closed down the old restaurant and opened the Sailing Goat restaurant.
Credit Sailing Goat Restaurant Instagram
From the Sailing Goat website:
Now in 2025, Arnon owns the Sailing Goat restaurant, Ta’yeem kosher catering services, Anaviv farm-to-table catering services, and is one of the co-founders of the Plant to Plate Internship program—giving back to students, “training them to be ready for the workforce in cooking and gardening.”
Q: You mentioned in your background that you owned a restaurant for 2 years and that you would never do that again, but now you own the Sailing Goat restaurant. How did that happen? What are you doing differently this time?
After founding his restaurant in 2006 and his experiences being a founder in the field, Arnon had had enough. “I swore not to have another restaurant again.” Whether he liked it or not, the restaurant business chased him down again.
Before COVID, the catering model worked really well. You gathered a lot of people together and you fed them, all in one confined space. Then the pandemic happened and you couldn’t do that, people needed to stay inside, were discouraged from large gatherings, and advised to stay at least 6 feet from each other.
“Our basic business model didn’t work.” In order for them to do something with their people and their equipment, they opened an outdoor restaurant.
Their location provided some optimal characteristics for an outdoor restaurant. They had a large parking lot, so they set up an outdoor restaurant to utilize this space, having many spread-out booths. This model enabled them to gather many people in a larger space and feed them (a hybrid between the catering model and a true small restaurant model).
People loved it.
The corporate lunch business struggled during the pandemic. It was shut down for 6 months, then as companies started to bring people back in variations (e.g. various hybrid models, fully remote) they reengaged with their core clients for another year on a small scale.
It was during this time when Arnon got an opportunity to do another outdoor restaurant: the Sailing Goat. A significant portion of their revenue historically used to be from these corporate lunches, so when choosing to open the restaurant, Arnon did the calculations and figured it would provide a similar portion of revenue as the corporate lunches used to bring them.
So, he decided to take the chance, and now he owns the Sailing Goat restaurant.
Q: Why do your customers choose you?
“That answer is different for the catering business and the restaurant business.”
The Catering Business
“Where we get our edge is our ability to customize and our eagerness to please the client and work with them to create a collaborative, somewhat stress-reduced (for the client) environment to do the event.” They are very responsive to clients, a “big level of engagement on their part.”
A unique part of the catering business is that every event is new. That’s where their edge is. They don’t have set menus, always loving to innovate and adapt, always loving to do it differently than they’ve done before.
Arnon emphasized the relationship portion of their business. “When we mess up, we own it all the way.” If they don’t deliver on their promise, they make the customer whole. In a business like this, sometimes this happens. There are many unknowns—every time they’re at a new place—they are essentially creating a new restaurant everywhere they go. “It’s a big undertaking.”
This model has been majorly successful for them. They do have people repeating purchases, mainly corporations and lifecycle events from the same family or friends of the family. Arnon attributes this all to the relationships they’ve worked on building.
The Restaurant Business
“It’s a unique location—a little harbor. Drive there and you feel like you are at the end of the world.” Arnon described the place as having the feel of the 40’s or 50’s.
Credit Sailing Goat Restaurant
In crafting the experience at the Sailing Goat, they wanted to create food experiences that “enhance the feeling of this remote environment…the feeling that you just took a trip to somewhere new.”
The goal was to enhance this feeling that you are somewhere else, so they curated a relaxed environment with the sensibility of the ocean.
Q: Across all of your businesses, how do you pick your employees? What advice would you give someone in any industry regarding this?
Arnon’s passion is the people he works with. Early on, he tended to lean into people’s potential a lot—he was hiring a lot based on people’s future potential compared to people’s capacity (skill level and experience).
From his experience, his balance was a bit off—it was too much towards people’s potential. He initially thought that someone’s capacity, ability, skill, and experience could catch up faster than it did.
Now, Arnon is realizing more and more, especially in the culinary business, that you cannot expedite learning, or in his words, you “can’t pressure cook learning.”
His business is very hands-on. You have to touch the produce, cook the food, be with the people, see the clients, and feed the clients. Hands-on takes time, it takes experience to learn. There isn’t a way to learn this from a book, you have to just do it again and again and again.
Arnon has had great success in this approach (hiring based on potential). Hiring someone talented who is interested in excelling and allowing them to do so will often produce success. However, it doesn’t always work. “We are very interested in the development of passionate people who work with us and we always see the potential in them—if often leads to beautiful results. And then sometimes it takes on a different direction so we just need to be aware of that and look for a balanced approach of finding skilled people while also allowing less skilled and very passionate people to be growing with us.”
Overall, he’s tried to be very people-focused. If you treat people well, they’ll stay on longer.
Arnon doesn’t have major problems with turnover (uncommon in the culinary industry). Around 80% of the crew currently at his restaurant was the original crew when it was founded 1.5 years ago. In addition, the average person working in their catering company has been there for 3-5 years.
Q: What are your company’s plans for future growth in the next 5 to 10 years?
In the next 2 years, Arnon hopes to get back to where they were pre-COVID. From there, he plans to expand on the businesses that they have, growing in size and the quality of offerings.
As for the restaurant, they want to expand on the areas surrounding the restaurant. “We want to make the harbor…. a place where people come and do their company team building activities.”
Throughout this, Arnon hopes to grow through the people they already have, giving them more opportunities to be a part of the process along the way. If Arnon creates a new business, someone from the existing team could go manage that business—potentially becoming a future partner in this new venture.
My Takeaways
First of all, it was fantastic to chat with Arnon and hear more about his story. It was interesting to learn about his career trajectory and his strategies for building and growing his enterprise.
I want to thank Arnon again for the fantastic opportunity to chat with him!
A Quick Aside on My Rationale With This Approach:
My goal in reaching out to Arnon, and people like him, is to highlight that all businesses face strategic challenges at each step of the growth journey. In school, you traditionally only learn about the “best of the best”, those Fortune 500 businesses that have hundreds of case studies written about them.
Yet, there’s value in the unique insights from small business owners who are on the ground, constantly navigating critical decisions every minute.
How much do I price my product? Who should I hire? How should I expand my business? What do I do if my sales are down? — All questions that small business owners face constantly.
Now on to the critical lessons I want to highlight from my conversation with Arnon.
Lesson #1: Macroeconomic Shocks Can Majorly Impact Small Businesses
The pandemic hit many small business owners, especially service-based businesses, very hard. For Arnon, he’s estimating that it’s going to take him ~6 years to return to his pre-pandemic growth and size levels.
Large businesses tend to have more diversification and stability through tough macroeconomic periods compared to smaller businesses. For example, the S&P 500 index dropped ~33% in February and March 2020, yet it had rebounded to the original levels by August.
It’s estimated that around 33% of small businesses closed temporarily or permanently during the pandemic. Arnon’s experience wasn’t isolated, but it does provide a valuable reminder that smaller businesses struggle when there are macroeconomic shocks.
A couple of potential reasons for this are summarized below:
- Reduced consumer spending
- Supply chain disruptions
- Interest rate and inflation rate fluctuations
- Pressure on operations (workers’ hours, inventory levels, cutting costs)
Lesson #2: The Balance Between Current Capabilities and Future Potential
I’ve never had to hire an employee before, so it was very interesting to hear Arnon’s hiring philosophy.
Throughout his career, Arnon has probably hired hundreds of employees. As he touched on, each employee has an amount of future potential—their ability to grow and develop in the role and in the business over time—and an amount of current capabilities or capacity—their current abilities to perform the role adequately, including their skills, talent, experience, and mindset in the role.
Ideally, you would want to only hire employees with high potential and high capabilities as they would be the best of both worlds. Yet, those people are rare to come across.
If you are unable to fulfill your hiring needs with people from that bucket and need to look into other buckets, what should you do?
Arnon began with the bucket of individuals with high potential and lower current capabilities. In his opinion, especially in the service industry, he potentially should have made a different decision.
In his industry, it’s difficult to teach capabilities, so hiring people who already have capabilities, but a lower potential, in his opinion, would sometimes be a better option. It’s a delicate balance—a good mix between employees with more potential and those with more skills can be a recipe for the most success.
In another industry, one where capabilities are more easily taught, Arnon’s initial philosophy probably would work very well.
Lesson #3: The Value of Flexibility
At many points during Arnon’s journey, he was presented with sudden or more immediate opportunities. For instance, while running his first outdoor restaurant during the beginning of the pandemic, he was presented with the opportunity to begin the Sailing Goat restaurant.
If he wasn’t able to be flexible, he would have missed this opportunity.
Another example is during the beginning of the pandemic, when all of the lunch and catering businesses were really struggling, being flexible to start the pizza business (eventually turning into the first outdoor restaurant) enabled him to keep some revenue coming in the door and keep his employees.
Throughout my conversations with business owners, especially small business owners, flexibility has been a key point to their success.
You never know when a critical opportunity might present itself, so it’s best to be able to take it whenever it happens.
Tony Robbins summarizes this approach well, “Stay committed to your decisions, but stay flexible in your approach.”
Lesson #4: The Value of Relationships
In every aspect of his business, Arnon prioritizes relationships.
In an industry with higher employee turnover, Arnon’s employees stay for long periods of time. Why? I bet it’s one of the following: A) they enjoy their jobs and/or B) they’re paid very well. I didn’t ask Arnon, but I imagine the reason many, if not all, of his employees stay with his businesses for longer periods of time is because they enjoy their jobs. They enjoy the work they do, they enjoy their fellow employees, they enjoy Arnon as an owner, etc.
In my opinion, a large reason for this lack of turnover is the relationship that Arnon has with these employees. They’re allowed to grow and develop within the company and they’re given opportunities to succeed if they’re interested.
It’s not just employee relationships that have made Arnon successful.
As Arnon discussed, the relationships they build with their clients have been critical to their differentiation and success as a firm. Arnon’s staff helps clients feel known and heard, helping customize the experience to perfectly meet the client’s desires. In the catering business especially, this is critical as many of these events are once-in-a-lifetime moments or very important times in the client’s journey, so they need to be captured as perfectly as possible.
If they weren’t focused on building relationships, a vast majority of the value they would bring would be off the table as at that point—they would simply be providing food to a gathering. It’s the relationships that helped set their services apart and kept clients coming back to them afterward.
These relationships have enabled Arnon’s businesses to be as successful as they have been, with happy, recurring customers and happy, long-term employees.
As one of my professors once put it, “when you’re interested in a company’s sources of differentiation, ask them about the relationships they have.”
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I just want to say another thanks to Arnon, it was great being able to learn all of these things from his experience, and even better that I can share them with you.
I hope you read something valuable in the above discussion and takeaways that will influence how you approach business or even your life in general.
That’s all for today. I’ll be back in your inbox on Saturday with The Saturday Morning Newsletter.
Thanks for reading,
Drew Jackson
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