Chef Azmin Ghahreman, founder and owner of Sapphire Laguna restaurant on Pacific Coast Highway in Laguna Beach, will be spending the next couple of months at patient-monitor maker Masimo Corp., tweaking the new cafeteria-style restaurant he opened at the company’s headquarters in Irvine.
The eatery is the latest of seven business ventures based on Sapphire, which Ghahreman opened in 2007, to offer international comfort food.
Ghahreman’s businesses employ a combined 130 on a full-, part-time, or on-call basis. They include Sapphire at School, Sapphire Catering, Sapphire Cruises, Sapphire Commissary, Sapphire Consulting, and Sapphire at Work. The Sapphire name came from the gemstone in his wife’s engagement ring.
He declined to provide annual revenue for all of the businesses. The Business Journal estimates the restaurant’s revenue at about $5 million.
The Iran native, who was raised in Switzerland, was an engineering major in undergraduate school in Indiana before dropping out to enroll in culinary school in San Francisco. He took the advice of an instructor who suggested he work for a hotel to learn as much as possible about his chosen profession.
The Masimo restaurant is part of Sapphire at Work, which he launched this year in response to a request by Joe Kiani, chief executive of the healthcare technology company.
Most customers would consider the Masimo site a cafeteria, but Ghahreman views it as a restaurant with his name and reputation tied to it.
He said the venture resulted from a lunch meeting with Kiani, his friend. The subject of food naturally came up, and Kiani asked Ghahreman if he would “take care” of the 1,300 Masimo employees by providing them with healthy meals.
“About 30 minutes after our lunch ended, I received a call (from Masimo’s operations manager) saying I could create my own kitchen inside Masimo’s headquarters,” Ghahreman said.
Within a couple of months, he’d designed a 3,200-square-foot master chef’s kitchen with a special pizza oven, and staffed the site with Sapphire-trained cooks to provide the tasty but nutritious breakfasts, lunches, dinners and take-away meals that Ghahreman is known for concocting.
He said each item and ingredient in the cafeteria mirrors the fine food he serves at his Laguna Beach restaurant: hand-picked local tomatoes, rolls baked each morning, even $150-per-pound prosciutto.
The Masimo cafeteria offers omelets, pizzas, Asian-inspired meals, pastas imported from Italy, and American foods, such as Philadelphia cheesesteak sandwiches. It serves fresh juices, teas, lemonades and naturally flavored sodas to wash it all down.
Ghahreman also offers prepackaged lunches, dinners and farm-fresh eggs by the dozen for employees who are working on deadline or who are too busy to grocery shop.
He and General Manager Devin Wells, even with all that culinary variety, will spend a few months adjusting the cafeteria’s menu to “local tastes.”
“We go through a lot of spicy ingredients at Masimo,” said Wells, who usually helps Ghahreman troubleshoot his new business ventures.
Ghahreman and Wells, after they have learned “local preferences,” will make tweaks “to keep the recipes fresh and provide variety to the employees,” Wells said.
The two met while working at The St. Regis Monarch Beach in Dana Point. Wells joined Ghahreman full time in 2011. He said the entrepreneur has created a wide foundation of business ventures and now seems to be adding clients to each.
The first was Sapphire Laguna restaurant, followed by Sapphire at School in 2009.
Several parents and administrators noticed the meals that Ghahreman’s four children brought to their respective schools, and “Everyone suggested that I make and sell lunches for their children,” he said.
He gently turned down the idea for a couple of years but answered an urgent call for help from St. Anne School in Laguna Niguel on Feb. 9, 2009.
“I still remember the phone call,” Ghahreman said. “It was at 6:45 a.m. The school said the cafeteria manager closed the business overnight, that the school needed to feed 800 children that day, and that they had a 400-person dinner event that night.”
He remembers what turned out to be an intense day. The restaurant owner already needed to oversee the 350-plus meals usually served at Sapphire, but he wanted to help the children, so he agreed to provide all of the last-minute meals.
He recalled advice his dad, a lawyer, once gave him.
“My father told me to ‘always feed people, never take food away from anyone,’” he said.
His Sapphire at School now serves 5,000 meals daily at 11 private and public schools.
“And the kids at the public schools eat the same quality meals that the private school children receive,” Ghahreman said. “The government may only pay me $3.10 for each (public) school lunch, but I subsidize the rest to make sure that the children eat healthy and complete meals.”
Ghahreman later created two other ventures that are modeled on the school lunch program: Sapphire Commissary and Sapphire Catering.
The former delivers lunches to hospital staffs and other companies in Orange County. He started the business by loading boxed meals into a rental truck and driving to various businesses, kind of like the typical food truck.
“Today I have five modern delivery transports and that original rental truck,” Ghahreman said with a chuckle.
He started Sapphire Catering in response to requests from corporate leaders, business owners, and couples in need of a wedding caterer.
Then in 2013 Ghahreman created Sapphire Cruises after Century City-based Crystal Cruise Lines asked him to be a guest chef on a cruise from Southampton, England, to Rome, Italy.
The company wanted to provide tapas-like foods from numerous destinations, Ghahreman said. The program is called “Tastes” and uses Ghahreman’s experience gleaned from opening restaurants for Four Seasons and Fairmont hotels around the world.
He said the Sapphire Cruises venture takes place only three or four times a year and that the cruise line provides all of the cooks for the week-long trips. However, it requires him to revive and adjust the couple of thousand recipes he’s created and memorized since launching his career in the 1980s.
As if all that wasn’t enough to keep him busy, Ghahreman operates two other businesses. He serves as a consultant to clients who want to create commercial kitchens in their homes or businesses. He also operates a small pantry next to his Laguna Beach restaurant that sells many of the ingredients used in his recipes. He intends to bottle and sell many of the salad dressings that he creates for his restaurants.
Ghahreman said he works 70 to 80 hours a week and usually makes unannounced visits to each of his ventures, visits he said typically reveal more than the effectiveness of his staff or the kitchen. He also learns when the greatest number of customers arrive at the restaurant, whether most like to eat alone or in a group, and the duration of their visits.
For example, he said he’s noticed that the Masimo restaurant is starting to attract groups of employees from other corporations for lunch.
The Masimo venture just launched this spring, Ghahreman said, and, “I will need to hire another assistant soon.”
The serial entrepreneur said he didn’t set out to establish a lot of ventures and that he hasn’t actively sought additional clients—they typically just come to him—although he recently hired an agency to market the various Sapphires. He creates businesses like he makes dishes—by instinct.
Ghahreman decided when the last recession weakened Sapphire Laguna’s business that he would branch out instead of hunkering down, keeping his eyes open for opportunities in the marketplace.
“The recession taught me to have guts and to be strong when making business decisions.”
