You’ve heard about the entrepreneur who buys a franchise and grows a business as part of a larger system.
Manoucher Khashe is the other kind.
He bought a former franchise and runs it in traditional mom-and-pop style, a rare situation in the industry and one that made business a tad complicated in the restaurant’s earlier years.
Khashe’s MSM Burgers LLC owns Wedge Burger on 17th Street in Costa Mesa, a one-off joint that sells burgers, fries, sodas and shakes.
You can get a chicken sandwich or veggie burger, but at an old-school hamburger shop, why would you?
Standard fare at the Wedge—Khashe’s son-in-law chose the name for the famed nearby surf spot in Newport Beach—are the single- or double-decker burgers.
But “Manouch,” as friends and family call him, is flexible.
“We can do five-by-five,” Khashe said—five patties and five slices of cheese—“whatever you want.”
He declined to offer an annual revenue figure but said he moves 450 to 700 hamburger patties daily.
The Iranian immigrants are wife, Sima, and brother-in-law Mansour Akbarzadeh, who invested from the start and lives and works in New Mexico.
Khashe remembers the day they bought the double drive-thru place.
“Seven-seven-O-one,” he said, or July 7, 2001.
They paid $375,000.
Then it got complicated.
Tricky Business
The restaurant had been part of a chain called EZ Take Out LLC that started in 1969 in Upland as Instant-Go Burgers, according to franchise documents filed in California in 2012 by EZ Take Out.
Two affiliated companies in the first two decades of operation were EZ Out LP and Take Out Burger Inc., the documents showed.
Names and building design of the early locations were similar enough to Irvine-based burger chain In-N-Out Burgers Inc. that by 1992, it agreed to change its name to EZ Take Out, according to a 2003 letter reviewing the deal that Manouch keeps in a manila folder.
He said he bought the restaurant from two partners who had owned it since 1992, first as a franchise and then as an independent store. The then-owners of EZ Take Out came to him in 2007 and told him he was still connected to the franchise.
“They said you gotta pay,” said Mehdi Kazerooni, a business broker and longtime family friend who helped Manouch and Sima navigate the original purchase and still helps the couple with the business.
The agreed-upon fee was $500 a month, plus annual increases of about 3%. Payments continued for several years, but eventually the Khashes stopped paying because, Manouch said, “They didn’t do anything [for us].”
A news report in 2009 said EZ Take Out LLC—now based in Aliso Viejo—had signed a franchise deal for 50 locations in the Middle East and North Africa over 10 years. The chain at the time claimed eight locations—it’s peak, the franchise documents show. Two EZ Take Outs were in OC, one in Yorba Linda and Manouch’s in Costa Mesa.
“This was the best location in quality and volume,” Kazerooni said.
The 2012 franchise documents show
EZ Take Out LLC was established in May 2003.
They also show that Chief Executive Shannon Bane had been chief financial officer for a 67-unit Carl’s Jr. franchisee and worked in investment banking.
The chain’s franchisee in the Middle East had opened just one, in Bahrain.
Reviewers on the Yelp website indicate that the original Upland location and the Yorba Linda site closed in 2011 or 2012.
It’s unknown if the chain’s other locations are still open. A message left at a phone number for EZ Take Out LLC, from the 2012 documents wasn’t returned.
In July 2013, Manouch, Sima and Mansour changed the restaurant’s name to Wedge Burger.
All in the Family
Chicago-based restaurant industry researcher Technomic Inc. Executive Vice President Darren Tristano said the franchisee-indie operator arrow doesn’t often swing this way but that when it does, it
looks a lot like the situation with Wedge Burger.
“What typically happens is a corporate entity … goes [out of business],” he said. Franchisees might keep operating, he said, sometimes under a new name. But most stores in the system close.
Wedge Burger employs 13.
“Fourteen, if you count me,” Manouch said.
“Eighteen, if you count you,” said John McMurray, the son-in-law who chose the business’ name.
He meant it as testimony to how hard Manouch works his hamburger stand.
“He’s here every day,” McMurray said.
Manouch and Sima helped run small family businesses—a restaurant and a dry cleaners—in Colorado before moving to California in 1999, where eldest daughter, Elham, who’s married to McMurray, was relocating to practice dentistry.
The couple, along with Sima’s brother, looked for about 18 months for a small food-related business to buy, and decided on the restaurant on Jan. 1, 2001.
They liked the double drive-thru lanes and small site—easy for a family to run without much trouble, low overhead, and “in a great location with good traffic and absolutely great customers,” Manouch said.
The well-worn comment cards Wedge Burger lets customers redeem for a free cheeseburger when they fill them out and return testify to customer response.
Almost everyone knows and likes hamburgers and fries, he said.
“How could you go wrong with a burger?”
