Standing in front of his enormous, custom-made meat smoker, Jack Timmons is a happy man. He’s a lanky guy who speaks with a gentle Dallas drawl; his family back in Texas, he says, is the kind that always offers a person a drink or a sandwich when they walk in. He loves parties, and he’s throwing one five days a week at his roadhouse on Airport Way. It’s called Jack’s BBQ.

Timmons worked at Microsoft for 12 1/2 years ― in IT, in operations, in marketing and in business development. After leaving in 2008, he produced “A Wink and a Smile,” his wife Deirdre Allen Timmons’ documentary about Seattle burlesque. Then he returned to his native Texas to go full-nerd on barbecue, attending BBQ Summer Camp at the Meat Sciences department of Texas A&M University.

Back in the Northwest, Timmons started his “barbecue raves,” aka the Seattle Brisket Experience, which caught on via social media wildfire. (The final S.B.E. sold out in 19 minutes.) This fall, he opened Jack’s in the no-man’s land between Sodo and Georgetown.

The restaurant world has all the pressure and crazy-making hours of tech, but instead of a product release and the potential for a huge payout, there’s a never-ending timeline and razor-thin margins. The skill sets seem to have zero overlap; the rewards seem entirely different. But Timmons and three other successful former techies in Seattle have taken on the role of restaurateur. Why would anyone make such a move?

They’re all fully aware of the downside. The restaurant schedule is “a ‘Groundhog Day’ kind of thing,” says Wassef Haroun, owner of Mamnoon on Capitol Hill. Expectations must be met or surpassed, out in public, over and over. “In the tech world, you don’t have that extra stress that you’re going to be walking the tightrope and people will see you fall,” says Mike Almquist, owner of Hommage in north Queen Anne.

But like Jack Timmons and Chris Cvetkovich of the forthcoming Nue on Capitol Hill, they wanted human feedback, in real time, while sharing something they love. They’ve also all found lessons from their former lives serving them surprisingly well.


Variety in ‘24/7’ work

Taking a tenet of the tech world, Timmons recommends hiring the best from the get-go. “I got the A team,” he says, sounding admiring rather than boastful. In the kitchen at Jack’s, you’ll find former Poppy chef (and Texas native) Wesley Shaw; out back, manning the smoker, is pit master Tony White, who came from Louie Mueller, a classic barbecue joint in Austin.

Compared to making meat for hundreds of people five days a week, working at Microsoft was Sisyphean for Timmons. “I was always trying to get new stuff done, always pushing the rock up the hill,” he says. Then there was the sudden cancellation of laborious projects. “There was a lot of startin’ and stoppin’ there,” he says.

“Here, the worst days are (about) customer feedback. Usually, it’s unwarranted,” Timmons says. “Every now and then, though, I’ve sliced a piece of meat, and somebody might say it’s not tender.” He pauses.

“That crushes me more than anything, when somebody doesn’t like the brisket. ‘Cause that’s our baby. It’s like somebody calling your baby ugly.”

Timmons prizes the variety in his days now, even though he works “24/7.” He even embraces the problems that come with trying to provide Texas-style hospitality.

“We have more eccentric people working in the restaurant industry. Engineers, especially, are very calm and sober compared to the average restaurant person,” he dryly observes. But, he says, “This is the entertainment industry ― it’s fun. We’re puttin’ on a show every night.”

It’s a show with direct and potentially painful financial consequences, unlike his time in tech: “The fun thing about Microsoft, they had unlimited funding, if you could get it. ... Once you got money, you were funded. You didn’t ask for $20, you asked for millions and millions. Here, it’s tight. Now I’ve spent all the investment money, and I’m running on profits. And profits are ...” He just laughs.

On the best days now, he says, his work is so thoroughly appreciated, “People come up and hug you.” Which never happened at Microsoft.


Patience, passion

Wassef Haroun is calm, almost grave, amid the lunch rush inside dim, sleek Mamnoon. He and his wife, Racha, could’ve done nearly whatever they wanted after his 11-year stint at Microsoft, followed by networking and database start-ups in France and Dubai.

They chose to create Mamnoon for a serious reason. They’re from Syria, where a multisided war appears insoluble and unending; Mamnoon’s highly praised Syrian, Lebanese and Persian cuisine is the Harouns’ “ambassador for the culture,” Wassef explains. (“Mamnoon” means “thankful” or “grateful” in Arabic.)

Starting out, Haroun dispensed with spreadsheets and three-year projections: “There were some things that we were freed from because we were the only investors,” he says. The process of creating Mamnoon, informed by his tech experience, was an unusual one.

He’s in agreement with Timmons on hiring. “That’s something that you learn in the startup world,” he says. “You find the smartest person you can who’s the greatest fit for the team.” For Mamnoon, that person was chef Garrett Melkonian. Then, before the restaurant opened, he and Melkonian embarked upon a six-month, trial-and-error culinary collaboration that included Racha, both his and Racha’s mothers, and Lebanese cookbook author and food historian Barbara Massaad.

The “initial hypothesis” ― that they’d need to teach Melkonian how to cook Middle Eastern food ― was a “false assumption,” Haroun found. Slowly, he realized it was about communicating the palate of the cuisine, not the individual recipes or methods. “When that realization hit us, it was almost like we hit turbo mode,” Haroun says.

“It’s a blessing, in retrospect,” Haroun says of Mamnoon’s slow-motion genesis. “It was very beneficial, even though we probably ― as they say in the tech world ― left money on the table. We emphasized learning, observing and understanding way more than trying to optimize.”

Haroun’s advice for would-be restaurateurs, from tech or elsewhere, is simple: “Make sure that there is that passion there.”

By Bethany Jean Clement

(The Seattle Times)

(Tribune Content Agency)