It is early morning and the restaurant doors won’t be open for hours, yet Menachem Elisha is in stealth gear. His Bitcoin Grill at Leetsdale and Oneida opened on January 1, and there are still countless items to check off his to-do list.
“This has been a dream of ours,” says Elisha, “and the hard work is worth it.”
Elisha talks while he is tethered to his cell phone at his makeshift office, which happens to be a table he hopes becomes occupied when the lunch crowd arrives. His laptop sits amidst a stack of papers and he is surrounded by containers of silverware and glasses still warm from the dishwasher. His voice is sometimes drowned out by the clattering in the kitchen, where pita bread baking has already been in production.
“We make everything from scratch, especially pita,” Elisha boasts.
“It’s harder to do, but it’s fresher.”
Such is life for a kosher restaurateur in Denver. There are only a few such establishments in town, which is why Elisha and his business partner Netanel Sharafi picked Denver to open their dream restaurant.
“We’ve been to California and Miami and always found sit-down kosher restaurants,” said Elisha. “There really isn’t that here.”
Elisha, originally from Jerusalem and Sharafi, from Tel Aviv, emigrated separately to the US for education and opportunity. They each settled in Kearney, Neb., where they worked for meat butchers for Hebrew National; Elisha was the plant’s shochet or ritual slaughterer.
Every Friday Elisha and Sharafi would make the five-hour drive from Kearney to Denver, where they would spend Shabbat with friends. Ten months ago they put the wheels in motion to open Bitcoin Grill at MGL Capitol Investment Plaza on Leetsdale Drive.
The passion to open a restaurant stemmed from a television show, of all things. When they were in Nebraska, Elisha and Sharafi both got hooked on the Israeli TV version of “MasterChef.”
“We are very interested in food back home,” he says. “We decided one day we would do that.”
Bitcoin Grill specializes in shawarma and Israeli salads. Early customers favor the restaurant’s shawarma and lamb kabob.
Elisha estimates the startup cost was approximately $400,000. He and Sharafi got financial help from a variety of sources.
“Lots of help,” he says.
Sitting nearby in the restaurant is Levi Sarikob, who owns the plaza and was eager to provide some of that help. Sarikob is a partial investor in the business.
“These are two Jewish guys who have become my friends,” says Sarikob. “I want to help them succeed.
“I think the Jewish community will come here, and eat good food.”
Elisha earned much of the seed money two years ago when cryptocurrency was in a bear market. For the record, he did not invest through FTX.
“We timed the market really well,” Menachem says.
Hence, the name Bitcoin Grill, and now part of the 200 club. The Colorado Restaurant Association estimates 200 new restaurant openings each year.
“We projected that it would take two or three months before we would start making money,” Elisha says, “but we are doing much better than we hoped, and we are already on the plus side.
“Even during the bad weather, we’ve had a lot of reservations.
“We’re doing great, thank G-d.”
Only a few blocks away on South Monaco Parkway, across from George Washington High School, sits the food truck of Mordy’s Falafel. Even on a cold day, the aroma wafts and the proprietor, Mordy Nisenbaum, shares his calling card, a highly-seasoned serving of . . . falafel.
Nisenbaum waits for a reaction.
“Pretty good, right?”
Nisenbaum didn’t really need to ask. He already knows the answer.
A New Jersey native and former Israeli resident, Nisenbaum was in the construction business and later marketed low-energy toilets.
In 2018 Mordy and his wife Recheli were looking for a change of scenery. So on July 25 of that year (Mordy’s birthday) they placed three cards on a table marked “Dallas,” “Phoenix” and “Denver.” They spun a wheel, and wherever the wheel ended up was where the couple would head to start their new future.
Quite a caution-to-the-wind plan.
The wheel landed on Denver.
“It was the best birthday present I could have ever given myself,” Mordy says.
The couple arrived in Colorado, only to later find their business plans coming to a halt during COVID.
“We lost just about everything,” Nisenbaum says, “but with a few dollars left, we said, let’s do a food truck!”
Mordy likes to joke he went from one end of the food business to another.
For a few years, Mordy’s Falafel truck was solely a traveling food truck, generating business outside friends’ homes in Winston Downs and other areas of Denver. He partnered with East Side Kosher Deli, each referring business to the other. The deli has also assisted Nisenbaum receiving some food products from overseas; shipping to a food truck is sometimes problematic.
Mordy has been at his current location for a year-and-a-half; it took nine months prior to secure the proper licensing to operate. He estimates that his startup costs were approximately $150,000 — relatively low for any food venture, because Nisenbaum built the truck himself.
“We try to make the most authentic falafel around,” says Mordy, who once worked at a felafel stand in Safed during a seven-year stint in Israel.
The food truck currently sits in front of a previously-abandoned store front off Monaco; Nisenbaum hopes to be able to operate that as a place for customers to sit, and says that development could occur between two and three months.
Equally as important, Mordy plans a food truck expansion.
“My goal is to have a food truck courtyard to cater to everybody,” Nisenbaum says. “My falafel truck is kosher and gluten free.
“We want to open another truck that will feature shawarma and schnitzel.
“Our main focus is to be authentic.”
The expansion plans are robust, though at the moment, Nisenbaum’s business model relies most on pita bread, which he exports from Israel.
“I go by pitas,” says Mordy. “My goal is to sell approximately 100 pitas a day. We’re doing close to 80 or 90.
“Now that winter is here we’re selling between 40-60 a day. Hopefully that will pick up when we have seating inside.
“You have your ups and downs in this business.”
Both Nisenbaum and Elisha, no doubt, know the cold, hard facts about restaurant survival. An IBISWorld report noted that 60% of new restaurants don’t survive over one year, and that 80% of new establishments are closed by year five.
“When people compliment me on our food,” says Bitcoin Grill’s Elisha, “it gives me energy for the whole day.”
For the moment, that is his fledgling restaurant’s survival, and Menachem is determined that will more than be enough.
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