JAMIE WAX:
00:00:23
If there is a Secret behind chef HoChan Jang's fresh tastes at Balance Pan-Asian Grille-- I'm going to steal one of these because it's so beautiful. --it's not exactly the sauce. I have never seen a restaurant where the farm is literally a hallway across from the table. This is amazing. No, the secret here is in the greens. The microgreens. When we visited, their indoor aquaponic farm was mere steps from the kitchen. Can I taste? Absolutely. There you go. All right. Well, it doesn't get fresher than this. No. Definitely not. Oh, my gosh. Making the greens almost impossibly fresh. This place looks like a chef's dream. It is. I love being here. It's a zen moment for me. When you're in the kitchen, everything's busy. It's a hustle and bustle. And then you come in here. It's a level of silence, and you smell the dirt. It's a farm. It really is a farm. It is. It is a farm of the future. That's the way I look at it.
JAMIE WAX:
00:01:23
This 8,600 square foot space has given way to a massive 26,000 square foot farm in Detroit. For Balance Grille, it's not the farm of the future. It's the farm of now. Absolutely.
JAMIE WAX:
00:01:36
And the seeds for this farm-restaurant combination were planted in 2008 by Jang and his college buddy, Prakash Karamchandani. You were not in a food-restaurant background. No. I never worked in a restaurant in my life before starting one. But you have a finance degree. I do. Which is a perfect thing to bring to your chef college buddy. I'm not a numbers guy.
JAMIE WAX:
00:01:58
Jang came to the US from South Korea when he was eight after his father had died, and learned to cook in his mom's restaurant. Karamchandani's parents are also immigrants with their own definition of success. Yeah, my parents have always been super supportive. But to be 100% candid, being Indian American, I really only had one career choice, which was to become a doctor. And then I got into med school and went to my parents and told them, I really want to be in business. I really want to follow my passions.
JAMIE WAX:
00:02:29
So like the old lottery saying, it only takes a dollar and a dream. Only these guys didn't have the dollar. We had just graduated college. So you walk away with this idealism of thinking you're just going to write a business plan and walk into a bank. They're going to write you a check, and you just go open your restaurant. And we got rejected from every bank we went to, obviously. So even though we didn't have any money, we just decided to do it. We maxed out every credit card we could. Oh yeah. IKEA cards. Home Depot cards. I mean, you name it.
JAMIE WAX:
00:02:58
The partners will tell you, that is no way to start a restaurant or any business. But the fresh menu got the attention of hungry Toledoans. They were able to pay off their debt in two years, and they expanded with three more restaurants in Ohio and plans to open in Michigan. Do you feel a sense of that-- that you are the realization of your immigrant parents' dreams? Absolutely. Our parents struggled so hard just to be here. This is the land of opportunity. It's the ability to follow our passion and start a business. And still, this many years later, go to work with my best friend is just-- it is a uniquely American opportunity. Uniquely American indeed. It's an immigrant story. It's an entrepreneurial story. And they're bringing the farm closer to the table. And the food looks so good, Jamie. It was excellent. I love the fact that they believed in themselves so much that they said, we're doing it anyway. We have no money. We're doing it. We're going to do it. We're doing it. Jamie, thanks.
