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On the house: Restaurateur giving away business lease to Ayer bar

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6 months ago

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On the house: Restaurateur giving away business lease to Ayer bar

AYER — After more than a decade of owning nightclubs, bars and restaurants, Reza Rahmani still remembers the moment that he made the decision to start his first business as “a gut-wrenching process.”

Rahmani reminisced about the struggles of raising money for a nightclub in Amherst, his first establishment, which often pushed him to turn to family and friends.

It’s that experience that has inspired Rahmani to give away the business lease to Bar 25, one of his three businesses in Massachusetts, to someone who in theory is now wearing the proverbial shoes he had to wear a long time ago.

Rahmani opened Bar 25 in 2018, when he was first looking to experiment with running a 1920s-themed cocktail bar. He turned the previous office space at 25 Main St. into a bar with help from a local artist.

That bar became a jumping point for him to open a much bigger, similarly themed bar in Newburyport in 2021, also named Bar 25.

“When I entered the restaurant world, I had had a Mediterranean restaurant, a nightclub, but this was something that I had not done,” said Rahmani. “This became a test location for the vision to do only cocktails and a little bit of food.

“This place is really near and dear to me because of what it did for me.”

Rahmani, who also owns Sin·A·Tacos on Salisbury Beach, said the decision to give up the four years remaining on the lease at the Main Street location in Ayer comes down to him wanting to shift his focus to his other two locations.

But as he does so, Rahmani does not want to leave that space with no care for whomever takes over.

“This is a community that’s very, very intelligent, and with a really good palate,” said Rahmani. “They fill these seats night in, night out and they’ll put you to the test, they know their craft cocktails, so we want to make sure it goes into the right hands.

“The ideal proposal would be someone who has the idea for a bar down to a brand and has that passion to be in the restaurant business.”

He has already seen a lot of interest, having seen about 15 proposals already as the deadline, Friday, is approaching.

A panel of food-tasting judges will also have their say in choosing the winner, during an event at one of Rahmani’s other restaurants in Newburyport.

Rahmani knows what it takes to run a successful business not only from his own experiences but also as the son of an immigrant family from Iran that owned a Persian restaurant on Harvard Square in Cambridge called Moby Dick for about two decades.

Despite a several-year-long stint in supply management at Honeywell Aerospace after earning a double degree in business and in economics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, “the restaurant business always called me back in.

“I left a very nice, cushy job to do this,” said Rahmani. “It’s in the fiber of my being.”

Rahmani said that just like he saw the brunt of many years of “a lot of failures and no guidance,” he is looking to do for someone else what he needed many years ago by giving away his Ayer location.

Among other efforts, he said he is working to raise the funding for the next person and that he will also offer consulting services for how to manage a business, including overhead expenses, which he says, “could destroy you on that first attempt.”

If done right, Rahmani said his decision to give away the license to Bar 25 could maybe start a trend where the more established and seasoned businesspeople open the door to their smaller locations to newer businesses.

“The rent is manageable, the overhead is very manageable,” said Rahmani. “This gives them that starting point and if they go from here and open a chain, God bless them.

“The goal would be to take these spaces and to continue this as a trend for more independent visions, especially those of younger, talented kids coming into the business.”

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