‘A cheap person cannot own a restaurant. They’ll never make it.’

As a wife, mother and co-owner and manager of one of the best-known and well-regarded Jewish delicatessen/restaurants in San Diego, Debi Akin is proof that, with a little daring and a lot of work, a person can have it all. The 33-year-old native San Diegan and her Israeli-born husband, Zvika, own D.Z. Akin’s Restaurant in the State College area. Akin was managing a few of her father’s clothing stores in Los Angeles when she met Zvika, who owned a butcher shop. She says it was an accident that they ever ended up in the restaurant business because she had no experience in the field and her husband had never cooked any of the food he sold. She spends part of the day acting as hostess, making purchases and overseeing the restaurant, but Akin spends the late afternoon and evening with her two children, ages 7 and 6. She and her family recently moved to Del Mar, where they are renting a place until construction is completed on their home. Times staff writer Kathie Bozanich interviewed her at the restaurant and Times staff photographer Bob Grieser photographed her.

My husband and I met in his shop. I think I was the youngest thing that had ever been in his shop. He had a lot of old Jewish ladies coming in so I must have looked pretty good to him. I went in and asked for a chicken, and he asked whether I wanted the inside stuff. I told him I didn’t know what to do with any of it except for the liver. He reached into his case and gave me a handful of chicken livers, and he rattled off some kind of remark like, “Now you can invite me over and I can see what kind of cook you are.�

I made a big bowl of chopped liver over that weekend, and at 6 a.m. Monday morning I was standing outside his butcher shop with this bowl filled with this stuff. He came zooming around the corner very late for work, and I gave him his chopped liver. He didn’t know how to react, being a foreigner and all that. He tried to repay me by giving me more frozen livers. That night he called, after getting my phone number off a check I had written to him. We got married very soon after that.

We felt we needed a change, so we moved to San Diego, where I had grown up and where my family is. At the time, I was pregnant with my first child, and my husband was looking for a business. He knew the food business, but I didn’t expect I would be working with him. I thought I would continue in the clothing business, but that didn’t happen, of course.

We didn’t do any research. The only thing we did before leaving Los Angeles was to go to every deli we could find. We studied their menus, their look, and we ate and we ate. I was pregnant, so it was great. When we finally decided what kind of restaurant we wanted, it just sort of happened. We never thought about the area or the people, not on paper anyway, not in any calculated way.

I can use my business skills here, it’s just another product. I love working with the public, and I have more public to work with here as opposed to a retail store. I manage a large staff of more than 70 people. I think if I went back to school, I would get a degree in psychology. It’s tough trying to keep the customer happy and the employee happy. The business skills come more naturally to me.

A cheap person cannot own a restaurant. They’ll never make it. If you count every cent, every meal you replace for the customer to make them happy, every cookie you give out so a child is happy, you don’t belong in the restaurant business. I feel generous because I have everything that I need and I’m able to give back.

It came to a certain point where I realized I had lost touch with my home life and my children. I was working every single night. It got to the point where I had to decide what was more important to me, my customers or my husband and children. I realized my kids would not have the mommy and daddy situation they needed unless I learned to cut back.

My goal is that everybody walks out of the restaurant happy, no matter what God-awful thing might happen. I won’t sleep if I know I didn’t take care of something properly, that someone was saying they were unhappy and I didn’t take care of it properly.