What is Needed to Become an Entrepreneur: Stories of Kazakhstanis

What is Needed to Become an Entrepreneur: Stories of Kazakhstanis

I went to Moscow, visited all these foodmarkets, met their managers, directors and owners, tried to collect full information and started looking for necessary premises in Almaty. This took me about six months. When seeking investments, I invited partners with whom we now work together: Arsen Ospanov and Ainur Ospanova. We found empty premises and built everything from scratch. We wanted to arrange the space so that it felt like outdoors, hence the name of our business. This is why we installed street lights, a fountain and had a lot of plants. We are grateful to our designer, Aizhan Ospanova, for bringing our ideas to life.

There are not so many market players in the fast casual segment in Kazakhstan. For example, Rocket Japan launched their start-up especially for our project (10 years ago their founders established Manga Sushi). We also have two Russian franchises: Lepim i Varim which offers pelmeni (dumplings) with various fillings, and Farsh, and a burger chain established by Arkady Novikov, the most famous restaurateur in Russia. Also, Pasta Bar and Pizza Mono were adapted to our format under the leadership of the talented chef Akmyrza Kakenov. In total, we have 13 cuisine vendors and two bars.

The trend for foodmarkets was also determined by external economic factors. Our target audience is people who love high quality meals but cannot afford frequent visits to restaurants. We offer delicious and affordable restaurant class dishes with self-service. We are often visited by large groups and families, and we offer dishes to everyone's taste. I believe this segment will only grow.

Our team manages the food market itself. We are responsible for cleanliness and administration, and maintenance of all utilities, so that our vendors could focus on cooking only. We also ensure promotion and marketing of Restopark; we pay attention to each of our vendors, create content, invite artists, musicians and entertainers, and hold various events. Our small team includes eight administrators and managers. The founders are also involved in operations: we always keep our finger on the pulse.

I left South Korea about 10 years ago because I wanted to see the world and people living outside my home country. I am a professional artist. I earned a master's degree from Boston University and then was working and living in New York for a couple of years. After that I lived for six months in Buenos Aires and several months in Paris. I did art, painted, tried different styles, photographed, and carried out various creative projects.

I also travelled along Central Asia, spent a lot of time in Kyrgyzstan and fell in love with its nature. In Bishkek, I opened a Chicken Star restaurant, which became quite successful, but coffee had always been my passion. I really love coffee; I have been drinking it every day since high school, that is, for about 22 years. At that time, the tea culture was highly developed in Korea, and there were few places where you could drink good coffee. But I found such places and spent my free time there. As a student, I worked at Starbucks and believed that it was the best coffee with the best concept; later I realised that good coffee implied many other things. I started thinking about how to conduct the coffee business ethically.

In 2017, I had a chance to open my own coffee house in Bishkek; my first Flask Coffee emerged there. To be honest, we did not make much profit during the first two years. It was more like a hobby that I had because I enjoyed it and loved coffee very much. A couple of years later I moved to Almaty and opened a combined establishment – Chicken Star / Flask Coffee – here, but due to the pandemic, we had to close it and move to smaller premises on Kurmangazy Street. Here we decided to focus more on Flask Coffee, because we thought that coffee houses would be more popular when the quarantine was gradually lifted. Many people have come to prefer home-made food, but coffee is still more enjoyable to drink outdoors. This decision turned out to be correct: despite the fact that last year was difficult, we grew up and opened another Flask Coffee house on Baribayev Street and one in Bishkek, we plan to open two more coffee houses in Almaty and Astana by the end of the year.