Allen Ambor — Business man, entrepreneur, author, yoga instructor wit A Taste For Life

And once more it is what's involved. Man have I got a special guest for you at this time and somebody I've been wanting to talk to for a while and well when the book came out I had a very very good reason to to reach out and to want to chat to him. Who am I talking about? I am talking about Alan Ambo and his book that he's just released called The Taste for Life, How the Spoe Legend was born and trust me it is a legend. Hello Alan. Morning. Hello David. It's so good to have you along with us and congrats on the book and getting it out. I was fascinated. It truly is sort of a rock and roll ride through the sort of history of of spur and franchising etc etc. So before we look at at the book and what is in the book tell me a bit about Alan because you certainly you led on the one hand a very sort of normal average South African life in your early years but there was this I pick up that there was this always this lustful life and a sense of adventure. So talk me through Alan's younger years. Well I was blessed with a lot of energy. I grew up in Johannesburg in Bellevue, the oval boys primary and then Highlands North High and I was very lucky that my parents were interested in the world I think is a good way to put it. They both stemmed from Europe having fled the Second World War fled the Nazis and they had to set up from scratch. My dad had a bed in his office and everything was grown from there as it were and I learned that you have to earn what you achieve.

My mom was a very hard-working woman. She had been on the brink of becoming a medical doctor and she also was a concert pianist and she had to flee and couldn't carry on with anything thereafter of that sort and they met in South Africa and married and I came along eventually in the middle of the war and I was given a lot of freedom in my life being an only child in a suburb like Highlands North where we moved to. I had a range of pals and I grew up happily doing what kids do, riding bicycles, buying watermelons off the wagon that was pulled by oxen up the street, playing tennis and eventually I ended up at Wits University after working first and in order to pay for my studies because my dad said I wasn't studying hard enough for his liking, I said to him that I would earn my living by working in a local steakhouse that had just opened up and from there the idea grew that resulted in me going to Cape Town and opening my own business. I was meant to be franchised by the company I worked for but they understood retail. That's where I learned retail working for them as a waiter but they didn't understand franchising and in actual fact their little burgeoning group ended up by closing and they started up again through some cousins from Greece who came to South Africa but that's a whole other story.

During my time in the steakhouse business I used to go every year on holiday overseas to places like Greece and Spain. I was very lucky and I spoilt and in the mid early 80s just before PW Butters Rubicon speech I ended up going to India where on a train

an Indian major who obviously was fiercely opposed to apartheid when he learned I came from South Africa quizzed me very very strongly and he was then joined the next morning after he slept on the train from Mumbai to Delhi by his group of cohorts and they started all over again on me and the only way that I could see myself clear to being feeling relaxed and safe as it were was to assure him that PW Butters was to cross the Rubicon which of course he never did. So that's just a smattering of my early years and that's fantastic and I'm gonna tell you because I highly recommend people get the book and read it. There is a lot more in there, there's a car accident in there, there's stories of Allen's national service. I was actually quite amazed that you only did national service for a couple of months back in those days and then obviously before they'd increased it to the two-year stint that I did but so you then went with this company and you sort of said okay you're now going to go and start a steakhouse in Cape Town. Did you at that stage have an idea for the name because I'm fascinated about the name and I'm also fascinated by the image and as long as I can remember we've always had this, it was like a Wild West connotation and the Indian chief with the headdress, was that something at the time that you were thinking about and planning? David, actually very interesting question. What happened was this, the initial name Golden Spur was a name that had been used by a steakhouse, had become defunct and when I came to Cape Town remembering that I lived in Johannesburg and I used to drive down in my little money over a period of two and a half years I drove down six times trying to find premises which were in, they weren't in short supply, they were in zero supply in Cape Town. Nobody was building, Cape Town was much more of a small town in those days and I couldn't find anywhere to set up and looking back I'm absolutely amazed at the stubborn young man who was myself who had this dream of opening a steakhouse in Cape Town because I'd come here and seen a gap in the market. I definitely knew there was a place for it and I wanted to live here, I loved the place and yet I kept going back to Johannesburg where my girlfriend was and where I could earn. I taught primary school soccer, I taught high school English economics and Afrikaans at two different schools for a term each because they were desperate for teachers. I had a BA but I didn't have teacher training experience but fortunately that came relatively naturally to me. So the name I picked up because somebody had opened up a black steer in Cape Town, they pinched the name from the guys who ran the black steer in Cape Town and I was going to call myself golden steer and because I was associated with them which is covered quite fully in the book and I couldn't because somebody had gazumped me by using the name black steer so I decided to resurrect this old name golden spur which was now owned strangely enough by a company which I'm not sure if it exists anymore, definitely exists in terms of its products, one of which was Joko Tea and Coffee Ace I think but they wrote me a lawyer's letter saying that they owned the name and if I wanted to pay them 100 rand I could have it. So I paid them 100 rand and bought the name even though I'd been trading with it for about six months already not knowing that they had owned and registered the name and that was very smoothly segued and done away with and I had no problems with them fortunately because legal problems at that stage would have been a dreadful cost and a drag to have to deal with that as well as run a very very fast growing business. As far as the car accident is concerned the reason it's in there was because as I went over the edge of this road being driven by somebody else I said to myself I'm about to die and I was very calm because we tippled over a high road down a rocky face but I won't say anymore because it's a quite as you quite rightly point out quite an incredible story in the middle of the night just outside Lanesburg. National service, sorry David carry on.

Sorry you know I was just going to say it is indeed an amazing story when I was reading through it and your rescue was even more amazing but you've got to read the book for that. Alan we're going to take a short break now and then we'll chat some more when we come back. This is what's involved my special guest is Alan Ambo. He is the founder of SPUR just written a book called The Taste for Life how the SPUR legend was born. We're going to get into that a little bit more when we come back and we're back with my special guest Alan Ambo. This is what's involved by the way in case you missed out in case you stepped off the planet for a bit what's involved it is and we're chatting with Alan. So Alan you then started this golden SPUR in Cape Town you'd spotted a gap in the market and it started to do incredibly well. Talk to me about that phase.

Well I was meant to be supported by some people who ran a couple of steakhouses in Johannesburg, very nice people, very good people. I'd worked for them for a number of years and they were it was mainly operated in the evenings when I worked by two nephews of the well one was his son the founder the late George Halamandres who was already in his late 60s at that stage and his son George and his nephew Arthur had left school by then and he opened this business and they ran it and I worked for them and I got this idea in my head that Cape Town had the gap as I said before and that I wanted to go and live in Cape Town and I'd been battling with all sorts of employment opportunities working for a company my father represented in England who manufactured carpets and upholstery materials who invited me to go there because I think they hoped I'd go in and take over the business from my dad and then I worked for a big shoe manufacturer and retailer who sadly are no longer in existence and I had other part-time jobs and I just knew that I was not happy working for other people who expected me to sit around for most of the day and not achieve anything I was keen to show that I had ability that I was keen to show that I could work hard which was the ethic that my parents instilled in me they were both very hard working people middle-class decent people bright energetic and I was imbued with that sort of ethos that they taught me this is how you live your life you don't sit around pretending to be working you go for it you achieve something you make something of yourself and I just got this mad idea in my head mad because I was very young when I first decided to go to Cape Town look for premises I was 22 by the time I opened the business which happened about as a fluke because I did six trips before on my very last trip by sheer chance finding an agent I phoned him and he said yes somebody had just commissioned him to find a restaurant and other retailers for a shopping center he was about to build in Newlands Cape Town and that was the previous day so the timing was immaculate it couldn't have been better it was incredibly lucky he took me and showed me the site and on this very last trip to Cape Town I driven down with a mate of mine Tommy McClelland and Tommy I said to him what do you think of the site he said no it's terrible because there were these very low roofed old shops that hadn't been painted for ages and looked derelict and about to fall down which indeed they soon were going to be encouraged to do by a bulldozer I suspect and a shopping center small one was built and I was lucky enough to get premises there and when I started the guys from Joburg who were meant to help me they were meant to franchise me they were supposed to send nine people down to help me start up people who knew how to grill to train grillers people who knew how to bake to train bakers cut meat etc and all the things associated with franchising and opening a restaurant and not one of them pitched up so I and my partner and Tommy who was the only there for six weeks we just worked like maniacs training people and we were blessed with the most fantastic assortment of the young employees some of them weren't so great and we had to move them out of the restaurant business but most of them were absolutely superb and I look back on it now and I'm aghast at how lucky we were to have the people walk in the door and bring their friends once the one came he'd bring a cousin or a brother or a friend or a whatever and they all turned out to be highly talented the highly skilled people some of whom who's still alive today I'm still in contact with and we have a lunch at Christmas or in the new year every year except for Covid of course and it was hectic it was madness because we were immediately assailed by customers who knew of this job big style steakhouse that was now opening in Cape Town and we did something which was very clever in a way but in a certain sense backfired because it gave us a deluge of customers we weren't really ready to cope with and we should have started more slowly and that idea was the day before we opened we had sterilized our ice cream machine and we had five schools around us and we told the kids after school come and get a free ice cream and of course they all did we had queues of kids waiting for their ice cream cones and they went home and told their parents and their parents thought well if this is going on we've got to come and have a look so the strain the enormous amount of work that we had to do was almost overwhelming but we were very lucky and we knew we were very lucky and we managed somehow to cope.

It was incredible because the growth was incredible but Alan why sort of restaurants, why steakhouses and restaurants because I mean you say by your own admittance in the book that you were quite a shy person and rather you know drawn back so I would not have pegged you for somebody to think okay well forward facing in a restaurant business that's where I need to be.

Well it's an interesting question but I think the truth lies in the fact that I'm and I've got a quite a nice story on that one as well but the truth is that I'm an only child and I had lots of friends as I said when I was growing up as a youngster and I enjoyed people so that's one of the things that really attracted me to the steakhouse business to be a waiter and I was a competent waiter and I enjoyed it and I enjoyed being with the guys who were running the business who became mates we became really good friends in fact Arthur Velasquez was driving the car that we nearly all got killed in in the middle of the night in the Karoo that was referred to earlier and we used to go on Sunday nights to the Greek tavern at the bottom of Love Day Street near Fandranda Street and have a a bit of a party most Sunday nights because we really were good friends we weren't just employee employee there was a connection between us we were mates they were a little bit older and there was a group of us some of the waiters just went with them and we party so I enjoyed that whole atmosphere and I think it brought well I know it brought me out of myself and when I decided to go into the business I knew I would have to be the guy in the front welcoming, greeting, showing people to tables, making sure everything was working smoothly which took a bit of doing in the beginning particularly but they didn't faze me I look forward to it with relish and handle it under great pressure when it actually occurred.

Wonderful stuff my special guest there is Alan Amball author of A Taste for Life How the Spur Legend was Born and it is an absolutely fascinating book Alan certainly has fitted a lot of living into his time we'll be back in just a bit and we'll find out a bit more from Alan about the spur and the legend because obviously moving from one store in Cape Town they then grew quite dramatically we'll be back in just a bit this is what's involved and we're back with my special guest Alan Amball Alan I have to be honest you know talking to somebody like yourselves this is when I think to myself I wish I could like do multiple chats to you because there's just so much to talk about and we literally won't be able to fit everything in the time that we have but let's move on a little bit so the Cape Town spur which was the golden spur that was doing well it was taking off what on earth possessed you Chinago all right I'm not working hard enough now so I think I'll look at French I definitely was working hard enough but what happened was as I said to you earlier there was a shortage of premises and just as I signed the lease for golden spur

the premises that I'd been dreaming of in Seapoint came available and I spoke to the guys I was working for in Jobing and they said they'd take that one on they'd finance it and I had a a friend who was working in the stake house as well and at the very end I'd now set everything up to open golden spur he came in and he ended up running the Seapoint spur which was financed by the guys in Johannesburg one day I was running on a busy busy Saturday night and an old schoolmate Raymond Padowitz walked in with a friend of his Paul Curzon and I said what are you doing down here you come on holiday he said no I'm coming to live here and I knew that he was an accountant already studied accountancy I said well are you going to be an accountant he said no I'm going to open a steakhouse I thought well that's pretty amazing I said where do you want to open the steakhouse he said he was thinking belval I said funny that you know the old mutual have recently phoned me or written to me and said to me that they have premises in a new center they're building there and would I like to put a steakhouse in there and I've been thinking about it he said well I would love to take those premises I said okay I'll franchise you now David not to put too far an a point upon it because as you quite rightly say I was that busy and I used to have a mantra which is quite interesting that it doesn't matter who suffers as long as it's not the business and believe you me in the early days we all suffered quite a lot because the physical strain and the long hours and then having to close the shop and drive the staff in a little mini because we couldn't afford a combo yet because we had debts and we were paying off on two trips to places like Langa, Gugulettu, Athlon, Heidelfeld etc and then only go home and sleep and get up before everybody else so we were we were working hard let's put it like that and here Raymond came along wanting to go into Belvoir and because of the default of the people I'd been working for in Johannesburg and them not arriving and them not helping me set up the business I'd learned what it took to set up the business because fortunately I had a bit of common sense and I managed to negotiate my way through that particular difficulty a very close friend of mine made the day call for the place which is still in the spurhead office although it's my property and I'm no longer there for two and a half years but I thought to myself right that's the answer I'll franchise because if you franchise somebody else provides the money which is a low capital cost to yourself all you costing yourself is the training of the staff they pay their own stuff but you have the cost of training them and putting a lot of time into them and feeding them while stay there and managing that whole process and franchising is a brilliant principle for growing a complex business which is what a restaurant is particularly a high-powered steakhouse so that's how that started and then when Bulval became successful I got other guys in Cape Town approaching me and saying we'd like to open in town and so Apache spur was born in Strand Street it's crossed the road over the years it's now elsewhere in a hotel it was higher up the road but generically people saw that we were doing well and so that's how I got to Blomfantine with the guy who noticed our progress and elsewhere it was generic and it was all franchised now the thing that that has impressed me over the years with the the spur group is there's a there's a couple of things okay the decor I've always whenever I walk into a spur I always have a look around and see what the decor is there were some wonderful designs in the in the in the early days as well which you've you've mentioned but also it's it's the quality and the level of service and there is something comforting about whether you go to a spur in Brackpenn or to a spur in Khatzon of Artid you know what you're getting and you know that it's going to be quality food is this something that you were because I sense maybe you were a bit fanatical about that I think manic is even more the word you should use I really was fanatical and I think it's very important in a business like that or indeed in any business at all is training people have to share your vision and if they don't really want to share your vision well they must go and share somebody else's vision or their own vision that's the attitude but I think one of the interesting things David is that in the early days where there were very very very few restaurants and none of the type that I opened in Cape Town in Cape Town we tended to attract people who were prepared to work those hours and that hard on their feet all the time with a very demanding boss quality and service wise namely myself because they needed a break somehow we attracted guys one guy comes to mind who was a dropout at university and he told me he needed a job he'd been at the pig and whistle which was a pub down the road he dropped out with 200 rand which was a considerable sum in those days and he'd eaten and drank it all at the pig and whistle and now he'd come to me and he wanted a job and I gave him a job I fed him because he was hungry he said he was hungry so I fed him I gave him a job and he ended up being a junior partner for a number of years after working the six-month probationary period so I needed the men who were committed who were prepared to buy into the modus operandi the way I wanted the place run the way people had to be greeted and he this particular guy Tony Williams who ended up in Thailand Tony was a very lovely guy with a fantastic smile and a and a twinkle in his eye behind his gold-room spectacles and I had other guys Manuel George who had stopped university had got his degree and he joined me and he became my first junior partner and many other people of a similar ilk there was one guy Maurice Beecher a marvelous big mountain of a man from Blumenthal who grew up poverty-stricken and he told me that in winter it got so cold from the age of 14 he used to hitchhike to Durban to keep warm so these are the sort of people that came in initially into the steakhouse business and they were willing to work under those rather tough circumstances as I say my mantra was it doesn't matter who suffers as long as it's not the business I certainly wasn't a boss who led from behind sitting down I was at the front of the charge wonderful stuff it is what's involved with my special guest Ellen Amber you've got it you've got to get hold of the book and that's what I can say it's called the taste for love how the spur legend was born there are so many stories in it and they are told so well you know the story of a restaurant franchise could be sometimes you could think maybe it's a bit boring not this one guaranteed we'll be back and we'll be wrapping it up with Ellen Ambo in just a bit this is what's involved it's so good to have you along with us and we're back what's involved my special guest Ellen Ambo so Ellen let's let's fast forward a bit because again I'm running out of time now but you then ended up with a bunch of spur franchises and once again you thought well that's not quite enough for me I think we need to do more and I think the more the first one if I recall correctly the first more was the Panarotti's brand as well now I mean you've got you've got under the spirit of banner there's Panarotti's there's John Dory's and then the one that we're going to touch on as well is rocker mama's now now why wasn't it couldn't you just go okay I've done enough now let's just settle down or was it just this passion that you had for people and food David it worked like this when we had about 10 branches I put an ad in the Sunday Times looking for franchisees further afield from Cape Town and I got an answer from a fellow in Clarkstalk by the name of Dudley Haynesworth who wanted to open up there and eventually did and I realized that I wouldn't be able to keep control and I put an ad another ad in the Sunday Times and out of that ad came a fellow who was absolutely ideally suited to be my helper my assistant in the head office and his name is Gert Topat we still good mates today and he joined me and he became the first area manager and he loved riding around South Africa in the little golf that we bought him and finding premises and finding franchisees which we both did to match in those premises and because of that spur grew the team was a good strong team he again bought into the way I wanted things done he was a chef in his own right he traveled the world and learned English because he was German in the Bahamas he'd grown up in he'd grown up on an island off the coast in the Baltic Sea where his dad was a pig farmer and butcher so he had a lot of experience in the culinary arts as it were and he was a fantastic driving force very dynamic and very hard working and very committed and a wonderful person to have helped grow the business and one day I said to myself we really should do pizza because there all these towns Clarksville, Brustinburg, Cape Town etc etc where people want to eat pizza and our area managers by now we had a few are going there and they're looking after the spur but in the initial stages we eventually did quite rightly separate the brands but in the initial stages the spur guy could also be the Panarotti's guy and I didn't want to put pizza in spur because it just would have been wrong for the brand some steakhouse guys did offer pizza and I felt that wasn't the answer pizza had to be Italian and I wanted to call it Panarotti's after the great singer but my lawyer at the time said to me look when you got 50 stores he's going to want a franchise fee from you so I went through the alphabet yeah I went through the alphabet and Paner is bread so it became Panarotti's and then Rockemon's that was much much later when our MD who took over from Gert a fellow by the name of Pierre Fantonda he was in charge of building the brands and I was now in the marketing advertising creative side you mentioned the decor earlier that sort of came from myself working with talented artists one of whom a mate of mine Paddy Webster used to paint red indians all the time and the Indian story came from the spur on a cowboy boot being a harsh implement and not animal friendly and I also sensed a change in South Africa's social structure and I felt I must give a signal to people of color that we welcome them so I adopted the Native American Indian as our logo and that's where that comes from so that is a bit of a roundabout answer but it addresses a few subjects that are dealt with in a lot more detail with a lot of other subjects in the book including boardroom issues you know there's always politics and tensions in companies where people as they grow start trying to assert their own views and it becomes tougher to control them you feel a little bit like a sheep dog sometimes having to run around keeping the sheep in the right direction but I'm not sheepish about that one sorry then as well I mean in the mix there is John Dorries as well and again I mean if I look at these brands they are all very different they've all got their own unique identities and yet there's that underlying thread that runs through them of excellent food excellent service and I can only see your hand in that in terms of guiding people along with what they do I mean these days you can literally I mean I said it to somebody from Roc-O-Mummers a couple of years ago and I think only one had been opened and the next second if we look now there's a Roc-O-Mummers and smash burgers are the thing yeah I think sorry please carry on I beg your pardon not at all I'm over to you um firstly thank you for saying such kind words about the standard of the food in the deco etc and yes mine was the original guiding hand and uh until two and a half years ago when I left but other people put their input uh credit Musco to Perf and Tonda for uh sourcing both John Dorries as a brand to purchase and Roc-O-Mummers um uh Mark Farley who was our chief operating officer went up and looked at Roc-O-Mummers and thought it had legs and it most definitely does we had a franchisee who had some spurs who uh started Roc-O-Mummers uh with Pears permission and he said you know if you want to you can buy in and unfortunately we ended up paying an awful a lot of money for Roc-O-Mummers but it definitely was worthwhile because as you quite rightly point out that brand has grown enormously and I don't know if you've seen the brand Hussar around but it's a upmarket stakehouse that's also even though it's still quite small in numbers it's very upmarket and it's a very very successful little group within our group by then David you must understand we'd gone public so the game had changed a bit and assembling brands under the umbrella of the initial spur stake ranch group became the name of the game and it had its ups and its downs uh under Pear we also uh went overseas which we weren't very successful at but now we're getting much more successful at it in Africa and the Middle East there's Roc-O-Mummers doing well and spurs so yeah it's it's been an incredibly interesting exciting ride you mentioned Ellen that that sort of two two two two and a bit years ago you you stepped down um and obviously you know people would go all right well Ellen you deserve that you know you've you've you've you've worked yourself almost uh into into the ground so to retire and just you know be good and do things that retired people do and yet and this I find fascinating you decided not to and then when Covid came along you branched out into something that you do for yourself these days and uh and and there's a there's a charity involved so I'm going to spill the beans it is in the book but I'm going to spill the beans um you've been teaching yoga I've been teaching yoga for over 20 years at the local virgin and when lockdown came along one of the ladies phoned me and said Ellen won't you please teach us with lockdown here over zoom and I said to her what zoom and she taught me what zoom was and I teach yoga five times a week uh the deal was in the gym I used to go to another teacher myself for many many years the deal was when we taught when I taught on zoom because I couldn't walk around the room adjusting people I do the yoga with them I'm talking all the time uh to them how they should position their bodies and then I'll come down and look at them on the screen because they're there and I'll tell them verbally what they should adjust to make the yoga more uh beneficial and yoga David I must mention to you the thing that's kept me as energized as strong as happy and as balanced as I am yoga is the best exercise for the human animal and if anybody wants to join my yoga zoom class I'd love them to do so uh my email address may I say it David absolutely yes with pleasure is Lambor L A M B O R which is an L before my surname at Tiscally T I S for sugar C A L I Tiscally.co.za so it's Lambor at Tiscally.co.za and all the money which is 300 rand a month for 22 classes which is nothing goes to ladles of love charity that feed people who are poor in the cape every single penny I don't touch it there's a company that also that I think that is fantastic Alan we've reached the end of our time together and all I can say is thank you so much this book is amazing I think you're an amazing human being and you know to go from running this huge massive company um because I think it was at the end of the days more than like 500 franchises around uh around the place now so nearly 600 today wow that's brilliant and and sorry I'm proud of the employment we've created absolutely and the thing is uh and you'll get this in the book and particularly if you look through and there's there's some lovely pictures in the book as well is there's always been the sense of family and the sense of caring for other people and and I think that's also what shines through in you yourself Alan so thank you so much we wish you all the success with the book go out and get it it's available at all good bookstores I'm sure it's available online as well uh the title the title once again A Tasteful Life how the spur legend was born by Alan Ambo uh once again if you'd like to join his yoga classes I would love to do something like that I keep threatening to do it and I'll never get around to it uh it's L Ambo so one word Lambo at tiskely.co.za that is an email address that's been around for a while because tiskely was like literally one of the first uh internet service providers if I if I'm not mistaken um Alan thank you uh just just thank you that's all I can say we wish you all the best have yourself a fantastic day forward thanks David all the best to you and your listeners thank you there we go wraps it up for this edition of what's involved my special guest there was Alan Ambo author of A Tasteful Life how the spur legend was born do yourself a favor get out there and read the book until next time uh look after yourselves take care and thank you for listening