Back to the Future with Manhattan Hub’s Abbott Younes

By Jacqueline Raposo

According to food historian Emelyn Rude in a story for Time magazine, “on any given day in the United States, 6 percent of the entire country will be eating takeout for one meal or another,” whether ordered from an oyster cart or through an app. It’s a fact Manhattan Hub owner Abbott Younes can get behind — he was an early believer in giving customers easy access to tasty eats.

Younes immigrated from Jordan to attend college in Berkeley, California, where he worked his first food-service job in the student union deli. He next spent seven years in management at Pizza Hut in Mountain View. There, a sales rep showed up one day and did a demo on how customers could place an order using a fax machine. “My boss didn’t want to do it,” Younes remembers. “He told me if I wanted to, I’d have to do it myself.” So Younes bought a fax machine and was the first Pizza Hut location nationwide to accept “online orders.”

After Pizza Hut, he spent some time with Einstein Bros. Bagels. And then in 2004, he bought the ten-year-old San Francisco deli, Manhattan Hub.

“I’ve always believed in online ordering,” Younes says of why he rushed to build a website and implement a program to allow customers to pay over the phone or online using a credit card. “Demographics are changing. When I took over, we had a line of dine-in customers mid-to-late age. Now, mostly young people come in, the same customers who do everything online. I was a big believer.” Over a decade later, Younes credits his continued success to this foresight.

Well, that and a few more things.

Read the interview here.