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Continued from previous page
West Coast Crepe King
Assaf Tarnopolsky, WG'00
When life handed him lemons, Assaf Tarnopolsky
made crepes.
Tarnopolsky was living the fast-paced, jet-set, dot-com
life as director of international development for the
Industry Standard, the trade magazine of the Internet
boom. It was Buenos Aires one day, Bangkok the next.
And then one day, it was over. Facing bankruptcy,
Tarnopolsky and a few colleagues made a last-ditch
effort to rescue the magazine.
"We had to have a deal consummated by the day
we went to bankruptcy court," Tarnopolsky recalls.
That day was Sept. 15, 2001. Four days after the
terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade
Center, a defunct Internet business magazine had
no takers.
Tarnopolsky endured a few "depressing" job interviews
that fall. All they did, he says, was convince him
that "the next great media job in my life was not going
to be right around the corner."
So he turned to crepes. He had actually been making
and selling them for a few months at farmers' markets
in the San Francisco area, thanks to a bolt of inspiration
that struck during a trip to Paris that summer.
In the French capital for a friend's wedding,
Tarnopolsky's every meal came folded in a fluffy pancake.
He simply could not get enough crepes. "I must
have eaten five or six a day," he says. "I started thinking,
this doesn't exist in the states, and they're so good! Why
doesn't this exist in the states?"
When he got back to San Francisco, Tarnopolsky
convinced his wife Nancy, WG'00, to let him buy an
industrial crepe press for about $800. Before long, the
two of them were peddling crepes on Saturdays and
Sunday mornings.
"We were making our walking around money for the
week and then some," Tarnopolsky says.
They were also having a blast. So Tarnopolsky decided
to devote himself to crepes. He found a weird little
kiosk in a park on the edge of San Francisco's financial
district, an historic landmark from the 30s that had been
saved as part of a skyscraper development deal.
Now the one-time new media titan was cracking
300 eggs at five every morning, and loving every minute
of it.
"I feel like I'm in a position to really be successful.
I own the majority of this company, and I think it's a
concept that has a lot of potential," Tarnopolsky says.
Pretty soon it was time to expand. Thanks in part to
the irresistible press appeal of a media titan turned crepe
king (Tarnopolsky appeared on "Donahue," National
Public Radio, CNBC, and all the local news shows; he
also made the pages of The New York Times and The
San Francisco Chronicle), it wasn't hard to find the
financing he needed.
West Coast Crepe King now has two locations in
San Francisco, and Tarnopolsky envisions up to four
more in the next year.
"My long-term goal is to dominate the globe,"
Tarnopolsky says. "But for the time being," he adds,
"the Bay Area and environs."
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