Calgary Sun - September 29, 2002
Kyoto storm clouds recall gloomy days
-Bill Kaufman
When he fled the Iranian revolution in 1979 seeking a more stable life in Canada, Kius Pahlavan thought he had it made in the shade in Calgary’s oilpatch.
But the distant relative of Iran’s former Shah, who scorned the mullahs controlling his native land, eventually discovered Canada’s freedoms brought their own challenges.
Pahlavan’s job as a mineralogist with Petro-Canada survived the ravages of the National Energy Program (NEP).
But when a resource patch still recovering from the NEP’s trauma was shaken by plummeting oil prices in 1986, Pahlavan, along with thousands of other Calgarians, found himself at a crossroads.
“Petro-Canada closed down the lab,” he says.
“I started to look around for something else to do.”
But it didn’t take him long to conclude that there is life after oil.
Pahlavan says he discovered the joys of the fast food industry by a fluke and found himself trading bitumen for burgers.
“It could just as easily have been pizza,” says Pahlavan, 57.
Pahlavan hooked up with a partner, parlaying $60,000 in severance pay and maxing out his credit cards to open up his first Burger Inn on 4 St. S.W. in 1988.The man with PhDs in clay mineralogy and sedimentology was flipping burgers by choice and has since become more practiced with a spatula than most.
“I’m thinking of contacting the Guiness Book of World Records because I’ve personally made two million hamburgers since we started,” he says, adding he hasn’t had a day away from the grill in the past 15 years.
Pahlavan, who’d also worked in Iran’s pre-revolutionary nuclear energy sector, said lacking experience in the kitchen wasn’t an impediment.
“We had no cooking or business experience but we got by because we had no choice…we went one step at a time,” he says, boasting his buffalo and ostrich burgers will some day be the beefiest players in Calgary’s burger wars.
“McDonald’s managers eat at our place.”
The oilpatch serenaded him once again for a time and Pahlavan did consulting work for lucrative sums.
But the burgers and fries swallowed his time.
“In the last few years, I just gave up (consulting) – the restaurant thing just got bigger and bigger,” he says.
But it hasn’t all been smooth sailing; early naivete in real estate dealings allowed an unscrupulous landlord to bilk his business for tens of thousands, he says.
The chain still managed to grow to five Calgary-area locations with plans to more than double that count.
Pahlavan acknowledges fear of the Kyoto Protocol could spark a fresh wave of layoffs in the energy industry.
But he says there’s always light at the end of the tunnel.
“It’s not the end of the world…there is life after and it can be quite good,” he says.