Chef Stories: Andrew Turoczi

Since 2013, Inman Park standby Julianna’s Crepes has served traditional Hungarian crepes out of a historic building that dates back 100 years. Here, in his own words, chef and owner Andrew Turoczi shares the story of his mother’s classic recipe and the power of being resourceful.

No value assignedI would consider this restaurant the American Dream. My immediate family is Hungarian, and together we immigrated to Connecticut in 1988, moving down to Georgia for the Olympics in 1995. We lived through the whole Communist era in Hungary and left right before the Berlin Wall fell. My dad was a jack-of-all-trades. He was a carpenter, electrician, plumber, and lumberjack at one point in my life. He was very resourceful and never had trouble finding jobs.

I graduated Kennesaw State with a finance degree, but during college, I worked in a chain of restaurants. I was a server, bartender, and manager, which qualified me to a certain level of reputation in the community. After graduating, I accumulated over 10 years’ experience, doing a little bit of work in a corporate mortgage broker firm and opening a plumbing subcontractor business with my dad in between. Even before opening the restaurant, I knew what it meant to self-motivate and understood what it would take to switch from a secure job with a paycheck to depending on self-drive.

I had the idea for a crêpes restaurant for many years. I took long trips on the West Coast, from Seattle to San Francisco, and there were crêpes places everywhere along the coast. I knew there was an opportunity as one crêpe shop is never the same as another. You can find many recipes for the palascinta, but mine is the one I grew up with and was developed by older generations of Hungarians. It’s not really a secret, but after three years, we have perfected it on our griddles.

The number one question I get asked is the difference between French and Hungarian crêpes. There isn’t really a huge difference, but we try to spruce up the classic crêpe by including specialty Hungarian ingredients like cheese. The cheese inside many of our crêpes is a non-salted farmer’s cheese from cow’s milk. Consistency-wise, it’s like half feta cheese, half milk cheese. In Hungary, we grew up with this farmland cheese. The non-salted cheese can include vanilla extract to be a sweet, Danish-like filling, while the salted cheese is versatile in savory crêpes.

No value assignedMy mother drove us to open the restaurant, and we named it after her. Unfortunately, she passed away five years ago, so the idea was to honor her memory, along with a mural in the restaurant of my entire family and lineage. Opening Julianna’s was a little bit of everything I acquired. As a business major, I had a professor who advised me to always look out for opportunities, and I always kept his advice in the back of my mind. And at some point in your life, you want to take a big risk. If you have to pay back money for the next 10 years doing grunt work, so be it. I was in my early 30s and realized it was time to take that big risk. I didn’t care if I failed or not.

Julianna’s building was built in 1911 and was first used as the landlord’s storage space. Later, a house was built atop the storage space and became a few businesses through the years. If you are driving around Atlanta, especially Grant Park, Candler Park, and even Cabbagetown, you may notice those random, older houses that have a tiny little wooden storage unit. I knew the landlord of this space from working as a bartender and building a rapport with a regular. One day, I went over to pick his brain and knew I had found it, even though it was probably too tiny to be anything.

No value assignedWhen searching for decor, I knew I didn’t want anything usual. The tables found me. They were stored in the back and were upside down and sticky. We rummaged through used chairs at restaurants to find the red metal chairs. The wall is original, and of course, I didn’t want to touch it because it is beautiful. The resourcefulness of my family returned as my dad built the counter from scratch. All the shelves you see were custom built by him. This whole space fell into place like it was meant to be.

Halfway into building out the space, I got an email saying Krog Street Market was coming in, and that changed everything. In the future, I want to control the BeltLine as far as crêpes go, open a stall at Ponce City Market, expand the catering side, and maybe even open a full blown Hungarian restaurant if Atlanta’s ready for it. In the meantime, there is a small Hungarian community that I can tap into. We sell their jams and jellies in the retail section of Julianna’s.

I think a lot about what my mother would think of Julianna’s Crepes. She saw me do pop-ups that didn’t do too well, but she would be proud of my motivation to keep moving forward. Not many met my mother, but they have definitely heard of her now.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Julianna’s Crepes. 775 Lake Ave. 404-436-1825. www.atlantacrepes.com