FoodChasers’ Kitchen is a lesson in the restaurant business for two retired school principals

For fun sometimes, Kala and Maya Johnstone watch the Food Network. When someone comes on and the announcer says, “She was a teacher for 20 years and then she opened a restaurant — ”

“They missed so many parts!” the identical twins shriek gleefully in unison.

“You can’t just jump into a restaurant,” Kala Johnstone said.

Oh, how they know.

After retiring from the School District of Philadelphia, where they had worked for 20 years, the Johnstones, 43, went into the restaurant business full-time with FoodChasers’ Kitchen. Kala was principal of Edmonds Elementary School in Cedarbrook and Maya was principal of Wagner Middle School in West Oak Lane.

From their part-time catering company that they started at the height of the pandemic, they opened FoodChasers’ Kitchen on Dec. 3 2021, near the Elkins Park train station.

The restaurant, combining takeout and delivery with a cheery, modest dining room, is not a low-cal experience. The Johnstones think big — enormous, lavishly sauced plates of breakfast and lunch food: shrimp and grits, biscuits and gravy, French toast, fried chicken. Everything can be put on a roll and turned into a “steak sandwich,” including chicken, beef, mushrooms, and salmon. Pork is not served.

The creamy chicken jawn cheesesteak, for example, has chicken and mushrooms cooked in a seafood seasoning, topped with cheese, fried onions, mayo, and seafood cream sauce. “#TeamFoodChasers don’t chase us down for salads,” the twins wrote on Instagram, referring to their followers. “When we opened, we had 3 salads on the menu and we sold 2 in 5 weeks lol.” There is only one salad offered now, a chicken Caesar.

Word-of-mouth has spread through friends and social-media personalities such as JL Jupiter.

Maya and Kala Johnstone had been considering the restaurant life for about 14 years. Kala said she saw an Oprah Winfrey episode about creating vision boards — a visual way to plot out your dreams.

They created a menu for “Friends Cafe.”

“I taped it to my bedroom wall,” Kala said. “It’s never fallen off. But schoolteachers can’t just open up a restaurant. And we just went on, watching the Food Network.”

They traveled around the country on their summer breaks, eating at places recommended by those shows, in turn passing along the tips to family and friends.

Ten years ago, “our friend [TV personality] Quincy Harris said this thing called Instagram just came out,” Maya said. “He said, ‘You should do it.’ We didn’t even have Facebook. We didn’t like social media. We didn’t want to show our faces. He was like, ‘Then don’t.’”

The “food chasers” created their own account, posting not only meals they had eaten but photos of food that they had made for sporting events such as Eagles games. “People would start saying, ‘Your food is better than some restaurants. Can we get it?’” Kala said. “We said no, but eventually we began to cater dinners.”

Then came the pandemic, shuttering schools and prompting the sisters to rethink their futures. “We had a heart-to-heart,” Kala said. “I said, ‘I would rather pursue this dream now because it’s now or never.’ I said we should quit. I want to chase this dream.”

“She was like, ‘OK, let’s all sleep on it,’” Maya said. “We should retire, but where are we going to get money from?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. We’ll figure it out. I just can’t do it anymore.’”

On April 16, 2021, they got the keys to the restaurant, which had been Park Plates. On July 2, they officially retired from teaching.

Then reality set in. “It was not what you see on TV,” Maya said. “It was advertised as a turnkey restaurant but the floor was caving in.”

“Gas leaks,” said Kala.

“We learned a lot about leases,” Maya said.

Then came operations. “We didn’t know what we were getting into,” Maya said. “It is different cooking in your kitchen with your family and friends than cooking at a restaurant and learning how to scale recipes. In the beginning, we were getting stuff from Costco. We had to learn to get a Sysco [wholesale] account and go to Restaurant Depot and buy in bulk.” They hired a chef, Naren Gosine, through a godson.

Fortunately, they had their brothers to help.

“We’re like, ‘two former principals, a former NFL player, and a former social worker walk into a restaurant,’” Kala said.

To know about the Johnstones, who grew up in Mount Airy, is to know their ties to Temple University. All four Johnstone children — Lance, Brent, Maya, and Kala — went to Temple for undergrad. “We really didn’t have a choice,” Kala said. Their late father, Isaac “Ike” Johnstone, a community leader who founded Bill Pickett Riding Academy that teaches riding to city kids, was a 33-year veteran of Temple’s police department.

“He literally told us, ‘You are all going to Temple,’” Kala said. “Our brothers were really good at football, so they were getting scholarship offers [elsewhere], and he said, ‘No, you’re going to Temple.’ But then Temple had the worst football team.”

Maya interrupted: “Stop! I learned how to count by [age] 7 because I kept dreaming maybe they would score five more touchdowns to win a game.”

Brent Johnstone, now 45, who was an Owls running back and now leads a nonprofit called FathersLead365, helps his sisters when he can. Lance, 48, a retired defensive end for the Oakland Raiders and the Minnesota Vikings (and a standout Owls linebacker), is at the restaurant every day, helping customers and doing deliveries. He was credited with 42 sacks in the NFL. He’ll sack up more orders than that on a weekday.

“When people come in, they always say, ‘How are you doing?’ We always say, ‘Living a dream,’” said Kala. “You don’t know how much money you’re going to make day to day. But it’s still better than it was running the school.”

“Being a principal is a grind,” said Maya. “And it’s lonely because usually you’re the only principal in the school, right? So it’s a different kind of stress.”

When people come in, they always say, ‘How are you doing?’ We always say, ‘Living a dream.’

The Johnstones plan to use FoodChasers’ Kitchen to fulfill a personal mission from their school days: funding “safe rooms” to which teachers can send agitated students to relax or talk it out instead of arguing with them. “We learned that kids need an outlet,” Kala said.

The Johnstone sisters believe that once teachers know kids’ situations, they’re in a better position to help them. “Don’t get up caught up in how it’s being said. Listen to what’s being said and treat that,” Maya said.

The Johnstones credit their parents, Ann and Ike, for making FoodChasers’ kitchen happen.

“It’s just funny having a dream and then trying to make it a reality,” said Maya. “You walk into a bank and ask for a loan for your dream —”

“They laugh at you,” said Kala.

“You never get that loan,” said Maya. “We didn’t have any restaurant experience. We were principals. We had to run our school budgets, but we could not get a loan.”

By then, their social-media following had grown and they had raised $22,000 from friends. “That’s fantastic,” Kala said. “It worked because they’re the ones who kept saying, ‘Y’all need your own restaurant.’ We were like, ‘OK, put some money behind that.’ And they did.”

But they ran short of cash between their last day of school employment and the opening of the business. Their pensions had not kicked in. Ann Johnstone stepped in, no questions asked.

Ike was a cheerleader. “One day about 20 years ago, I went to his horse stable [at the riding academy], and one of the people that worked there said, ‘Your dad told me you’ll cater my baby shower,’” said Kala. “And I was like, ‘We’re not caterers.’ When I saw him, I said, ‘Why did you tell this woman I’m a caterer?’ He said, ‘Well, you should be.’ I said, ‘Dad, I’m a teacher. I’m not a caterer.’ And he said, ‘Well, you should be.’ And he walked away.”

After he died in 2012, one of her friends told her, ‘If you see a cardinal, that’s an angel visiting you.”

On Aug. 31, 2020, which would have been his birthday, the sisters were prepping food for one of their first catering jobs. “I looked out of the window and a cardinal landed right in front of me,” Kala said. “I started screaming and crying. In the eight years since he’d been gone, I didn’t see a cardinal. But on this catering event, on his birthday, this cardinal landed in front of me. I just heard his voice, ‘What you should be, you should be.’”

“I always just knew that we were on the right path.”