Signature: Moe El Abd Choumar
His smile is so wide and his greeting so effusive you’d swear he’s been expecting you personally.
But pretty much everyone who walks through the door of the Subway Restaurant on downtown’s North Boulevard gets the Moe Choumar treatment.
“Cheeps and dreenk?” he asks in a thick Lebanese accent. “Hey, where you have been?” he teases, efficiently making change, smiling wide and searching for eye contact.
Aw, you know, Moe, just been busy …
“You come back, yes?” Choumar replies, still beaming, his eyes now bright with hope.
Sure, Moe, I’ll be back soon.
Age: 54
Hometown: Beirut, Lebanon
Occupation: Subway Restaurant manager
And that’s how the lunch rush plays out for Moe Choumar, smile after smile, sandwich after sandwich, the most social part of his 11-hour workday.
Is he really this happy? Could he be making a killing selling hoagies in the land of the po-boy? Not likely—this is his brother’s restaurant.
Maybe it’s that he’s an entrepreneur at heart and simply loves to do business. Back in Lebanon in the 1980s he learned to haggle for designer shoes and perfume, buying them in Italy and selling them for a profit in Beirut. When war ravaged the city so badly the power was cut, he made a deal to import candles. Selling sandwiches in peaceful downtown Baton Rouge must seem like Easy Street.
“He likes everyone and he’s very patient,” says Lisa Bell, who has worked for him for three years.
Little did he know he was prepared for Baton Rouge life the day he arrived. He had attended Catholic school as a kid. His father El Abd (pronounced ah-bid) was a successful pastry chef who taught him how to run a family business. And wheeling and dealing had developed in him that most cherished capitalist trait: entrepreneurial spirit.
“My problem is I don’t stay on one line and continue it,” he says. “I make it and go, make it and go, make it and go.”
The shoes, the perfume, the candles, even the sandwiches—they’re just the commodity. What’s important to him is the connection he makes with people.
“I am telling you about these other things, but these things are not the story, do you understand?” he asks. “I think about opportunities. I think, ‘Why I don’t do that?’”
Choumar initially came to Baton Rouge to help his brother, but now he’s part of the community, especially since earning U.S. citizenship in February 2007.
“I’m not feeling it when I was only having a green card,” Choumar says. “But now I am feeling it. You have to be proud of your life and your country, wherever you are.”
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