For the past four years, Wah Jee Wah has tantalized street food lovers with its open-fire, charcoal-grilled Indian barbecue — a rarity in the Bay Area. On busy summer nights, crowds would line up outside the low-slung Hayward restaurant as chef-owner Ron Dumra and his team grilled yogurt-marinated chicken and sizzling lamb seekh kebabs over hot coals. Diners devoured the skewers in a haze of smoke at the picnic tables outside.
For now, Wah Jee Wah fans will have to travel elsewhere to get their Indian barbecue fix: The Hayward restaurant closed earlier this month after the landlord nearly tripled the rent. Now Dumra is looking to relocate the restaurant, and he says he already has tentative plans in place to open a smaller, takeout-oriented kitchen in Milpitas, a regular pop-up in Fremont and, eventually, a new flagship location closer to San Francisco.
“It’s not the end,” Dumra says of his business. “It’s a new beginning.”
Reached by phone, Dumra explained that he was forced to close the Hayward location after the landlord increased the rent from $4,000 to more than $11,000 a month after factoring in maintenance and other fees.
To Dumra, that large of an increase just didn’t seem reasonable. In particular, he noted that because Wah Jee Wah is an outdoor barbecue restaurant, business tends to be very slow during the winter months. What’s more, Dumra’s father passed away last year, and he’d had to pay a lot of expenses related to that.
