When she moved to Ann Arbor from Turkey in 1976, Ayse Uras and her husband, Mehmet, focused on getting him through a U-M mechanical engineering degree and raising their two children. While living in family housing on North Campus, Ayse (pronounced “Aisha”) got involved with International Neighbors and then decided to open a sixteen-seat, one-room showcase for her Turkish home cooking at the back of the Courtyard Shops on Plymouth Rd. Reflecting on those early days now, she smiles and says, “When you don’t have experience, you don’t have fear.”
Ayse’s Cafe has expanded into an adjoining dining room, but Ayse herself still cooks lunch and dinner every day except Sunday (and except in August, when she closes for a few weeks to visit her mother in Istanbul). She hires a lot of U-M music students as servers and has them perform at occasional three-course dinners–one of which, in April, launched a multi-month celebration of the restaurant’s twenty-fifth anniversary that she hopes will culminate in October with a reunion of her former staff and their families. Now widely spread out geographically, they’ll return to enjoy savory borek pastries, grain salads, lamb, fish, lentil soup, and all the other dishes that have supported her success.
Her advice for a young person starting a business? “You have to love what you do. I got lucky–I found what I like and worked hard. So don’t think about it–just do it.”
