Veteran chef Anita Hartel, whose restaurant
Mambuhas been a Midtown staple for creative, eclectic cuisine since 2001, is renaming and reinventing the restaurant with the help of a new business partner.
Hartel has been running the place solo since co-chef Corey Griffith left a while back, and she’s ready to recruit some help in the front of the house.
“I’ve taken on the restaurant by myself for three years, and I realized I need a guy around here who can do things out here [front of the house] better than I can,” she said with a laugh. “The whole thing is more cohesive when we’re doing it together.”
It’s also just the kind of opportunity her new business partner, Jan Firek, has been looking for ever since he moved to Nashville two years ago.
Firek started out as a schoolteacher in Michigan, but eventually landed in the big-city restaurant biz, working his way up the ladder in New York and Los Angeles. He doesn’t like to name-drop the famous restaurateurs he’s worked with, but he will mention a couple formative workplaces: August, the popular bistro in New York’s West Village, and the acclaimed Pizzeria Mozza in Los Angeles.
