For Julie's Deli, simple recipe for success adds up to 25 years

Business owner Julie Furlow presides over the register at Julie's Deli and Market on Wednesday morning. The deli has been in business for 25 years.
Business owner Julie Furlow presides over the register at Julie's Deli and Market on Wednesday morning. The deli has been in business for 25 years.

TEXARKANA, Texas - For Julie's Deli and Market, a simple recipe adds up to its made-from-scratch, 25-year success story: keep the customers and staff happy.

Looking back on the recently accomplished, quarter-century milestone, the Texas-side, Summerhill Square mainstay for comfort food's owner, Julie Furlow, credits that approach as the reason why they've steadily thrived and grown over the years.

Of course, the deliciousness of their chicken spaghetti no doubt helps the cause. Julie's supportive style and we're-in-this-together approach to her workers has also ensured they stay and speak highly of the experience of working there.

And her dedication to quality is why one customer wrote on the deli's social media page, "I still remember ordering chicken spaghetti for the first time, and the '15 years' sticker being on the bags!"

Ten years later, that chicken spaghetti is still memorable.

With the support of family, this former schoolteacher started the deli as a sandwich shop. Over time, she accepted the challenges to keep going and growing outward from the spot where the dining room is now.

"I started there with just soups, salad and sandwiches, and I was only open 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. So it really was just a lunch spot," Furlow recalls. She had her family working there and just one employee. "My grandmother cooked all my desserts."

She always had a business bug, she admits, even after teaching for 11-and-a-half years and enjoying it. In this, she was just like family. "My grandparents owned their own business. They had a small country grocery store," she said.

In the 25 years, she's expanded three times, adding the gourmet food market, the grill (so they can do burgers) and the catering side. It's essentially several businesses under one roof with the restaurant and in-house bakery, too.

"It all started just from the lunch and then we just expanded on top of that," Furlow said. When she traveled, she visited bigger cities and brought ideas back to Texarkana, such as grab-and-go meals, gourmet options and casseroles.

"I saw those things and I thought, 'You know, I can do that in Texarkana.' On a smaller scale that fits Texarkana and really offer convenience," Furlow said.

They have found a niche appropriate to the market here, too: comfort food for busy people who don't have time for extra cooking. What can they do for Texarkana? What service fits Texarkana, something that's different? These are the questions she asked of her business.

"A lot of the food that we do is just comfort food, casseroles and comfort food," Furlow said. "People have them not only for just family meals, but they're great for people that need something for a funeral, different celebrations."

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Postcard1003 Arkansas Postcard Past Cash 1909 The tiny Craighead County town was surrounded by hardwood forest and a series of swamps and bayous. The men pictured here, one oddly wearing a necktie, were helping to drain the land and harvest the timber, after which the area would be converted to farmland.

They've expanded with new ideas, and she credits her staff with bringing great ones to the kitchen table.

"My staff loves me. They are amazing," Furlow said. She considers her staff a second family.

"I love people, and these people come in here and work super hard. They're devoting a good part of every day to here. They deserve everything they get. When I say I've been here 25 years, we've been here 25 years," Furlow said, "because of the staff. They're great people, they have wonderful ideas and we're just close."

Julie takes a personal interest in their lives. Maybe she's like a teacher, in some respects, but she says she's kind of like a mother now, being older than many of her staff, who come out of culinary school in their 20s. If her workers have aspirations for something new and different, she'll be their cheerleader.

Brittany Weeks has worked for Furlow for years, and "family" is the word she returns to when she talks about the experience. She was the kitchen manager for a while.

"There's so much I could say about what a wonderful boss, business owner and person Julie has been over the 10 years I've been with the company, but what it really comes down to is how much she genuinely cares about her customers and her staff," said Weeks. "We may drive each other crazy sometimes, but at the end of the day, it can be summed up in two words: we're family."

Jenny Hughes Tanner has served as the Julie's Deli executive chef, in addition to the event and catering manager. She also credits the owner as the reason for the deli's success.

"In addition to loyal customers who continue to support local businesses, Julie's is successful because of Julie," Tanner said. "She has continuously assembled an amazing team OVERSET FOLLOWS:of people who care, just as much as she does, about her customers and standards of service. And her team stays because of her. You will never find a better (or more fun) person to work for or with than Julie Furlow."

Some of Furlow's workers have left and opened their own businesses, or they've gone on to cook elsewhere.

"People need to do what suits them best. If they're happy, I'm happy," she said, noting organizationally she works with four managers: the executive chef, a kitchen manager, a market manager and a bakery manager.

To ensure everything runs smoothly, communication is essential.

"When I come in first thing in the morning, I'm usually checking with all of them to see what we've got on tap for the day," Furlow said. With the volume of work they have, equipment needs attention. What's on tap for catering? Is anyone sick?

She has a separate office where she does some of the bookkeeping and other duties. Her mother kept her books for a long time and she has a bookkeeper, but she does it, too.

"At lunch time, I'm up here. Sometimes I'm in the back, sometimes I'm in the front, just kind of making sure everything's running the way it needs to run," Furlow said. People don't realize it, she says, but there are 15 people behind the doors, working all day long.

Two of them make casseroles for the day. Four are in the bakery, cooking cakes, pies, cookies and cupcakes. "There's a lot of moving parts," Furlow said, adding, "It may be chaos in the back, but in the front we want it to look all nice and calm."

She knows the deli is running smoothly based on the customer experience. "We want the customer to have the best experience," Furlow said. Ensure the order is correct and the store clean; greet customers with smiling faces.

"They're not fake smiles. They genuinely like what they do," Furlow said of her workers. "We have so many repeat customers here. It's all locals, and they really get to know them. They can order for most of them when they walk in."

And as the leader, her background in teaching helps her as the boss of the deli. "If you can teach, you can pretty much do anything," she says. "If you can handle a classroom full of kids, you can do a lot of things."

Monitor and adjust, that's what they do in the deli, too. "It's all day," she said. The kitchen, she adds, is like a roller coaster all day long.

And yet the customers drive the business, she says.

"In most places, if the customers are happy and the employees are happy everything is going to be running just fine," Furlow said. There may be snags, but a happy staff and customers ensure it's all good at the end of the day.

As to the cooking, her three signature dishes - chicken spaghetti, chicken salad and white chocolate strawberry cake - remain tops as deli staples. That cake outsells all the others 10 to one, says Furlow. It doesn't feel heavy, it's light.

"It's got that good, kind of vanilla, buttercream cake," she said, crediting a worker many years ago, Beth Smith, with finding and then perfecting the recipe.

"It is our No. 1 selling cake, hands down," Furlow said, noting she doesn't have all the answers. "You know what they say: hire people that are smarter than you and then get out of the way," she said.

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Arkansas Democrat Gazette illustration.

On Wednesdays, get your chicken spaghetti hot all day long. They always sell it in three sizes, too, as a casserole. "We sell tons of it on Wednesdays. That's our biggest day of the week," Furlow said. It's in the cheese. "It's creamy, it's cheesy," she said.

Chicken salad comes in a sandwich, in a fruit plate, or by the pound. Thought lighter, it's still comfort food, another twist on their classic American deli fare.

"We make 25 pounds of chicken salad every day, six days a week," Furlow said. "That's a big number."

It's all been work but she's been blessed by good employees, good customers and good food, the proprietor believes.

Twenty-five pounds of chicken salad every day and 25 years in business are markers of success for Julie's Deli and Market. "Texarkana has been really good to me because they've really supported this business, and especially last year during the pandemic," Furlow says.

(On the Net: juliesdeli.com.)

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