About Us
Established in 2012.
Chef Ramni Levy’s unique knish creations are a reflection of his eclectic background in fashion, event planning, and culinary curiosity. Ramni moved to San Francisco in the late 1990s after stops in two other premier food cities, New Orleans and Manhattan. He opened Bistro 1650, a small restaurant in the City’s Richmond District. Ramni successfully sold Bistro 1650 to move into catering which led him to found King Knish in October 2012, an “old world dish with a new world twist".
America’s independent food businesses are operating in a market where survival increasingly depends on the ability to respond to changing habits as quickly as they emerge. Consumer tastes move at internet speed, work patterns have reshaped catering demand, and smaller operators continue to navigate costs that can make experimentation an expensive proposition. In that environment, longevity has become its own business achievement.
The pressure is particularly acute for operators building around specialized food traditions. A product can carry generations of history and still require considerable education before it finds a place in a new market. Familiarity cannot be assumed, especially when regional tastes, cultural awareness, and expectations around convenience vary widely. The challenge is to preserve the recognizable core of a dish while giving contemporary consumers a reason to approach it.
That tension has also changed the nature of culinary entrepreneurship. Formal training remains one route into the industry, yet many food businesses have been built through observation, commercial instinct and an ability to spot where an existing experience is falling short. The strongest idea, however, still has to withstand the realities of financing, customer acquisition and periods when the business itself appears to have reached its limit.
COVID-19 exposed those limits with particular force. For many small operators, the disruption was not simply a pause in trading but a test of whether there was enough capital, demand and personal resolve to begin again after substantial losses. The recovery has produced a different marketplace, one where food businesses are still recalibrating their models around changing patterns of work and spending.
Ramni Levy, founder of King Knish, knows that uncertainty intimately. He entered the food industry without formal culinary training, after a career that took him through fashion, marketing, and special events, and built his San Francisco food business through self-funding rather than bank loans. King Knish, launched in 2012 after his earlier work in restaurants and private catering, became his effort to bring a more expansive interpretation of the traditional knish to the West Coast and beyond.
His route into food began with a commercial observation. While working around a luxury business, Levy encountered food he believed was not a match to the experience being sold. He approached the manager with an offer to improve the presentation and catering, initially working between New York and San Francisco, the success allowing him to find a kitchen and open up a small bistro in San Francisco.
The move was characteristic of what Levy considers the essence of entrepreneurship: taking responsibility for the risk attached to an idea. “You need to believe in the ideas, even when you don’t believe in yourself,” he says, pointing to the confidence he had developed through earlier business experiences and his exposure to different food styles, art, and culture during his world travels.
He adds, “Everything I’ve done in my life has always been similar in fashion. A sink-or-swim attitude.” That approach was severely tested during the pandemic. Levy lost many of his clients & customers, and, by his own account, spent heavily absorbing the impact of COVID-era losses. He was close to closing the business before new work arrived.
He shares, “I was ready to just say I don’t want to, but I’m not a quitter.” Levy refers to his personal decision-making framework as the “gas can theory”: once the resources available to him fall past a certain point, the business requires a serious reassessment.
“I have been fortunate enough that my gas can has never fallen below 50%. It’s almost like when I get to that point, my instincts kick in, I reassess my situation, execute the plan and start filling back up to 100%. This rejuvenation gives me strength to not only carry on, but to thrive,” adds Levy.
New contracts helped him regain financial footing and prompted another round of personal investment, including a more professional website and a revised approach to how King Knish reaches customers. Levy is now placing greater emphasis on pop-ups while continuing to take catering work, and customer orders an adjustment he connects to the changing economics of small-scale food businesses.
King Knish itself reflects his preference for adaptation. Levy argues that the knish need not remain confined to its most traditional associations, using different fillings and flavour combinations to create limited dishes such as a customer favorite, wild mushroom with truffle salt potato knish. He has also created logo-inspired knishes, translating visual identities through the use of fruits and vegetables, and colours, rather than simply decorating the food.
He aims to make the experience memorable. Levy notes, “Having something memorable and an experience is how I frame success, particularly when customers engage with the food and want to understand its flavours.”
The next stage may take King Knish into new formats. Levy is developing additional condiments that can travel more easily than freshly prepared food, while also working on a book that will draw on his life story and include recipes, potentially leading to a separate cookbook. His broader ambition is to understand the business’s seasonal rhythms well enough to create space for those projects.
After years of setbacks and reinvention, Levy remains focused on keeping the business viable on his own terms. “It has never been about the money,” Levy remarks. “The more important thing is for me to do what I want in life, feel free, and share every experience that I’ve had.” In fact, Levy has mentored local youths in the San Francisco area for the past 14 years, teaching them more than just culinary ability, but instead, supporting them through the hardest journey of all: Life.
For a founder whose career in food started without a conventional roadmap, that philosophy remains closely tied to the business itself: keep moving, keep adjusting, keep supporting others, and make the next opportunity worth taking.