Few people in the Valley’s food and beverage industry can honestly maintain that they haven’t been affected — at least a little bit — by the past two years of economic woe. Then there are those like Qisai “Q” Putrus and Randy Kassab of City Market Deli, who will tell you that "economic woe" is a laughably inadequate term to describe the impact they’ve felt. The pair of resourceful refugees from the financial fallout’s ground zero, Detroit, Michigan, are setting up shop in Phoenix to start fresh after surviving the apocalypse.
“We make gourmet style sandwiches,” says Putrus, “but there was nothing we could do when the financial crisis in Michigan started shutting down offices. City Market shops are set up in office buildings, so when all those businesses started going under, our customers left. People love our food, and we know all of our clients on a first-name basis, and that’s what keeps our customers coming back.”