Illustration by Lauren Baldwin
Joe Folley studied accounting in college, but he runs a side hustle out of his business, The Red Door Restaurant, an old-school, Greek-Italian-American diner on Grace Street.
Folley bought the eatery with his wife, Sheila, in 1991, the year his surreptitious business, Red Door Restaurant Repair, was born. Folley is what every successful restaurateur has on their payroll: a fixer. The Wolf of Grace Street. If another kitchen boss gets in a sticky, hot or dirty situation, they call Folley. He can get anything — from an inoperable pre-rinse sprayer to an HVAC unit that blows hot instead of cold — mended, quickly and on the cheap. But you must abide by his schedule. Folley’s place, where he spends 60 hours a week cooking, plus hours squaring his own books, comes first.
“The first year I was in business, everything broke. I would have had to shut my doors if I had relied on someone else for repairs,” Folley says. “My brother-in-law had a restaurant, and I started helping him. People asked him who was fixing his stuff. That’s how I got started. I got certified in refrigeration and AC repair so I could get the parts. It’s an EPA requirement, so I took the classes. But I already knew how to put almost anything back together. My father insisted on that growing up. He was a rocket scientist, literally — an electrical engineer for Fairchild Industries, a government contractor.”
William Wright, owner of Bistro 27, has known Folley for decades, so his place is grandfathered into Folley’s one-man repair mafia. “I was told I needed new heat lamps, twice, from a company that charges $250 just to walk in the door,” says Wright. “I had spent over $1,000, and they were still broken, when Joe told me to stop buying new lamps. He could replace the element for $50.”
“People beg me to do it,” Folley says, “because it saves them money. I have to turn a lot of people down.”
While accounting, cooking and repairs at The Red Door eat up most of his time, Folley has the face of a much younger man, even after raising three boys. Each of them has inherited a skill from their father. One is an accountant, another an engineer and the youngest, a chef. But there’s only one Wolf. You just need an introduction to reap the benefits of his services.