Murphy's New Law

So it wasn't a match made in heaven, but Town & Country Mall did the trick. That's where Laura Watts and Hassan Houmani had their chance meeting before eventually deciding to go into the deli business together about 6 years ago.

Since opening their first Murphy's Deli in 1993 on Murphy Road in Stafford, Watts and Houmani now have 16 locations up and running in the Houston area.

A medical technologist at Baylor College of Medicine, Watts took a job at Neiman-Marcus during the Christmas holidays. On a break, she walked about a stone's throw away from Neiman-Marcus to the Blimpie Subs shop run by Houmani for lunch.

After Watts had finished her meal, Houmani asked how her lunch was.

"I said, 'This was a little bit filling for a woman for lunch, and the food could really use some improvement,' '' says Watts.

Houmani challenged Watts to bring something in if she could do better, and he would buy it from her.

Perhaps Watts was a natural. Friends who often came over for dinner kept telling her to get out out of the medical field and get into the catering field. Thus, Houmani's challenge served as her wake up call to apply her skills.

"I had never really capitalized on that," Watts says. "I thought why not give it a shot." Though Watts was soon making sandwiches at Blimpie for Houmani, they both realized they wanted to go in another direction -- more deli choices for customers.

"I saw Blimpie going the wrong direction by limiting their menu," says Houmani, who had few other beefs with the franchiser. "I decided to open my own concept." DAILY CHOICE Houmani says the new direction meant coming up with something more interesting than the major competitors had. But while the concept was easy to put into words, making it a reality has come without some hard knocks.

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