Hi! My name is Lisa Maxwell. This hurts! This is hard... but there comes a point in time where I have to put my pride aside and realize I can't do this on my own.

My husband and I decided to open a brick-and-mortar unique restaurant in 2024. We had owned and run a food truck for 3 years before we opened our doors. We love people! We love food... we LOVE PEOPLE WHO LOVE FOOD!

However, when we started this business, we had NO existing similar store to model after, so we had to wing it a lot! With that being said, we had a hard time getting funding for our business, so we did everything ourselves. We maxed out every credit card, took out loans on our paid-off vehicles, took personal loans, and sold pretty much every asset we had.

We opened our doors on New Year's Day 2025. From the day our doors opened, our first month was CRAZY! From the time the door opened, we worked it 24/7 between the two of us. The shop was busy. So, my husband decided to quit his job, and we both would work the restaurant.

However, ELEVEN MONTHS LATER... we got closed down by the state plumbing inspector. We had hired a local plumbing company to install all our required sinks, grease traps, and some other water lines. They also stated they would be the ones to deal with the permits and inspection. However... they did not do what they said, and it wasn't until NOVEMBER that they called for an inspection on the work THEY DID!!! And lo and behold, the inspection FAILED for the work we paid them to do! We are closed for the foreseeable future.

Now both mine and my husband's income is GONE! We haven't paid our mortgage in 8 months because we are trying to catch up on the overwhelming amount of small loans we took out... a business takes a while to get established. Stock needs to be maintained, and we had a few employees so we could still be involved in our kids' lives and run our food truck. Life gets hard sometimes.

We are currently shut down until the plumbing company can come correct the issues and get us back up and running! Not only does this affect us, but it also affects our employees and their families.