Estrellita Needs Your Help! Please Donate & Share

Before signing our lease in 2018, Walter and I visited Atlanta multiple times. We found it odd that Filipino food was so underrepresented in a major city like Atlanta. It was evident there was a void that needed to be filled. We opened the doors to our modest 550-square-foot restaurant in 2020. Since then, we have done all we can to build roots and sew ties amid impossible restaurant industry conditions. Two years, one pandemic, and months of economic inflation, we are holding it all together by a thread.

We opened in 2020 during the pandemic, the worst time to open a restaurant in the history of opening restaurants. We were plagued immediately by social distancing guidelines and evident economic pressures. It has not been easy. Margins were tight even before all of this. The restaurant business is hard. The most painful part is that while most established companies could take advantage of government assistance, Estrellita could not. We barely qualified for PPP1 because there was no payroll for 2019. Then the following year, we didn't qualify for PPP2 because we couldn't show a loss in 2020. Meanwhile, our projections dramatically changed, and we couldn't fully staff the restaurant until almost two years later in 2022.

National ACE, an organization dedicated to the advancement of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, was the only organization that came to our aid in October 2021. They helped us make payroll for one month just in time for the winter months lull and the Omicron variant. We were grateful they were there to see us through that next wave of quarantine and fear. However, after being denied grant after grant, we are extremely concerned about this year's winter month lull, as any form of relief or assistance continues to evade us.

On April 1, 2022, National ACE organized a round table. It was well attended by city and state representatives. We spoke our plight of humility to a room full of suits and ties. The shame of the hardships made talking about it openly awkward and uncomfortable. A woman from SBA agreed that our 2020 class of new small business owners was overlooked. She admitted that the government was well aware, yet admitted there was still no program to assist this tiny group of neglected entrepreneurs.

At this same round-table, we met with city reps from Invest Atlanta again we told them our plight. They anxiously touted the Resurgence Grant as a COVID relief grant. They said we were the perfect candidate for the $40k grant for small minority-owned businesses adversely affected by COVID. We praised a light at the end of the tunnel and submitted our application immediately. After 6 months of hoping, literally crossing our t's and dotting our i's, we were notified that we were not awarded any assistance AGAIN. After scrutinizing their scoring system, we discovered that the program gave more weight to location than it did to COVID-related grant rejections of minority-owned businesses born in 2020 who took on unsurmountable debt unable to recover from the financial aftermath of the Pandemic. Instead, they focused on dis-invested areas where location awarded you a 40% leg up on all the other applicants. In short, our AAPI minority-owned business was given a D grade right out of the gate, which made it impossible for us to qualify. Rather than being a true minority owned COVID relief fund, it ended up being another gentrification fund for certain pockets throughout the city.

During this same window, from October 2021 through April 2022, we closed our doors several times due to COVID exposures and our public health responsibilities. Because of these closures, we ended up paying rent further and further in arrears. Often times we had to make decisions between paying food purveyors or the landlord. Food purveyors always won because we have a duty of public service to our community and to the livelihoods of our staff. Currently, we are two months behind. Without any other recourse, we are asking the public for help. We need to raise $30,000 to reconcile our accounts with the landlord and to satisfy the high-interest debt we acquired to carry the restaurant through quarantines, social distancing, and several COVID closures related to both COVID-19 and the Omicron variant. Looking forward, we hope to lift these financial burdens that continue to overshadow our efforts with undue pressure, stress and doubt before December 1st.

As a last-ditch effort, we are turning to the public to help where the government, other grantors, and landlords could not. After, several pivots and expansions to our business, we aren't ready to give up. The Filipino community deserves a place for special occasions or a place to go when they don't want to cook. A place they can feel proud to take their non-Filipino friends or to entertain their friends or family from out of town. Though tardy to the party, Atlanta deserves a full-service Filipino restaurant dedicated to supporting our peers in the filipino food community. They deserve a team of cooks committed to cooking Filipino food 6 days a week from morning to night. Most of all, the people of the south deserve a place to discover our culture and embrace our cuisine. We have come too far just to come this far. Please help. Thank you so much for your kind consideration.