Help Fernando & Kortnie Open Tulsa's First Plant-Based Diner

For those of you who don’t know us yet, we are Fernando & Kortnie Martinez. Mom and dad to five totally fantastic children. We have both worked in the service industry for well over twenty years now. We rose in ranks from the bottom all the way to entrepreneurship when we opened up an award winning Cajun food truck. After a few years of that we found our calling, helping save the planet and shape the future for our children with plant based foods. We closed the food truck and set out on a mission to open up Tulsa’s first 100% plant based diner!

Some of you out there have been following our story for many years. And if you have, you know we started with literally nothing, worked our asses off for years, and continuously fell short of obtaining our dream, opening up a restaurant. We’ve scouted dozens of locations for different concepts, always being denied. We’ve never been able to obtain business funding. Weve gone back and forth with several investors, never pulling the trigger. We’ve even had a few spots we were working on that ultimately failed. The struggle is not new to us. And this industry is a fickle bitch (pardon my French). But we’ve always been willing to put in the work and remain patient.

So rewind a tad, last summer we signed a lease and grabbed the keys to our future diner. We got to work immediately with anything and everything we could do ourselves. We were finally granted business funding! We had a team of people in here “working”.

As the months keep coming and going we are realizing things are just not getting done quick enough and not getting done the way we want them. By this point we do not have any money left in the construction budget. So we roll up our sleeves and get to work ourselves, day and night. We start funneling what little bit of personal money we have left into purchasing all the odds and ends we need to get this diner completed. It was a brutal couple of weeks, but if there’s one thing we’ve learned… it’s that Nando and I can do anything at all we set our minds to!

So we think we’ve got everything finished up. We submit to the city for our last and final permit. The only thing standing in our way of opening up the dining room! Or so we thought.

Weeks go by and we have all our fingers and toes crossed just waiting and hoping that any second now we will see the green light. In which case we have a full staff that is trained and ready for those doors to crack open and hungry diners to flood in! Waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting. Money dwindling, clock ticking, anxiety on max… it’s literally make or break time. And then we find out the news.

Our building that we have signed a lease to occupy and open up shop is MAJORLY not up to code. The structure itself before we even stepped foot inside is inoperable, according to the powers that be.

So we screamed. We cried. We sat in silence. We blew up. We almost took a sledgehammer to the walls. We became emotionally nothing but a sack of bones on autopilot to just keep moving. We couldn’t even fathom what this means for us.

We don’t have a rich ol Uncle Phil to ask to float us some cash. We have already drained our savings account to finish this build out. We are living off of high interest credit cards to keep our personal bills half way paid. At this point we are COUNTING on this dining room being open to save us all. After all, we are already MONTHS behind our scheduled opening. Surely we’ve been through the wringer enough and it’s time for some good news right?

We whole heartedly believed we would have the dining room open last week.

We are no stranger to hurdles and hardships. But we really did have total confidence we had finally made it to the other side and at last we could see the fruits of our labor. We did not see this wrench being thrown our way what so ever.

So we’ve been in contact with architects and had some estimates done on what it will take to bring this up to code. We are exploring every single option there is to get this diner open. We have a few professionals brainstorming creative solutions. But in the meantime we are just in limbo with nothing we can do with our own two hands to make it better or quicker.

We have lost over 200 potential customers (that we know of) in the last two weeks alone due to not having our dining room (and yes we have been counting).

We have put well over $100k into this location. Even more blood, sweat and tears. We have already missed out on hundreds of thousands of dollars in projected sales. All of our emergency funds have been spent.

We just dont know what comes next.

Over the years, the support of our community has always kept us going. So now more than ever, we are very graciously asking for your help.

Through these frigid temperatures Nando and myself will be working limited hours in the kitchen to attempt to keep the sales rolling in. Much of our staff is patiently on hold waiting for the dining room. We will be selling gift cards. And coming up with any other creative way we can to raise some more money to keep Ruby D’s alive.

All we can do now is take it one day at a time. Keep calm, carry on. Patience and grace

Every single dollar is so deeply appreciated by our family and our work family. Should we exceed our goal we will use any extra funds to complete the build out of our restaurant, to double our occupancy, and perhaps even compete our final phase we call “operation milkshake” (yes- 100% plant based milkshakes!)