Reestablishing Ourselves

Hi, All! This is an update on our road to recovery.  Most people know me as Daran, or Darrell, and I represent 1/2 of the team that brought Fargo, ND the great tasting food of the South and the Caribbean. The business name, Daran's, is a combination of the first initials in each of our five kids name. Our goal when we started the business back in 2016, was to leave a legacy that'll not just feed our family for years to come, but yours for the foreseeable future as well. Unexpectedly those plans changed.  When we opened our brick and mortar location in 2017, man it was great. We got off to a blazing hot start, and things seem at that time to be as bright as can be, with higher expectations going forward. We were highly reviewed, talked about in the local news, newspapers, and magazines, all the publicity you would think a business would need to blossom. We felt good, things were how we always hoped for. Even after being a ND residents for 6 years we finally had family members that had never been to ND come visit. We had our 3 bedroom townhouse, and all of our bills at home were paid on time. We couldn't really ask for more. When the summer months came, things got rough for us. In the mist of trying to "ride out the storm", hoping for better days we put ourselves in a tremendous amount of debt, and we never recovered. We made the decision to lock our doors (at that time we hoped will be temporarily) on October 13th. Today our business has been closed for almost 2 months now, in all honesty we're broke, and sad to say we're homeless. Not homeless living on the street or out of our car but living in a hotel. Not the way I would've drawn up "1 year after opening a restaurant," but that's where we are today. We knew the struggles of opening a restaurant, we knew the historic odds of a business actually succeeding within the first 5 years were against us, but like the entrepreneurs we are, we were not going to let that deter us from our dream. We felt this region of the country needed our style of food, and by any means our goal was to give it to it. This is not an attempt for sympathy but to update you all on our long road to recovery, that'll eventually lead us back to you. I started this GoFundMe page because some of our followers asked "how can they help?" and said we "should start a GoFundMe." There is not set goal here, whatever you can do helps. We love yall, Later!