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When Jay Tugas and his business partner Ray Yaptinchay first opened spoons and pork as a food truck in 2017, they had never managed a restaurant before, but that didn’t stop people from flocking to modern take on Filipino cuisine.
“When people enjoy food, that’s what we want to do,” Tugas said. “We wanted to show everyone our cuisine, our culture.”
Eight years later, the food trucks were gone and replaced by two brick-and-mortar restaurants that were rave reviews from the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and even the Michelin Guide spots.
However, these days, restaurants have experienced increasingly vacant dining rooms during the lunch rush.
“It’s really hard. It’s really hard,” Tugas said.
We met Tagas at their Sautell location (other restaurants are in Silver Lake). There, he and Yaputinchey run through the kitchen after being forced to lay off most of their employees.
He spoke with Tugas, topped with bare pork belly fried eggs and prepared Filipino staples such as crushed Lumpia in each bite.
The pair experiences that many other restaurants in Southern California treat them the same. They fear going to work amid a decline in their customer base, funding for depleted Covid relief, and ongoing federal immigration enforcement.
“I had to let go of all the servers and kitchen staff, so now it’s me and my business partner Raymond,” Tugas said. “Sometimes, it’s just, as you know, it’s just blank like my brain, what’s going on?”
It appears that each week, well-known restaurants and trustworthy LA Classics are closing their stores.
Before an interview with Tugas, places like the original Pantry Cafe in downtown LA and Papa Christ near Harvard Heights closed their doors decades later in business.
Others, like Oriel in Chinatown and her sister in Downtown, have been closed despite their popularity.
“I mean, everything is expensive and number one. I think the taxes here are heinous,” Tugas explained. “Work is very expensive.”
Many in the restaurant industry often use social media as an important tool to contact customers directly, but media is also the worst enemy, with algorithms that often try out the latest and hottest spots for users.
Meanwhile, in addition to the awards, the restaurant boasts over 4 stars reviews on Yelp and Google, but that’s not enough.
It’s a very different reality from when Spoon and Pork first opened their brick and mortar in 2019.
“We know 2020 is amazing. And then we’ll be coming in March and everything’s going to be closed. We’ve been fighting since then,” Tugas shed tears in his eyes. “From the day we opened until now, it’s been a constant battle.”
It’s a battle they admit they might not be able to win, and the battle many other restaurants face right now.
“This is not going to last long. I work hard to keep others open too,” he said. “We do everything. We do everything.”
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