Irene Li co-founded the Boston restaurant Mei Mei with her two siblings in 2012. Since then, she’s been nominated for the James Beard Foundation’s Rising Star Chef of the Year award six times. Just before the pandemic shuttered her restaurant, Li broke down Mei Mei’s finances for the world to see: In a year that brought in $1.2 million in income, the restaurant netted just $22,000 after expenses. Now, the owners have reimagined Mei Mei and Li is helping other restaurant owners get a handle on their finances through a program run by CommonWealth Kitchen, a nonprofit shared kitchen facility.

On March 9, 2020, we had just hosted a public event where we used this funny little technology called Zoom and presented our profit and loss statement to the public. The moral of the story was basically that restaurants are more complicated and less profitable than anyone thinks. 

I’m pretty sure I said the sentence, “A lot of businesses only have a couple of months of operating expenses in the bank.” And then the pandemic hit, and that became really clear to everyone. 

We closed Mei Mei on March 16, before there were any orders from the governor of Massachusetts. I could just hear my dad telling me, ‘Don’t trust the governor to keep you safe. Listen to what the doctors are saying. You’re better safe than sorry.’

To be totally honest, I think that’s probably the most traumatic process I’ve ever been through. I think maybe some of the laid-off staff would say the same thing. 

There’s part of me that felt like the constraints of HR, of corporate culture, of capitalism influenced me to go against my gut feeling, which probably would have been to spill the beans to everyone and have a good cry.

Instead, they got a copy/pasted email, ‘Hey, we want to meet at this time.’ We had a number of staff who declined to appear at their layoff meetings. For a few staff members, there was just not really any closure. One thing I heard was that getting a copy/paste email was really insulting.

Everyone can have their own true version of the story and there is enough empathy to go around, and to meet the pain that all of us are feeling over it.

I felt like, oh, my God, I don’t want to employ anyone ever again. I think I called it a seven-layer dip of despair. 

The turning point was when we had a regular customer who sent us an email asking if we would want to come sell any of our prepared foods at the farmers’ market. We gave it a shot starting in September. 

The farmers’ market honestly felt like a gift from whoever in heaven is running things. People were so happy to have us there, and it was such a controlled environment for safe human interaction. It just felt like magic. We started putting feelers out to join other farmers’ markets. And it snowballed from there. That is when we started thinking about a future that was not as a restaurant and that would be as a packaged foods company. 

I think I knew that we were not going to reopen the restaurant for a while before I published a blog post announcing the closure, September 30, titled ‘This is not a restaurant.’ At a certain point, I just looked at the team and I felt like, ‘If anyone dies because I wanted to keep the restaurant open, I will regret that for the rest of my life. I would rather lose my business than think that I had a team members’ blood on my hands.’ The essence of Mei Mei would live on as a packaged dumpling company.

I thought that turning Mei Mei into a dumpling company was the right plan, but that didn’t mean I liked it, at least not on a personal level. I really felt—emotionally, practically—like I couldn’t make this change. I needed to bring someone else in to do it. As that happened, I became less and less crucial to like daily operations. 

As my schedule was starting to clear up, I was thinking about what kind of impact I wanted to have. There was a voice in my head that was like, ‘Your former employees hate you. Your business is not the same. And everything you’ve been doing for the last eight years has just crumbled.’ That voice was very persistent. 

But there was this other voice which said, ‘Nothing that you’ve done is a waste of time. Everything you’ve done has been about learning and making mistakes and improving based on them. And you just have to find the next thing that will turn what feels like a failure into valuable experience.’ I had been engaged with CommonWealth Kitchen, a nonprofit shared commercial kitchen facility, as a board member for about four or five years. And as the Restaurant Resiliency Initiative (RRI) started to take shape out of the CommonWealth Kitchen’s initial emergency funding for restaurants to cook for their neighbors, I just inserted myself in the conversation. And eventually I ended up as the program manager, which is what I’m doing now. 

We’re working with eight businesses over 16 weeks. We’re getting in up to our elbows and doing some very hands-on work with them.

All of them are fighting to get to the point where they can work on the business and not in it, meaning they can step back from day-to-day operations and think bigger picture. Your financials can be useful for helping you make those really hard decisions that you’ve been just relying on your gut for. Like, ‘Should I take this dish off the menu? Because I think it’s too expensive, but people really seem to like it.’ Or, ‘I’m not open on Sunday nights, but maybe I should be.’

Everyone who is in the program has either been part of the CommonWealth Kitchen network or has been supported by a peer organization. Many of them have a handful of tables, but primarily they do takeout. These aren’t businesses that needed to be saved from the pandemic—they’ve actually done okay or even fairly well because they’re smart and they’re scrappy and they got some support. The program is really about setting them up for success at the next level, whatever that means for them. There’s a lot of energy for Black- and Latinx-owned businesses. We want to make sure that they are in a position to take advantage of the opportunities that we feel really confident are going to come their way. 

For many of them, the owner is unpaid or minimally paid. One of the business owners still does contract work as an electrical engineer.