Fellow monkeys -
I left consulting a few years ago to start my own food business. I live in a quickly gentrifying working class neighborhood in Brooklyn and found that there is a huge demand for healthier alternatives to fast food like fried chicken and McDonalds. My business plan is a fast casual Southeast Asian-Indo Caribbean restaurant focusing on curry and vegetarian food. I'm hoping in the long run I can open a production kitchen and sell consumer goods like prepackaged curry roux and Caribbean pastries (kind of like Momofuku Milk Bar or Xi'an famous foods).
I've cooked in some of the best restaurants in New York, I helped open a Thai restaurant as the sous chef, and have received grant money from small business plan competition. But I've recently hit a wall in trying to raise additional funding. Currently I'm going in with my own money I saved from my consulting days, two small loans, and my sole investor - a college friend who works in finance.
I am short about $30k of my goal, which I guess isn't very much relatively speaking but restaurants being such a low margin + capital heavy business, I've found that not a lot of investors want to invest in restaurants. But at the same time I've also found that lot of people are interested in restaurants for other various intangible reasons. I was wondering if by any chance there is some fund or investor community in NYC that focuses on the hospitality industry that maybe I should get in touch with?
Would appreciate any advice
