“I Want to Do Well Here”
How small business owners in food and sustainable fashion are making it work in Puerto Rico.
While we were putting together the final cut of these interviews with small business owners in Puerto Rico, it started to rain. The lights flickered, and the water went out. One block in Old San Juan, at least, lost power.
As a household, this is an annoyance: no washing our faces before bed; the sink filled with the dishes of dinner, unable to be cleaned. For small businesses, these infrastructure issues mean lost revenue, lost ingredients, and lost hours of work. We wanted to understand more deeply how these problems and more manifest for a few different businesses, and why people continue to work in Puerto Rico despite them. We talked to Mugi Pan, Café Regina, and Hola Aida, and they described the ups and downs in their own words.
Read Crítica’s introduction to the issues, as well as a brief introduction to the candidates running in tomorrow’s extremely significant election for governor. Lee en español aquí. These interviews have been edited and condensed for readability.
Amanda Alvarez and Hiroto Abiru of Mugi Pan, Río Piedras
Mugi Pan is a Japanese-style bakery that’s been in business since 2021, founded by Alvarez and Abiru after they moved from Japan back to Alvarez’s home of Puerto Rico in 2020. Both had been working in the restaurant industry in Fukuoka, where Alvarez originally moved to study animation and the Japanese language. They bake in Bayamón and sell at markets, as well as at a stall in Río Piedras on Saturdays. Alvarez spoke to us about their experiences.
I find it surprising that a lot of people here have business ideas regarding Asian food, but nothing pops up regarding pastries or breads, or kind of easier, smaller, hand-size stuff. I feel like everyone's thinking about sushi or ramen or heavier stuff. One of the things I really loved about Japan was there were bakeries everywhere, and every bakery has their unique style and everything's fused with a little bit of French or Italian, and it's just really lovely. I really wanted to see more of that over here. Everything here is kind of the same base, especially the Puerto Rican bakeries. There's not a lot of different styles to the Puerto Rican bakery, per se.
We went to Japan recently, and people asked, Why'd you come back? Why didn’t you stay? And I'm like, it's easy to say that, but I'm not Japanese. Hiro is—he can do it easier. But I was there for so long that I missed home, and I do want to see home do better. I want to see my hometown be as decent as Japan. It's cool to live outside and do well, but you want to be able to do it where you're from, too. I can leave. That's easy. I have enough experience over there and everything. I can speak Japanese, I can do it, but I want that to be my last resort. I want to do well here. I feel like we deserve it as Puerto Ricans. So why not? Why not keep trying until I can’t?
So I think the main challenge for us is kind of, like getting a power outage in the middle a bake or the middle of a prep. We're prepping dough, and then we have nowhere to safely put it. We do have a small generator for the fridge. Once you have it in the sheet trays, you can't really fit everything in the in the shelves of the fridge, so it's a little bit overwhelming sometimes and you end up losing a lot of ingredients and time—and personal time, too, because you end up having to use personal time getting more ingredients; you end up using a lot of your personal funds, too, because it's a lot of money just to buy ingredients here. Everything is so expensive nowadays, and then the power is still super expensive. We barely have power sometimes. Like, it's just like a game: Are we gonna have power this week to cover what we've lost?
It's for the love of art. Whoever's doing food here really has to love it and have a passion for it. I tell people, even if I wasn't doing it for money, I would just be doing it for myself. You just push through it. Some days are tougher than others, but it's possible.
I wish I could get more ingredients sometimes. We went to Japan last month, and we got a few things, and it was so nice to just even walk into a supermarket and have everything available. Sometimes I want to get simple things, like heavy cream, and I have to go to three different places. It's such a waste of time and effort. And it's frustrating, because I’m like, They always have it here. Why don't they have it today, and I specifically came here? Deep breaths, you know? Sometimes it feels like a movie, like someone watching you, like The Truman Show. Sometimes it feels like everything's set up for a comedy.
For example, let's say there was one whole bake lost. It would be between probably $500 to $1,000—that’s a whole day's worth of baking for a market. Like, can't do it. After Hurricane Fiona, we lost power for around 12 days. And it was funny, because we got it back two days after the storm, but then for some reason, it just went out again, and it was out for 12 days, and we were just like, Oh my God. Are we gonna make it? We got some donations from friends, and I think that's the only way we actually pulled through that month, because we were like, Oh my God, we just restarted and everything is going downhill. We were staring at each other, like, What are we gonna do? Do we have to build a wood-fire oven or something? Like, I'm gonna start getting pizza ovens and making pizza. It was a crazy time, because it was our second year, and I still have this mentality that I'm in Japan sometimes, and that things are going to be okay faster than they are. So I kind of lose it sometimes.
There's a nice network of people here, too—a lot of supportive people in the community. There's a lot of bakers around, too, that are very supportive and I'm really grateful for that. I came back after being away so long, so I'm not really connected to the industry. Some people have reached out: We have a really good friend from Vía Lactea, the ice cream shop. She's one of our neighbors, and she's been there from the start, very supportive. So people like her really give us what we need in terms of support, and they keep us going. We have really nice customers, too. They're always like, We understand. It's super frustrating.
As a baker, I have to start very early, and I want to feel safe opening at maybe 3 a.m. or 2 a.m. Cleaner water, too—maybe cleaner pipes. Water is very important and we have to constantly use filters. We filter everything, of course, because the pipes here are horrible. The water is horrible.
Spaces for young people who can start up doing their bakes, or ghost kitchen kind of places but a little bit more accessible. Accessible rent would be great. That would be great. I'd also like to have more of, like, maybe community kitchens where people can bake, with community gardens attached, and we could donate food to shelters. The government could actually fund that, and it would be a great alternative for communities around Santurce or La Perla—those places would benefit from a community bakery or garden. The kids can learn: They can learn how to bake. They can learn how to grow their own food. But we have very little incentive for that here, so it would be great to actually get a lot of the restaurant owners into that.
Kali Solack and Mario Juan of Café Regina, Ocean Park
Café Regina first opened at Lote 23 in 2016, before moving into a small space on Calle Taft. In 2023, it reopened as a much bigger café and restaurant down the block. They’ve received international press and attention for their coffee and food programs, which use as many local ingredients as possible.
Mario: We had been in New York for a long time, and it felt like in New York, the path towards being able to do a personal project was just much longer and much more difficult and much more costly—a higher cost of entry than here. And so, we moved back and we did a few things before we opened Regina and Pernilería [his former business] at Lote. But ultimately, Puerto Rico was at this point where, because of the recession and all of these things, there'd been a lot of economic devastation and buildings abandoned, and lots abandoned—which is where Lote came from—around the city, and so it felt like there was a movement of people. Whenever I would come for visits, I'd see people who were trying to improve the local food scene and do interesting things at every level: casual street food and food trucks and things like that, and all the way up to the fine dining. I just wanted to be a part of that.
Kali: During the pandemic, things were really weird. Regina, after the pandemic, definitely changed a lot, and it wasn't doing as well, because all of those people who were once working in that area moved to larger offices in Guaynabo, so we just didn't have all of our customers there that we used to have. I like being in the Ocean Park area because we get so many locals as well as tourists, so it’s a mix. We definitely have a high season that we benefit from, but in the lower seasons, it's still in an area where there's a lot of foot traffic, so it's less risky. We're really a community spot. We get people who come sometimes two, three times a day to the café. But I don't really know if I would risk going in a non-foot-traffic area, because with the power outages and all the stuff that we've been dealing with, it's just really unpredictable.
We had a situation with acueductos [the water company] this year, which was, frankly, unbearable. I feel like it took three years off my life, and I'm still recovering, and we couldn't be very transparent about what was happening, because it was very gross. But basically the sewage line on the entirety of La Loiza, from past SuperMax all the way down to Acapulco, was clogged, and that water was basically backing up into our space, and so we had to be monitoring our plumbing registers in the floor and keeping them open, and if water came over a certain threshold, we had to close down the café, because we didn't want to risk that sewage water coming in.
Mario: We're talking about multiple manholes that were backed up and had four inches of drainage in a large pipe, and people were, I think, out of a lack of trust for the system, just not engaging in that, and not participating, and not putting in their claims and that sort of thing. When they would send people, they'd come, they'd say, Okay, this must be this one thing, let me flood your space and then realize that's not working, put in my report that what I did didn't work, and now they're gonna have to send somebody else, but then that somebody else would show up and try the same solution again, because there's no inner communication, and they're not really working together here. I ended up having to be a liaison, like, No, the guy that came yesterday tried that, and he said this, and you've got to open that one over there and take a look. I got on these people's nerves.
Kali: We kept doing this for two weeks, and we ended up closing. I don't even know how many days—I think we lost $40,000 in revenue [between water and electricity issues], a significant amount, and our team was losing work, and so we were paying them for all of these closures, because I felt so bad, because it was not their fault. They had to live in this anxiety—they were helping monitor the registers.
Mario: For me, there's a significance in the work. It feels like I'm contributing to a thing that I want to see do well and prosper. To whatever degree that my little grain of sand can help, I'd like to put that grain of sand here. The community that we built, our staff and the people in the area that support us, is everything for us. We see them every single day. They're a big part of our lives. When we were going through these things with acueductos and all this stuff, anytime we posted, we saw a lot of mobilization of customers going into action and being like, No, I need Regina in my life. Like, My friend who works at acueductos, call them. I can help you with this.
I think long term—this is maybe an obvious thing—but there needs to be better management of funds for investing in the infrastructure.
Kali: With aid from Hurricane Maria, I ended up finally being given that money, like five years later. It was so much paperwork and all this stuff, so small businesses that probably could have benefited from that aid to help them stay open after Hurricane Maria had to close before they even saw that money.
This is what supports our family and now we're a team of 16 people. The pressure’s on. I don't want to lose these people, and I don't want them to be affected in their payroll by this. These situations are out of control for them, but I've learned from Hurricane Maria, when I had to hustle so hard when I was opening an hour a day just to sell anything. And then the pandemic and stuff, and we had to close. And so I've learned that I have to have a security blanket in the bank so that if we're put into these situations, I'm not being forced to close the business or something, because I've already committed eight years to this, this business that now supports way more people and is a great part of our community. But I feel that smaller businesses who haven't been able to set up that security blanket of having some finances to cover those situations might just have to close.
It's definitely complicated doing business here. But I also feel like if the power were more reliable and things were a little bit more organized, and we saw improvements happening to the community, it would be less sad, because the people are amazing, and I love, love living here, but I do see a lot of people suffering.
Maru Aldea of Hola Aida & Aida Studio, Hato Rey
Aldea returned to Puerto Rico in 2018 after spending years in New York and Maryland. She founded Hola Aida to satisfy a burgeoning local interest in vintage fashion and housewares, and Aida Studio is her upcycled fashion line that also produces custom clothing.
In Puerto Rico, while there was an appreciation for vintage, there weren't a lot of people doing it. So I was like, Well, maybe there's something here. And there were people who really got into it. I know there was Johnny & June, myself, other online stores, and now the movement has grown from more vintage shops to more thrift, but that's great, too, because there isn't a lot of thrift culture—there wasn't as much that I knew of in Puerto Rico. There's a couple of Salvation Armies, but not a lot of thrift stores as in the U.S. or in Europe, so that kind of culture around secondhand and vintage and thrifting is still relatively new here. It's been going on for a while, but not as long as other places.
We lack capital investors and manufacturing. For most brands, if you want to do a studio, an atelier, and do something specific, you can do that. There are a bunch of amazing companies that do that. They have their amazing ateliers and they focus on couture and evening and things like that. But if you want to do ready-to-wear at a more in-between price point, where you have your designs and you make multiples of them, even if it's different fabric—like I do five styles, and then the fabric changes. That's more of a challenge, because there aren't very many manufacturing options. Specifically for me, since every item is a different thing. I could potentially go to Colombia or another country and make things small-batch but again, funding and just the logistics of it—it's tough.
A lot of us don't have a physical space, and the physical spaces here are so expensive. It's kind of absurd, the rent prices. Everybody wants to have a physical store, because, to be honest, when we do pop-ups is when we make money, when we make more money. We would like to be able to have a physical location, but first of all, you can't find where they are, like, signs for rent, and then when you do find it, the prices are like—who can afford this?
I just feel like there's not a lot of incentive to create little districts like you see in other cities. San Juan is a major city, if you think about it, it should be, and it's still not laid out like one. There's not enough pockets of interesting things happening. There's not a lot of spaces available, or the rent prices are similar to New York or L.A. And then the whole process of setting that up, from getting the space and permits— feel like it's the same way in a lot of places, too, but it seems to be more burdensome here. I think if there were more options for micro-businesses to have physical spaces, people would do better. I would love to be able to do that, but I don't see it happening anytime soon. I'm kind of at the point where I'm like, Well, do I stay, or do I leave, or do I keep going, or do I stop? To be honest. Because it's not very sustainable. It's just survival mode. I love what I'm doing. I love it, but it's kind of hard to continue it when the day to day is just kind of exhausting.
I do think that there are positives here in Puerto Rico that aren't in other places; here, a lot of small businesses really band together. In Puerto Rico, at least, you have very strong groups of people that have similar businesses who band together and share resources as much as they can, and they support each other. I do photography for a couple other people, as a side hustle, helping them out. We all help each other out, so that's really nice. And I don't know if that's very common elsewhere, to be honest.
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Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism by Julie Guthman
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Gutting but super fascinating and important work here, thank you both.