Please understand, I HATE being dour and discouraging, because I applaud entrepreneurship in impulse and in deed and I admire it in execution and I don’t mean to be polyanna cliched saying “most restaurants fail”.
But they do. I know, I know, you and I go out to restaurants at all levels, greasy spoons and high end places and think little of it, but they are very complex entities to open and run. My brother was the attorney for the CA Restaurant Ass’n for several years, I know folks who are restuarant consultants, and I know several people who are experts in commercial real estate. And all I can tell you is, I have no idea how an operator can conform to the requirements of running a restaurant without massive, massive capital. A restaurant can go out of business if their food costs go up 3%. If she is hard up against the wall capital-wise and running afoul of regs-wise in episode #1, she is cooked.
Again, without knowing any details; if she can exit her lease because the premises do not conform to ADA req’ments, she will probably be better off breaking her lease on the grounds of impossibility right now and exiting stage right. I’m sorry.
One would think that with such enterprises that difficult to keep going, there would be a lucrative field of soup-to-nuts restaurant coaching firms. The lawyer is the least of it; there is the logistics.
It ain’t the roaring 20s any more.