South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
DROWNING IN DEBT
South Florida restaurants resort to crowdfunding to stay afloat
Catherine Malcolm is too proud to tell customers that her Caribbean restaurant, Jerk Machine, sits on a knife’s edge, but regulars have spotted the telltale signs anyway. Trays of simmering jerk chicken have been less abundant. The air conditioning and bathroom: on the fritz. FPL shut power off in the middle of lunch service — twice. And Malcolm’s husband and Jerk Machine’s affable chef, Desmond, has been missing in action since December, when a fall punctured his lung and landed him in the ICU.
But her landlord’s three-day notice stung the worst: If Malcolm didn’t pay $10,000 with late fees, Jerk Machine would face eviction from its longtime home at Lauderhill Mall. So Malcolm, whose restaurant is something of
a community hub, turned to one final lifeline: a $50,000 GoFundMe campaign.
“COVID pretty much killed us,” says Malcolm, who’s operated Jerk Machine with Desmond since 1989. “This might sound funny, but coming from the Caribbean we are not a people who will publicly ask for money. But we were way under water. Then the money came in.”
Two weeks later, the crowdfunding campaign dubbed “Help Jerk Machine Get its Groove Back” has raised over $21,600 from 354 donors. Many commenters pointed out Jerk Machine’s reputation as a refuge for the hungry, and Malcolm’s work with charities such as Homeless Hearts. “I hope [Malcolm] gets what she wants because she is always giving, giving, giving, even when she don’t have,” wrote one local customer, Donna Elliot, who donated $5.
After 10 months of a brutal pandemic and little relief in sight, restaurants here and across the country have resorted to crowdfunding campaigns to stay afloat. Once an avenue to group-fund startups, by the early months of the pandemic, coronavirus-related GoFundMe appeals made up one-third of all U.S. campaigns and have racked up $120 million globally, according to the platform.
The GoFundMe, so far, has helped Malcolm cover two months of unpaid rent, utilities and payroll for her four employees, but not every bill. On Wednesday, Malcolm could only despair when an employee told her the latest calamity: The power company had cut their electricity again.
“The employees and I had to pool our money together and turn it back on, and you should have seen them when the lights came back: They were cheering and dancing to reggae,” Malcolm says. “We may be out of the woods and in the lifeboat, but there are still sharks swimming around. With those [bill collectors] it’s always $500 here, $500 for everything, $500 for the toilet, $500 for the air conditioning, for water.”
Jerk Machine isn’t the only local restaurant turning to crowdfunding for survival. Owner Aileen Liptak’s 14-year-old Undergrounds Coffeehaus has been fighting off bill collectors since August.
Her 2,100-square-foot café, near the corner of Federal Highway and Oakland Park Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale, is accessed by a first-floor walkup. The upstairs lounge is a pop-culture time capsule, filled with classic board games and Stephen King novels, tater tots in a mug and creative twists on lattes, along with nostalgia shows like “Alf ” playing on TV.
“We’re like the island of misfit toys,” Liptak says. “If you don’t fit in anywhere else, you’ll fit in at Undergrounds, and the bond is stronger than coffee and tater tots. I’ve had four wakes there. I’ve had weddings. I’ve had two engagements there. It’s a ton of creative artists, tarot readers, musicians under one roof.”
In early January, after keeping her café afloat with a trickle of donations on Venmo, PayPal and Facebook, she turned to GoFundMe in desperation.
The gambit worked: Her $6,000 GoFundMe campaign, “Save Undergrounds Coffeehaus,” has so far raised nearly $2,800 from 44 donors.
Now, Liptak’s self-described “mom and no-pop shop” — she’s the sole owner — has caught up on rent and utilities. But without further relief, she expects to close Undergrounds by March.
“It’s been a really long, dark cycle,” Liptak says. “This keeps us on our feet, but if goals aren’t met at the end of January, we would have to make some serious decisions.”
‘It’s a community center’
That the community is now answering Jerk Machine’s plea for help shouldn’t be surprising, given that Malcolm’s restaurant has been generous since the beginning.
The Caribbean institution, locals say, is the kind of fast-food spot where the oxtail is always fall-off-thebone, meals are cheap and random acts of charity are common.
At lunchtime on a recent Thursday, Adrian Rob rolled his wheelchair to the counter to order his usual — curry goat, steamed cabbage — when Malcolm raced over with good news. “Sir,” Malcolm told him, pointing to a second man waiving at Rob in line, “You’ve got a customer over there who’s going to pay for your lunch.”
Rob adjusted his blue mask, looked stunned for a moment, then waived back. “Young man, thank you,” he said. The other customer, a man named George Costanza, said he felt happy to help.
“I just felt, ‘You know what? Times are rough,’ “says Costanza, who runs a dental office in Lauderhill Mall. He says he also donated $250 to Jerk Machine’s GoFundMe. “People not having jobs means they don’t come in and buy lunches as often as they used to.”
On Christmas Day 1989, two days after Jerk Machine debuted in Lauderhill, the Kingston, Jamaica-born Malcolm and her three children helped a charity group distribute free meals to the homeless on Fort Lauderdale Beach. “I said to them, ‘We’re going to be doing this every Thanksgiving and Christmas,’ much to the chagrin of my kids,” Malcolm says with a laugh. “We are blessed and we must always give of ourselves.”
Despite Jerk Machine’s recent struggles, Malcolm refuses to stop. On the same recent Thursday, a wave of fresh customers visited after climbing off a county bus in front of the restaurant. In the kitchen Winsome Green, a longtime customer who helps Malcolm distribute free Jerk Machine meals to the hungry, was busy assembling 200 lunches in Styrofoam containers for students at C. Robert Markham Elementary in Pompano Beach.
“You see that bus stop over there?” Green says. “People walk from the bus to be here, because if they’re a dollar short, Catherine will feed them no matter what. This is a community center.”
During Martin Luther King Jr. weekend Jan. 16-18, Malcolm and Green plan to give away 500 more Jerk Machine plates at the Boys and Girls Club in Lauderhill and at LifeNet4Families, a nonprofit in Fort Lauderdale.
Malcolm says a few customers admonish her for giving away Jerk Machine’s food when the restaurant is struggling to stay alive. “They say, you run this place like a soup kitchen, and this is why you’re in bad shape and never profit,’ ” she says. “Well, lots of neighborhoods are in bad shape in this pandemic. Look at someone’s eyes on a feeding line. They are you. You just don’t want to see it.”
But she won’t sugarcoat it: The survival chances of Jerk Machine’s flagship are dire.
Sales are down 80 percent from the same pre-COVID period last January, Malcolm says. Three hundred caterings a month shrunk to 30. The state last year denied the Lauderhill restaurant’s Personal Paycheck Protection program loan, although her son Dane Austin, who runs Jerk Machine’s second location in downtown Fort Lauderdale, gave her a chunk of the $22,000 loan they received.
Hitting her $50,000 GoFundMe goal will help the restaurant pay February’s rent and utilities and cover repairs. Another piece of it would fund an incentive program to give 10 veteran employees, many of whom have worked there over 20 years, a piece of the Lauderhill location.
“They all deserve to have a piece of the business,” she says. “These are the same employees who I couldn’t pay for weeks and weeks and months, and yet they still showed up and literally gave money to keep us going.”