Mama Meena’s Family Restaurant

By Roxanne Torres

Under the train tracks, Mama Meena’s Family Restaurant stands at a corner in Jamaica Avenue.

Like artworks in a museum, photographs of Filipino dishes are displayed proudly outside the glass window of the small family restaurant, Mama Meena’s. Seduced by the giant “A” inspection grade posted in the middle of the photographs and perhaps, by the foreign and the unfamiliar names of the dishes—“Pancit Bihon, Adobo, Lumpia Prito”—a young man walked inside the restaurant with a cell phone at hand. A glance at his cell phone screen revealed the Yelp page that most likely drew his attention to the restaurant in the first place. He grabbed the menu and pored over the names one more time.

Wilhelmina Prego or as she likes to be called, Mama Meena walked out of the kitchen, wearing her black apron and a forced smile. She greeted the obviously new customer. “Hello, do you know what you want to order?” she asked. The man looked up and said, “I’ll just come back.” Prego watched the man close the door and smiled. “By the time he comes back, Mama Meena will no longer be here!”

Mama Meena’s Family Restaurant was always a dream of Prego ever since she started her catering business. For the fifty-four-year-old mother of five, the restaurant is a passionate hobby and an extension of her culture, roots and her home. This restaurant dream is not large enough to accommodate the rent expenses and the stress she endures from customers six days a week. After five years of nearly twelve hours in the kitchen, Prego is closing the small Filipino family restaurant on October 25^th.

Prego decorates the restaurant as an extension of her home.

Located at the corner of 95^th Street in Jamaica Ave., under the noisy and busy train station, Mama Meena’s maintained its popularity for five years within the diverse community of Hispanic, Latin American, European, and Asian residents.

A small percentage of the community are Filipinos, Mama Meena’s targeted demographic. Roughly 12.7% of the neighborhood’s population are Filipinos, which are about 896 possible consumers to fill the restaurant’s twenty-eight wooden seats.  This is not an issue for Prego, who longs to promote the Filipino culture to mainly Hispanic, Latin American and Caucasian community.

“You wouldn’t believe the amount of Caucasian people eating bagoong!” she exclaimed. With its salty, fishy smell and dark brown hue, bagoong is not always a familiar condiment to those who are used to consuming ketchup and mustard.

While Caucasians and other customers of various ethnicities enjoy the newfound discovery of Mama Meena’s cooking, they are still one of Prego’s reasons for closing the business. “The thing is people would come here one day, and they won’t come back the next.” Prego blames the modest number of loyal customers to the recession that started the very year she opened the restaurant.

During the recession of 2008, the U.S. market experienced a drop in sales and profits that had an impact on chain restaurants and independent restaurants, like Mama Meena’s. As a result, Prego and many restaurant owners began raising menu prices, which then led to a drop of roughly 10% in customers.

Eventually, Prego recovered some of her loss from her first year of starting a restaurant business. “Before I worked here, there really weren’t many customers coming in,” said Marilou Clemente, Prego’s trusted assistant and waitress.

Clemente was a regular customer at Mama Meena’s until she found herself unemployed after her accounting firm laid her off. In 2010, she began working at the restaurant and immediately noticed a change a few years later. “The restaurant was mentioned by Eyewitness News, so all of a sudden more people started coming in!” Clemente said.

2011 was the year Prego finally found a reason to continue cultivating her dream. More people started coming from all parts of the country to the small, cozy single-floor restaurant. “People from Los Angeles or Connecticut would come here because of Yelp,” Prego said, as she arranged the empty chairs.

“I go here for coffee almost every week,” said Eduardo Joquico, a local and loyal customer.

Yelp, the website that collected ratings for all types of businesses in an area, helped garner new faces to the lone Filipino restaurant in Woodhaven. This sudden popularity by word of mouth helped Prego lower the cost for advertising. Merely days before the restaurant’s closing date, the website is still under construction.

Three years after her glory year, Prego found herself exhausted and unsatisfied. “I’d go home every day and I’d be like, ‘I spent so many hours there and this is all I got?’” she said. Prego learned from watching the Food Network that to maintain a restaurant business, one must earn three times the cost of starting it.

She started with a total cost of $150,000; this included buying the lease from a previous Mexican restaurant owner, renovating, buying  new appliances, and like many new restaurant owners, paying the Health Department inspection fines. Prego paid $8,000 to earn the large “A” grade printed and displayed on the restaurant window.

Wilhelmina Prego’s pride and joy over the years: her dishes and the large grade “A” inspection grade.

Prego refused to disclose her actual earnings, the money required to keep her restaurant, her dream alive.  She relied on her sixty-year-old husband, John to fix and worry about the business’s financial crisis. John is an engineer who, like his wife, always dreamed of owning a restaurant business. Coming from the Philippines, the expectations were low.

“He owned a restaurant back in the Philippines and it was much easier because we didn’t have to deal with the government,” Prego said, “and oh God, the rent!”

Despite buying the lease from the previous restaurant owner, Prego still faced the challenge of the increasing rent prices for the building. In 2008, the three-floor apartment building that she currently owned a single floor of, had a total market value of $966,000 and a total assessed value of merely $37,013.

Four years later, the market value decreased to $512,000. The cost of renovating the restaurant floor led to an increase in the assessed value, which is at $46,621. These calculations further led Prego to decide that the stress she was enduring was not paying off.

“She came in one day with her arm in massive pain, and she couldn’t move it at all,” Clemento said. She watched her boss experience the physical and emotional pain of being the only chef in the restaurant.

Prego once hired a chef, but due to the rising cost of the rent and her mistrust of the chef’s ability to cook and prepare authentic Filipino cuisine, the chef was fired. In addition to Clemento as the assistant and waitress, there are two workers in charge of frying, grilling and cleaning, a small number when one considers that the average number of employees working in family-operated restaurants in the country is fifteen. It is obvious from Prego’s exhausted smile and burn marks that working as the single chef with three employees nearly twelve hours a day is probably not worth the dream.

Wilhelmina Prego, also known as Mama Meena, preparing for the closing of her restaurant.

After noticing her dream decay in the last five years, Prego is still surprisingly hopeful. Mama Meena is still planning on cooking. This time, in the comforts of her actual home, a few blocks away from the second one she is leaving.

“I watched my employees cry after I told them we’re closing,” Prego said. “Those five years, they were my family and Mama Meena’s was their home, their bread and butter,” she said, as she turned the lights off in the kitchen.