Kim Larios is faced with an interesting situation.
She is the owner of B&B Cafe, and business is booming — for better or worse.
“Each year I’m astounded by the increase in business,” Larios said. However, she said her restaurant is currently operating out of its range on many days during the week.
“It’s rough on us, on Friday and Saturday we are all running,” she said. “We don’t want all of the business.”
The cafe operates on a small scale, and she said the demand for homestyle cooking in Iola is too great for her restaurant to supply the demand on its own. While expansion is something that has crossed her mind, Larios said there is just not an obvious place.
“We’d love to (expand), but there is no place to go,” Larios said. “Right now, in this ecomony it scares me.”
So she faces the dilemma of being too “in demand,” but being too small to expand. Larios said B&B serves anywhere from 150 to 200 people on any given day, and that’s not including weekends, which are even busier.
She said having a booming business is definitely not a bad thing inherently, but oftentimes her restaurant loses customers due to the long wait for food from the small kitchen. She said her high overhead costs and difficulty finding dependable help has not helped the process either. She said employees don’t seem to take responsibility for how the cafe operates, and don’t stay for an extended period of time.
“We are a stepping stone to another job, and I can’t blame them (the employees),” Larios said. “But they don’t treat it (the cafe) as if it were theirs.”
Nevertheless, Larios sees a consistent amount of people come through her door — and that can’t be for no reason.
“In the restaurant business, consistency is the biggest thing,” she said. “Ninety-five percent of our customers are repeat customers. That is what is keeping us in business.”
She said these same customers have been supporting them since they opened in 2006. Larios opened the business with her partner, Phyllis Bostick.
“We just kind of went for it,” Larios said. “It was crazy, crazy busy.”
Bostick passed away in 2009.
“I miss her every day,” Larios said.
And now, Larios must face the decision of what to do next — a liberty that is not often privileged to newer businesses. Whatever the decision will be, as long as the customers keep coming in, B&B will keep meeting the demand.
“They count on us being here as much as we count on them coming in,” she said.
B&B’s success can be double-edged sword
