Theo Martin, the owner of Island Soul in Columbia City for the past 25 years, claimed that running a small business is harder today than it has ever been, including surviving the 2008 recession and the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It’s definitely the hardest,” Martin said on “The Gee and Ursula Show” on KIRO Newsradio. “You have to adapt to the increase in minimum wage, the increase in food costs. I mean, we’re all living in the same world, so we’re all dealing with it. But as a restaurant and a business, I definitely know for us, we have to stop and look at who’s in the door, look at our watch and go, ‘OK, in the next hour, what’s going to happen? Am I going to send somebody home? Do I need to send an employee home?’ Because I’m counting the minutes. I used to count the days, now I’m counting the minutes.”
Island Soul, a third-generation Caribbean and Creole-blended eatery, initially started off as a barbecue restaurant in the Central District in the 1970s, run by Theo Martin’s father…