7940 SE Stark St.
Portland, OR 97215
503-841-6094
We've been getting a lot of questions about our plans moving forward, what's happening with White Rabbit, why we're still operating with such limited hours, & more. We hope this clears some things up-- in terms of both why we're taking two weeks away from regular service, where we see ourselves in the next few months, & what we imagine it may take to get there.
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Honestly? The first part of this is that we're exhausted. We know that everyone who's still working in our industry right now is feeling this (along with so many other folks for so many other reasons), but we know that where we're at, we need to hit pause for a minute. We need a week or two where we work less than 80 hours. We need a chance to catch up: in the kitchen, on system improvements so that we still feel we're operating as safely & efficiently as possible, & also, on sleep, on getting to take our dogs on long walks, on calling our moms.
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The beauty of being an almost entirely from-scratch kitchen is that almost everything is from scratch. The trouble of being an almost entirely from-scratch kitchen is that almost everything is from scratch. For us to be open *at all* requires hours & hours of prep-- which we love, but which is grueling. And while we've been doing our best to keep up with everything, Mother's Day weekend wiped us out of almost everything we had, & it's going to take us a week to be able to fully restock.
Would all of this-- being open at all, the idea of being open more, the constant prep-- be easier if we had more staff? Yes . . . but we don't, & it may be quite some time before that's possible. Currently, we do not have a PPP loan; we're hopeful, but things are uncertain. Even if we do receive a PPP loan in the next few weeks, we do not plan on immediately expanding to anything close to our previous operating hours. We're trying to center safety & public health in the decisions we're making around our business, & at the moment, bringing more staff into our close-quarters kitchen feels like an irresponsible choice for both our own health & that of the community we serve.
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In addition to operating Hungry Heart & managing our community commitments, we're also still actively working on our build-out at White Rabbit. Until we complete the build-out, finish permitting, & are able to shift our main operations to that space, we're paying rent on a space we can't use, which is an additional, very difficult financial hit that we'd like to minimize as soon as possible. We're looking forward to using many of our hours during this little break to make headway over there! Extra time there is also needed because we've had to make some adjustments to our plan for the space; it may be some time before we're able to welcome you in for brunch, but we're excited to offer you many components of our planned menu in a market format. We'll have more details on that coming soon.
We've been trying to keep our work at White Rabbit from interrupting our scheduled service hours, but periodically, it may. (Frustratingly, there are only 24 hours in a day. If anyone has a fix for that, we'll trade you a hundred cardamom rolls.) Our apologies in advance; we promise to keep our site, instagram, & voicemail up to date with schedule changes.
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Thank you for taking the time to catch up with what's going on behind the scenes for us. We're so grateful for your continued support. I know we say this all the time, but we couldn't have asked for a better neighborhood to be in.
With love, Jax, Morgan, & team Hungry Heart