In Wenatchee, Washington, there is a coffee shop on a side street that features mismatched chairs and a chalkboard menu that is erased and rewritten nearly every day. For more than ten years, Maria Castillo—owner, head baker, and sometimes therapist to her regulars—has been working behind that counter. However, Maria is not the same person who opened those doors in the first place. She has shut down a company, grieved over it, left what she had created, and then repeated the entire process. twice. from nothing.
2018 saw the first collapse. Her initial catering business, which she had spent four years expanding through corporate lunch orders and farmers markets, quietly collapsed after a crucial partnership ended and a slow winter turned into an extended drought. She kept it a secret. There wasn’t a single bad week or a dramatic moment. Around February of that year, it became evident that there were more months than money. In order to pay the rent, she closed it, fired her lone employee, and took a job at the deli counter of a grocery store.
What Maria was really doing while slicing turkey and ringing up customers during that time is easy to overlook. She was observing. observing what customers purchased, what they disregarded, what they grumbled about on bad days, and what they requested but the store did not have. Unexpectedly, that quiet area behind the deli counter proved to be a form of fieldwork. Without that detour, she might have rebuilt more quickly, but it seems more likely that she would have failed in the same way.
She opened the café in 2020. Small, underfunded, and dependent on the kindness of suppliers and devoted neighbors. Then came the pandemic. What transpired is a tale that thousands of small business owners nationwide could complete for her. PPP paperwork submitted and resubmitted, outdoor tables, restricted hours, and the peculiar humiliation of a GoFundMe, which she still discusses with obvious discomfort. She did not turn off the lights. On, but just barely.
In certain aspects, the second collapse was more disorienting and quieter than the first. In 2022, supply costs affected her in ways she hadn’t fully anticipated. The majority of the town assumed that her three-month closure of the café was permanent. It almost did. She claims that she sat with it for longer than was likely healthy. Losing something for the second time is different; there’s less shock, more grief, and a kind of bone-deep tiredness that doesn’t look good on camera for the resilience narrative people want to tell about you.
Her third reconstruction did not significantly alter the previous one. The mismatched chairs are from the same neighborhood. However, the hours were more realistic about what one person could truly support, the menu was smaller, and the financial structure was tighter. She gave up on scaling. She began focusing only on what worked on this specific street, for these specific people, in a mid-sized city that moves at its own pace, rather than what other Seattle cafés were doing.
Speaking with Maria, I get the impression that the business community tends to overlook the scene where someone is sitting in their car outside a grocery store, wondering if they made a terrible mistake with their life, while celebrating the comeback. The messy, unglamorous middle is removed while the resilience—setback, grit, and success—is neatly packaged. However, she will tell you that everything genuine occurs in the middle. It is there that humility is developed. There, the judgment is sharpened. There, hopefully, the ego becomes a little more subdued.
She is still unsure if it will endure. She doesn’t think that uncertainty will ever go away, and it hasn’t. However, on a Tuesday morning last spring, the café was packed, and the chalkboard indicated that they ran out of cardamom rolls by nine. For now, that appears to be sufficient.
