In this week's newsletter: 

• It’s restaurant week! We’re featuring a few stories about the business of dining out, in the U.S. and abroad.

• Presenting a brand-new way to do the numbers with us.

• More stories about life and how money messes with it, from “This Is Uncomfortable.”

• Our most popular reads from Marketplace.org.

• And of course, read to the end for our song of the week.

When word got out about the impending closure of Leyenda, a fixture in its Brooklyn, New York, neighborhood, the place started filling up early every night. 

“Everyone wants to get a piece now that we're closing,” owner Ivy Mix said with a laugh. “I mean, I get it. I've gone to places when they close. But the other part of me is like, ‘Where were you? Where were you, though?’”

Mix opened Leyenda, a pan-Latin cocktail bar and restaurant, in the upscale Boerum Hill area in the spring of 2015. In early 2025, she and her co-owners decided not to renew their lease, joining a growing list of small, independent restaurants shutting down. The list includes lots of places that have been around for years, some famous, like Marlow & Sons and the Pencil Factory , and others that are beloved locally.

“There’s many reasons,” Mix said. “The restaurant-bar industry is difficult. It's become more difficult over time, the whole country over, but I think New York City is not necessarily the most hospitable place for small businesses a lot of the time.”

Rent, which has always been high in the city, has become much more expensive in the last few years, since the pandemic. Insurance has, too, along with almost everything else — utilities, food, labor. 

“Labor is big,” Mix said. “I'm the type of person that thinks that it should go up. But as a business owner, I'm like, ‘Whoa!’ If you look at our labor costs now compared to 2017, it's a huge difference.”

Credit card processing fees are also taking an increasingly big chunk out of many restaurants’ already-thin profit margins — every time someone pays with a card, which is all the time, 2% to 4% goes to the credit card companies. 

“At the end of every month, it's like, here you go, Mastercard and Visa,” Mix said. “Here's all this money.”

It all adds up in a business where, if you’re doing really well, you’re making maybe 10 cents on the dollar.

“At the end of the day, we're like, is the juice worth the squeeze?” she said. “Like, maybe not. Maybe not right now, maybe not like this, maybe not this iteration.”

Up until late last year, a popular brunch spot in Shanghai with free-flowing alcohol that was not too expensive was the Bull & Claw.

“It was housed in a beautiful villa-style lane house [with] three floors,” said Rachel Gouk of the Shanghai-based food and drink blog Nomfluence . “That was a lot of overhead to manage just to do brunch, which has an average check of [$50 including] three hours of free-flowing drinks.”

Bull & Claw is part of the Australian firm Camel Hospitality Group, which also ran a handful of gyms and other restaurants serving Italian, Mexican and Thai food. Last November, it shut all its restaurants and bars, and the gyms now operate under a new entity. Camel group sent a WeChat message to all its staff announcing the sudden changes.

“We received a PDF document from our boss Tony Finocchiaro,” graphics designer Joan Dai said. “The document said that the company had dissolved, and every employee’s contract had been terminated. It said our salaries would be ‘prioritized’ as soon as the company’s bankruptcy liquidation was complete. Then the boss disappeared, and he hasn’t answered our calls since. He just ghosted us.”

While catering revenues in China went up by 5.3% last year, profits in cities like Beijing dropped by 81% in 2024 compared to a year earlier. In Shanghai, where catering and accommodation data are combined, profits are estimated to have decreased by a third last year. Many restaurants have closed and sometimes abruptly.

Marketplace tried, without luck, to reach the former bosses of Camel group for comment.

The firm was established in 2010, when times were good.

“They were printing money back in the day,” Gouk said.

In a statement she obtained from the Camel group, the firm wrote it was a “difficult” decision to close all their venues but that “the current challenging market environment have made it unsustainable to continue.”

The firm’s procurement and sourcing manager Cathy Guo was part of the layoffs but still fronted calls from anxious and sometimes angry suppliers who blamed her for not giving them a warning before the closure.

“I had an emotional breakdown and cried for a long time when I picked up those phone calls,” she said. “[Camel boss Tony] should have come up with a proper plan, like negotiating with suppliers to pay them at a discounted rate and pay our workers [what they’re owed].”

Marketplace reached one of the vendors the Camel group owes money to, which was luckily not a large amount.

“It was something like 2000 yuan ($280) that was outstanding. So it wasn’t that much,” said Maria, who manufactures and distributes alcohol to restaurants.

Marketplace is not using her full name because she worries about official retaliation for speaking about the economy in less than glowing terms, which has happened to top economists in the country.

“I think it’s extremely hard to get people to dine out right now,” she said.

Hey everyone, 

Reema Khrais here, host of “This is Uncomfortable,” Marketplace’s podcast about life and how money messes with it. We’ve got new episodes coming your way this month! 

This week, I talked with two best friends who share a pretty remarkable story. Their journey touches on some of the biggest pressures Americans face today: exorbitant childcare costs, job burnout and the emotional toll of trying to hold it all together. At first, they tried to navigate it mostly alone –– until they realized their friendship could be a kind of lifeline.

Hanna Sanborn was a single mom with newborn twins, struggling to find affordable childcare. Her best friend, Bryer Rossi, was burned out at work and desperate for a change. It started as a joke: what if Bryer quit his job to take care of Hanna’s babies? They’d go on to craft a plan that not only helped them stay afloat, but created something more surprising, and more beautiful, than either of them expected. 

Their story resonated with me because it complicates what care can look like, especially in a country where so much of it is undervalued, unpaid or inaccessible. They created more than a workaround, they reimagined what it means to show up for each other when the systems designed to support us fall short. I don’t want to give away the ending, but I hope you’ll listen and let us know what you think. 

We’ve got three more episodes we’re sharing in May, including a story about a woman who left Hollywood to take a vow of poverty, and another about a couple whose search for a dream home exposed deeper rifts in how they handle money. We’re excited to share them with you all! And if you’ve got a story idea, or just want to drop a note, you can always reach us at uncomfortable@marketplace.org. 

— Reema 

Hundreds of thousands of workers rallied around the country this week for May Day, an international day of solidarity for workers worldwide.

Union organizer and balladeer Joe Hill once said, “A pamphlet, no matter how good, is never read more than once, but a song is learned by heart and repeated over and over.”

Tony Wagner wrote and edited this newsletter with Virginia K. Smith and Ellen Rolfes. Samantha Fields and Jennifer Pak reported our stories on American and Chinese restaurants, respectively.