A variety of training programs are bubbling up in Queens to help the culinary entrepreneurs start up food businesses.
The Queens Chamber of Commerce is offering a free Restaurant Boot Camp in Spanish on Monday in Astoria to help aspiring entrepreneurs navigate often confusing city regulations, secure funding and avoid costly fines.
The Entrepreneur Space, a business incubator in Long Island City, also has five-week courses on how to set up food businesses on the cheap in the borough.
Jacqueline Donado, a chamber coordinator who helped to organize the boot camp, said the sessions have become “very popular” with would-be restaurateurs.
“People are looking for information,” she said. “These seminars are like preventions on how to avoid large fines.”
The sessions, which are run jointly with the city Department of Small Business Services, are also held in English and Korean.
Kathrine Gregory, head of the Entrepreneur Space, said she mostly works with aspiring small business owners looking to start catering companies or sell to groceries and farmers markets.
She teaches students how to establish viable businesses before opening brick-and-mortar locations. This allows them to test their products and secure start-up capital down the line, she said.
Gregory said Queens is fertile ground for new food businesses.
“You’ve got such a strong ethnic population in Queens,” she said. “And ethnic foods that are brought to the mainstream are going to be the future.”
Stephen Zagor, director of management programs at the Institute of Culinary Education in Manhattan, said the number of students attending the institute’s food entrepreneurial program triple over the last decade.
“When people lose their jobs, they decide now is the chance to open the bakery or pizzeria they’ve always wanted,” he said. “People seem to have this closet ambition of opening a food business.”
But he cautioned that about a third of all new food businesses fail within the first year.
“Once you pass the first year … the survival rate is much higher,” he said .
Rosa Figueroa, director of the Small Business Development Center at LaGuardia Community College, said she’s seeing fewer aspiring entrepreneurs — and more existing business owners coming in for help to stay afloat.
“Across the board you have numbers of small businesses that are struggling,” Figueroa said. “No one will give them a loan.”
