We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Linda Moncur a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Linda, thanks for joining us today. What was it like going from idea to execution? Can you share some of the backstory and some of the major steps or milestones?

Started 2019, I began looking into food business, I wanted to open a vegan restaurant.
I’m a Taiwanese, moved to America in 2011, got married the same year, started working in an optometry office as an optician in 2012, became a mother in 2014,
While I still have my full time job, I spent a lot of time after work on research, gathering information I need, such as what do you need & how to open a restaurant, where to find the equipment & ingredients suppliers, locations, and how to apply for loans.
I visited my friends who own restaurants,
I talked to restaurant owners when I eat in one,
I had sections with business advisors,
I had a good source of people from the relationship I builded as an optometry manager/optician,
I talked to many people about my dream and my plans, and I’d get referrals to more people who are related or have the information I was looking for,
I read posts on social media everyday, from there you can also catch many information and have connection with the people in the food business field.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

My Favorite Place plant based cuisine established in 2019, running by chef Linda & her husband Brett. It all started with a simple wish: to see the smile on people’s satisfied faces after tasting Linda’s food. Your chef Linda known as a foodie ever since she was a kid. She vowed not to harm or eat animals since she was 13. Moved in to a temple in Taiwan since age of 15-25, from there she learned skills in kitchen and cooked for groups of visitors & people who lived in temple. Love watching cooking shows growing up, and passionate to turn famous dish’s recipes into vegan style. It brings us great joy to serve plant based cuisine to everyone vegan or not. The incredible flavors created by a heart of determination, is a taste that can win your heart. Day by day working in the kitchen, to be honest it could be very tiring with all the labor work, and the long hours of standing, but every single time when we see customer’s happy faces, the smile, hear the compliments, right the way it always makes the work 100% worth of effort, our heart would just filled of joy. It’s our fuel to keep us going, push us forward.
My Favorite Place has different menus, and many different dishes to fit any occasions, and to meet your needs. We have beloved popular Taiwanese cuisine, stir fry dishes, rice and noodles, bentos, dumplings and wontons; street foods such as plant based popcorn chicken, king oyster mushrooms bites, and authentic boba teas.
With all the yummy foods we provide for our customers since 2019 to today 2024, we do not have a brick and mortar restaurant, not yet.
We currently doing popups, going different events in different locations across LA & OC in Southern California.
We also have our own group of people who followed us on an App called LINE, from there we’d post the dates and the items we are selling, then customers place orders on it. We’d deliver to a certain meetup spot, for customers to pickup.
We have a website too for customers to place orders online. We cater too.
As of today, September 2024, Chef Linda still working in an optometry office part time, 3 days a week. Other days in the week running My Favorite Place. Our current step is in a process of building our food trailer, a mobile restaurant, we’re going to doing our business full time and serve our customers with some regular locations in different cities in 2025. So that customers can come to us everyday knowing the exact locations and times that we’d be open.
Our next step and the ultimate goal is to open a brick and mortar restaurant. Yes, we’re small and humble people, we do not have a bunch of income from our regular jobs, we do not have money support from family, we do not have funds from anywhere, we tried and tried but no banks would give us loans for people like us who never owned a restaurant before and to start a restaurant.
Therefore, Linda & Brett both work for their jobs while running My Favorite Place the same time. Throughout these years, we patiently build our customer base, and slowly saving up for our future restaurant.
To saved up money is not easy and it takes a long time with not much growth saving in the past years. We started in 2019, then Covid hit in 2020, all kind of business were shutdown worldwide. Lucky for us, while there’s no restaurants open, that gave us a great chance to spread out our Group Buy/ App & online orders. We deliver foods at the meetup spot as a Drive Thru for customers to pickup, customers love this idea & method, it’s contact free order& pickup. October 2021 we then started our popups, however, popup events don’t really give us much profit, many times we didn’t even make money out of it, but always LOVE to connect with customers though. Continue in July 2022 chef Linda was diagnosed with breast cancer, she had 5 surgeries in about 1 and half years of time. So business was on and off, she had surgery and rest to recover, coming back to cook for her beloved customers, and surgery and repeat, there’s one more surgery coming in the end of 2024.
Questions people often asked:
Are we making any money? Well, truth to be told, not really.
Aren’t you tired of working 2 jobs while fighting cancer? Well, we have to, we need our regular jobs to keep certain income to support our family expenses, medical bills, since our business is not profitable for us to support the living costs plus to save up for our future restaurant.
Why are you not give up? We won’t quit and we’ll not give up our dream. To serve people with our delicious dishes is our biggest wish. It might sounded silly to you, but it really is our passion and is our great joy to make people happy by enjoying our cuisine. All our dishes are cooked, created with all our love, we poured our hearts and soul into them. You have to try it, let us feed you, and you’ll understand.
We want you to know, we are dreamers, we are believers, and we will manifest. We built from ground up, we walked with our feet and hands, we took steps one by one, we overcome difficulties, and we will reach our goal sooner, with your help and support.

We’d love to hear about how you keep in touch with clients.

I see my customers as my friends. I try to remember faces, I try to know them, talk to customers whenever I can. Either I ask for their names and memorize them, or I will see who LIKED my posts on social media or tagged us on their posts, then remember this customer’s name for the future and message customer with appreciation.
I am open to chat / messages with customers in social apps or social media.
Truly be friends with them and they’ll show up with support.

Do you sell on your site, or do you use a platform like Amazon, Etsy, Cratejoy, etc?

I definitely use Instagram and Facebook to post our news. I also post for Group Buy not only on Instagram and Facebook, also mainly on a messaging App called LINE.
Group Buy means I post a delivery date and the items I am selling for that date, then customers will respond to put in their orders. On the delivery date, we will be at a meetup location for drive thru pickup. Customers pay after order is placed via Zelle, Venmo, or PayPal. It called Group Buy because this only applies for a bulk order from many customers, with select limited items. Not accepting individual customized orders.
For example, I give 4 flavors of bento options, and different customers order the flavors & quantities of bentos they want. I gather total orders about 50 -70 bentos, or the amount I can do, then I end the order so customers won’t continue ordering. It’s always a group of people ordering that’s why it’s called a group buy.
I recommend this way because it’s an app that many Asian people use (like other common apps such as WeChat, What’s App, KakaoTalk), different platforms use on different groups of people.
Using App for business is a very easy way to communicate and connect with your customers. For the orders they pay you directly via money transfer apps, so save your fee on credit card transactions.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://myfavoriteplace.me
• Instagram: @mfpplantbased
• Facebook: @mfp.plantbased
• Yelp: https://yelp.to/CzL_wm9K95
• Other: LINE:
  https://lin.ee/LNJByBW

Image Credits

N/A