We recently connected with Michel Meza and have shared our conversation below.
Michel , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s jump to the end – what do you want to be remembered for?
We definitely want to create a place where people feels like home, there wasn’t any restaurant with a concept 100% Venezuelan in Charlotte before us and our goal is to show how much we have to offer as a culture, taking advantage of the great ethnic diversity in this town. When we think in the future, We’d love people to think in us like that the place where they love to go for a coffee, a meal or a beer and feel like if they’re at their second home, the place that comes to their mind when they think in Venezuela or simply where they’d just like to be.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers
We love to say We’re a little bit of Venezuela in Charlotte. There’re more Venezuelan place all around the country everyday but we wanna make a difference, so we take the traditional Venezuelan base and add little touches of different cultures to get a new concept of Venezuelan cuisine. For example we fused the traditional Japanese plate “Por Belly Buns” whit the “Arepa” to get something nobody else got before, the “Pork Belly Arepas” with a simply and amazing result. You also can find the “Short Rib Asado Negro”, “Asado Negro is a traditional Venezuelan dish created for Christmas holidays, is originally made with the meat cut called Eye Round but we decided to fuse it with a little bit of the American culture and make it with Short Rib which is a cut increasingly popular in American taste. The idea is to create something that you can have only with us. Problems? We have go thru a lot of problems everyday since the very beginning, is the first time that all of us (the owners) are involved in the food industry and we didn’t have any idea of the business, but without any doubt, the two biggest have been the investment with the increasing inflation we’re experiencing and the fact of it takes some time to build rapport in the community. We never wanted to open a Venezuelan restaurant only for Venezuelan folks but for world citizens without regards of nationalities but certainly, Venezuelan people were expected to be our first guests, and keeping in mind that we come from a country with a totally different and crazy economy, where a traditional dish like “Pabellon” can have a price of 5-6 dollars, when they come here to find the same place costs 3 times that price, is shocking for them and it becomes necessary to explain how different is the economy in here and the most expensive item is human resources, we live in a post pandemic world and people don’t want to earn less than $15 an hour, so the most of the income goes to payroll. Another issue is related to the lack of experience, we though we’re ready to open on July 15th but when we finally called Health Department for inspections and permit, they let us know we were still missing a few thing to open complying the public health requirements, so we spent two more months improving the place to comply with those requirements, but that meant 2 more month paying essential staff, repair costs and a lot of expenses without any income, if we wouldn’t have the backup of resources, we would be in bankruptcy before opening.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
My dad was a business man in Venezuela since I can remember, we’re a mid class regular family dedicated to family business, with Chavez government we had a few good years but then the economy started to drop incredibly quick to the point we only kept a couple properties but no any money so we decided it was time to migrate in search for a better future for our children, I arrived to charlotte with no idea how my future would be, I started to work for DH Griffin Demolition Company as a labor without knowing how to even grab a slash hammer, worked there for a year till I felt that my stage in there had ended and it was time to continue growing, I spoke with the managers because I never wanted to left the door closed behind me and went to an electrical company to learn a new job that I was never related to either worked in there for six months, made good friends and learned a lot from people who have been electricians for a lifetime and then a great opportunity showed up and went to work on a Kia dealership also great people, they taught me a lot of selling techniques, human nature and goal accomplishing, my english improved in ways I never imagined, learned a lot of english slang, a lot of new words, spoke with people of a lot of countries, I had to deal with people who told me if they’d buy a car, it would be from an American instead a nasty immigrant and with people who made me feel like family, and finally the day arrived, my cousin, who have lived in America for more than 20 years, decided to open a restaurant as a second business and he needed someone willed to make whatever needed to make this real and here we’re.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
I’d have to unlearn to take anything for granted. My parents stayed in Venezuela in the meantime me and my sisters moved here to get settled to bring them here, after fighting against legal obstacles like the mess of getting a new passport which isn’t an easy thing in Venezuela due to the price, bureaucracy and corruption, We were finally ready to bring them, mom was aware they’re coming to stay with us but dad didn’t know because he always said he wanted to die in the same place he was born, and as soon as they arrived on Sept 15th 2021, both of them got the covid, for dad was a strong flu but mom’s oxygen dropped drastically on the night of Sept 21 and I took her to the hospital, the immediately got her in ICU and she fought hard to lose the battle on Oct 31st at 6 am, the last she told me was a text message saying she didn’t see she was moving forward, and it breaks my heart because I took for granted that after all those sacrifices, we’d enjoy a lot of years together. dead is always unexpected, but we never realize it until it’s too late.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.loschamosclt.com
- Instagram: @loschamosclt
- Facebook: Los Chamos Clt
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/los-chamos-charlotte
Image Credits
One of them was took by the Axios Charlotte magazine, the rest of them were took by us