Matthew Moore: Reese Roberts comes from a family of food industry workers. Her grandmother owned a bed-and-breakfast. Her mother worked in restaurants, sometimes alongside Reese, and her father worked in many different kitchens over the years.
Today, she is the co-owner of Leverett Lounge and Sidecar Cocktail Lounge in Fayetteville. In 2020, she was the general manager for Bordinos when COVID-19 hit.
Reese Roberts: In March of 2020, we all of a sudden had to close down all of our restaurants, and so there are four restaurant operators in town that just happen to get on the phone with each other. And that was me and Elliot Hunt from Atlas and Hannah Withers, who was at Leverett Lounge at the time, and Chrissy Sanderson from Mockingbird Kitchen.
We all had to lay off of all of our staff, and we were really concerned about people being able to pay rent. And so I went to the Dickson Street merchants and asked them if they could help me set up a trust, and we started crowdsourcing people’s rent within seven days of having to lay everybody off.
Moore: And that was the launch of the Fayetteville Independent Restaurant Alliance.
Roberts: Can I tell a story about kind of where this fund came from and the inspiration for it? So for as long as I can remember working in restaurants, there’s always — I do think that restaurant folks have a tendency not to ask for help and really try to figure it out on their own. But I also have seen restaurant folks be incredibly generous, and in my experience, kind of the inspiration for this fund came from our collective experience of being in a situation where someone has an emergency or has cash stolen out of their purse right before rent is due, or has a death in the family.
And I’ve seen lots of teams just pass around an envelope of cash and add cash to it until the need is covered. So I’ve worked in a lot of restaurants where that was the norm. If someone had an emergency, you just showed up for your team member and everybody threw in $20 if they could. And that’s really like the spirit of the Hero Fund.
Moore: In 2020, it seems like a pretty easy ask. It was very evident that there was a crisis going on. I think it was very clear that there was an emergency and a need. Did it feel easier to ask in 2020 than it does now? Here in 2025?
Roberts: Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think the sentiment has shifted a bit. We just tend to be, as restaurant workers, a little bit behind the times. Like we don’t typically have as many options to access whenever a crisis occurs. I think that people are fatigued by tipping and maybe don’t quite understand why people need help, but the need is still there.
We very much have. Applications are on the rise again. We’re probably at three-quarters the level of assistance requests that we were receiving during COVID and the height of COVID when everything was closed. And I think that we’ve seen a lot of people that work in positions that don’t rely on tips, like in the back of house, move out of town due to the housing crisis in Fayetteville. I mean, it’s hard to measure exactly, but we can feel that there’s an urgent need there.
Moore: The Fayetteville Independent Restaurant Alliance is a nonprofit 501(c)(3), and donations made to the Alliance are tax-deductible. Roberts says there are many community members who donate something up to $50 a month.
Roberts: That is honestly great for the fund. It helps sustain it long term. It’s not a huge ask, but it does provide some security for us whenever someone falls on hard times or they don’t quite have enough to cover the gap whenever something happens.
We do have restaurant memberships. So if you are an operator of a bar or restaurant, we have an option for a $400 a year, $35 a month membership, and we will offer unlimited job postings and some collaborative posting and just check in and support however we can.
Aside from that, we do have an NWA partners membership option that we just launched. It’s the same rate as our restaurant and bar options, but it’s for anybody that’s like maybe not exactly a restaurant or a bar but does care about the cause, that wants to commit and make a pledge that they’re going to do that every year.
Moore: Tell me maybe one of the stories that sticks out to you from someone who has been able to survive off of this, who’s been able to keep their housing because of the work that you and the other members are doing.
Roberts: We do have an applicant that we’ve helped consistently over the past year whose name is Mike. He has worked as a line cook for, you know, as long as we can remember. And last year he had an injury to his foot and ended up having an infection and had to get his foot amputated.
So he obviously cannot line cook and hasn’t been in a position to really do much while he has recovered from that surgery and going through physical therapy and trying to get approved for his prosthetic. I mean, that experience for him, that application process took — I think he just got his prosthetic like three to four weeks ago. And this originally started in May of last year.
So we have helped bridge the gap for him. Our average payout or request is like $700. People aren’t asking for more than they need. That’s one case where I’m not sure he didn’t have unemployment — enough unemployment — coming through. He’s been back and forth trying to get disability. That process is really extensive, and if you don’t have an attorney on your side, it can be really hard. And that’s definitely a person that I don’t think would have stayed housed if we weren’t able to help.
Moore: Do you have an idea of how many people you have helped so far?
Roberts: I just wrote our 199th check two days ago.
Moore: Wow. That’s meaningful.
Roberts: Yeah, it’s a lot. So we’ve paid out almost — a little bit over — $127,000 since we first started the fund. This year, we have paid out over $26,000. I believe in 2020, between March and December, we paid out about $43,000. So, I mean, it’s a pretty substantial amount of money. And right now we’re just behind on fundraising, and we have people that really need our help right now.
Moore: Is it weird to be thinking about this sort of need and necessity and all of this while you’re also simultaneously — you’ve launched a new venture that’s growing, and you’re seeing this sort of personal growth, you’re seeing this sort of business growth, while simultaneously being extremely mindful of the temper mentality of the people working in your industry here in your city?
Roberts: Yeah, I mean, it does. It goes hand in hand. And we really work hard to keep our staff as employed as we can keep them even through the slow months. I mean, we always joke about the months with the J being so hard. That is one thing that hits really hard for me right now is that we’re all coming out of slow season, and this is the moment where everybody gets out of the red again, including the staff.
So seeing folks out of a job in that month where — I mean, this is about where it’s the hardest before that paycheck hits — I really feel like it’s all kind of the same organism in a way. We just — I mean, that’s one thing that I think is so cool about Fayetteville is we have these small business owners that are willing to invest time and energy into doing it a little bit better than we experienced as employees whenever we were working at a burger joint at 16 or whatever.
So, I mean, it can be difficult, but it’s informative in its own way.
Moore: I think about — I’m a parent, I believe you’re a parent as well, right? I think about how the things that I grew up with, I want to change. There are some things about how I grew up and the ways that I was parented I want to change. I imagine you’re probably similar in that way. Do you think about that in terms of how you grew up in restaurants to now — you are a restaurant owner. You get to change some of the norms and behaviors that happen in this way, perhaps hopefully for the betterment of everybody.
Roberts: Yeah, I think about that all the time. And I do — people that haven’t ever worked in the industry before, sometimes people talk to me about The Bear. And The Bear — for people that have worked in a high-pressure environment in the industry before — The Bear’s a little triggering. Like, I have to be in a happy place with multiple beverages and a very fuzzy blanket to make it through an episode of The Bear.
I am really grateful that that’s not really an acceptable work dynamic anymore, and I really appreciate — it can be challenging to work with different generations of people that need different things, but I really do appreciate that folks that are coming up in the industry now have been shown that you can expect a safe and happy place to work. And I think most employers, at least independently owned restaurants in Fayetteville, I see a lot of employers working really hard to provide that for people.
Moore: Over the course of these five years, what has given you hope through this work?
Roberts: Oh, the fact that Fayetteville always shows up. I don’t think Fayetteville has ever failed to show up.
Moore: Reese Roberts joined me earlier this week in the Bruce and Ann Applegate News Studio 2. You can learn more about the Fayetteville Independent Restaurant Alliance on Instagram at @fayettevilleira.
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