Days before classes at Texas State University were set to begin this Fall semester, the owners and only workers at One To Fi, Chef Tommy and Fiona Zhou, were preparing their restaurant to serve the record breaking freshman class arriving that week.
They had finally opened their restaurant in the beginning of August after going through countless inspections and tedious amounts of work since the day they were handed the restaurant: they were eager to reap the rewards.
After finishing their prep, Tommy and Fiona were driving their way home to San Antonio when suddenly, minutes from their restaurant, they were struck by a car at high speed.
They ended up injured and incapable of opening their restaurant to the masses coming into town, causing financial loss and mental suffering. It’s been a tough year for Tommy and Fiona, yet they continue on with their mission to create a community safe-haven as well as providing good Asian food.
Who are To and Fi?
Residing in San Antonio, Chef Tommy and Fiona Zhou spent years trying to find a suitable place to open their newest endeavor. Tommy, a Hong-Kong native, wanted to provide flavors from Hong Kong mixing it with other Asian cuisine to create a taste that was rare in Central Texas when he first came to the US at age eleven.
“When I came to the states, a lot of the food wasn’t what I had expected when it came to finding food from my country,” explained Tommy. “You’d drive far to Chinatown, maybe Houston or Austin and you’d get your food over there that might not even taste like the real thing. I started to cook for myself because I wanted that taste back.” He also wanted to create a place where people could come sit down, hangout with friends, do school work and build community.
Fiona moved to the United States when she was sixteen and worked at her uncle’s restaurant. She worked in the restaurant industry for more than a decade then left to work in insurance and helped family friends with their bookkeeping including Mama Su, the owner of a traditional Taiwanese rice and noodle joint located in San Marcos called Taiwan Bowl.
When Fiona heard Mama Su was selling the restaurant, she told Tommy and drove an hour out to check it out. He ended up loving the place and decided that’s where he’d open up the newest authentic Asian-fusion restaurant in town.
That's One Tedious Journey
After closing Taiwan Bowl at the end of April, Mama Su passed the torch to Tommy and Fiona. They were energetic and ready to start their new journey and planned to open at the end of May, but instantly began running into issues. Due to the name change, the City of San Marcos required them to schedule inspections.
“You pay the money or whatever and everything should be working, but we changed the name,” Tommy explained. “You need to get a whole license. If I had kept the name, we could just keep running without shutting down.”
Tommy would drive an hour and a half out to face all of these problems every day until their grand opening in August.
There are six steps to open up a food business according to the City of San Marcos.
Tommy and Fiona had already finished the first four steps, which were to apply for a new certificate of occupancy, apply for a new fixed food permit and pay the permit fees for both of them.
The next step was the plan review stage where the city looks over the applications and other documents, which need to be cleared before booking inspections. Tommy and Fiona passed through this stage and were able to move on to the fifth step: schedule inspections.
There are three inspections One To Fi needs to pass in order to receive their permit: fire, health and building. Unfortunately on the first go around in the beginning of May, they failed everything except the health inspection, so they were left to pay the city for people to come in and work on these issues, which took a bit of time.
“It was a running business, so I had thought that everything should have passed with ease,” says Fiona.
Because Taiwan Bowl had been running right before they bought the business, Tommy and Fiona had thought the process would’ve been smoother for the inspections. To their disbelief, all three inspections had initially failed. Most of the problems stemmed from the building inspections.
“We started in May, and then we scheduled a 2nd appointment with them (the city government), which fell through,” said Fiona. “Then we had to call the technician guy to come over and fix things and then we had to schedule with the city again, which fell through and they ended up finding something else and we failed. We had to call another technician to fix the thing that we had failed.”
Tommy and Fiona had expressed their frustrations with the amount of government influence needed to sign off on certain aspects of building safety codes.
“Some of the technicians require a permit from the government before they can start doing their job,” said Fiona. “It’s easy (to fix), but the government needs you to follow the process to do it.”
Similar to the building inspection, the fire inspection also took a while
“This one took a long time,“ said Tommy. “I had to pay a lot of money to upgrade the system. I did not expect that at all.”
After getting the appropriate changes and updates done to the restaurant, they passed, which completes the sixth step. By finishing the lengthy process, Tommy and Fiona were able to obtain the Certificate of Occupancy and Food Permit and were able to open up their business at the start of August.
The Accident
Tommy and Fiona's car wreckage on E. Sessom, minutes from their restaurant.
Three weeks after their grand opening, Tommy and Fiona had been preparing for Texas State’s Bobcat Welcome Week, which had a record-breaking freshman class of nearly 9,400 students as well as returning scholars coming to San Marcos.
After a whole day of setting up One To Fi with a substantial amount of groceries and supplies to provide for the potential wave of new customers, Tommy and Fiona started their hour and a half drive back to San Antonio when a speeding sedan crashed into their car. Tommy had swerved to blunt the damages and saved their lives.
“We closed for three weeks,” said Tommy. “We had to throw everything away.”
After the incident, Tommy and Fiona have been trying to get back on their feet.
“We’re still doing therapy every Monday because of it,” said Fiona.
Outro
Despite the troublesome start of their restaurant, from a rocky transition of owners to a near-death experience, Tommy and Fiona persevere to provide San Marcos with an amazing mix of Asian flavors and a place for people to relax and socialize.
“People like a more chill vibe and this restaurant is about that,” Tommy explains. “I’ve been telling people that you can just come over and do your homework and chill.”