Nayomie Mendoza

Owner, Cuernavaca's Grill

Food & Beverage | Downtown Los Angeles

Cuernavaca's Grill is a second-generation restaurant that has anchored the L.A. Fashion District for more than 20 years. The district runs on immigrant and Latino creativity, from food to fashion to floral design, and the restaurant was built by the owner's father to be a place where the kitchen felt like home.

On June 6, 2025, the first raid in the district hit one of the restaurant's customers, a neighboring garment business that had held a corporate catering contract with Cuernavaca's for more than five years. That contract disappeared. In the first week after the raid, foot traffic fell 80 percent. The fear did not stop at legal status. The owner, a U.S. citizen who has run the business for two decades, described the district feeling eerie, worrying about profiling and whether the team would get home safely.

"The first raid in the Fashion District hit one of our own customers. That first week, our foot traffic dropped by 80 percent. People weren't gone because they didn’t want to dine with us. They were gone because they were afraid to be on the street."

Across the district, multi-generational businesses laid off staff or closed, and the stack of resumes at the surviving shops grew thicker. To protect their own team, the owners drove employees home, let anyone who felt unsafe stay home with food delivered to them, and terminated the lease on a second location in Bell after it was raided five times in a single week. They did not lay anyone off.

What kept the jobs was revenue the restaurant could reach without foot traffic. Government contracts and catering for the major global events coming to Los Angeles carried the business through. Costs still climbed, with basic ingredients like tomatoes sometimes running triple the normal price, and neighboring owners began recommending each other's shops just to keep orders flowing.

"When Governor Newsom came to see the district for himself, we made two sales the whole day. I had never seen numbers that low. My neighbor told him he hadn't had a single sale all week. That's what this has done to a district that used to be too busy to find parking."

When Governor Newsom visited the restaurant to see the district's reality firsthand, it recorded only two sales that day, and the business next door had not made a single sale all week. The owner's central ask is funding that legacy businesses can actually access. Grants exist, but the process is often too tedious or too poorly communicated to reach the businesses that need them.