“It was their lifelong dream for their daughter to go to Chapel Hill and for them to have a restaurant, and they just weren’t quite sure what they were buying,” said Tom Scheidler, who was an owner of Top This! until April and a manager until November.
After buying the restaurant in late April while they still lived in Mexico, the couple kept Scheidler on to run the day-to-day operations and hired a translator, Paola Audisio, to help with language barriers.
Audisio said the turning point came when Alvarez and Rios realized the business had lost $60,000 in an eight-month period and wouldn’t be able to recoup the losses.
“They just wanted to give their daughter a good life in America, but it’s very different from Mexico,” Audisio said. “The language was definitely a problem, and they didn’t know anything about restaurants.”
UNC student Sophie Capshaw-Mack started working at Top This! as a cashier at the beginning of her sophomore year.
“The owners were always absent,” she said. “Whenever they would come in, they were always nice, but we never spoke with them firsthand.”
Capshaw-Mack said she and other employees left due to discontent with management and that the owners were unaware of the personnel problems.
“Because they had just moved to America, they really just put all their trust in Tom and never knew what was actually going on until it was too late,” she said.
