Her Restaurant Breaks All the Rules, and Thrives

“We have three Dumpsters outside our restaurant,” says a Salt Lake City restaurateur who manages a branch of a $28 million seafood chain (and who asked to remain anonymous). “After weekends, they are filled to the brim with garbage, at least half of which is food.” At One World Everybody Eats, on the other hand, by the end of an average night, there’s a quarter of a 10-gallon can of garbage and one or two five-gallon buckets of food scraps, which are composted at a nearby community garden that also serves as a site for educational programs. Cerreta says it’s the savings from this lack of waste that enables the restaurant to be self-sustaining.

A curvy woman with luminous hazel eyes and a broad smile, Cerreta had zero experience running a restaurant when she jumped into the food business. She’d moved to Salt Lake City to open an acupuncture clinic in 1997,
after studying acupuncture and herbal remedies at the International Institute of Chinese Medicine, in Santa Fe. The clinic was very successful: She saw from 20 to 25 clients a day and made good money. But, at 41, after running the business for five years, she “hit a spiritual glass ceiling,” she says. She’d come to believe that most of her patients were lonely rather than ill. “Loneliness is an undiagnosed disease in this country, and I wanted to change that,” she says. A café where customers could socialize seemed like a worthwhile enterprise.

In 2002, with no idea what she was getting into, Cerreta opened a small coffee and sandwich shop in the
building that housed her clinic. She called it Smoochy’s One World 7-10, envisioning it as a healthy alternative to 7-Eleven stores. She hired five people and funneled all the profits from her acupuncture practice into running the shop. Six months into the venture, however, the shop wasn’t attracting enough customers to cover costs.

Realizing that she couldn’t run two businesses at the same time, she folded the clinic, let the coffee shop staff go and ran Smoochy’s herself. She opened an hour earlier than before, hoping to bring in more customers. “I hon­estly wasn’t sure what was coming next. It was like throwing myself down the Grand Canyon,” she says. For the next four months, she struggled, doing all the food preparation, shopping and cleaning. She maxed out her credit cards and could barely pay her rent. Then came the lowest point: Her car was repossessed. Concerned friends told her she was crazy to keep the shop going. Still, Cerreta was positive that food was somehow in her destiny.