Our group for our first story decided to focus on the Asian restaurants within SLO county. A large part of our little town is dedicated to the food atmosphere different restaurants have. That being said, it’s pretty obvious that the diversity of food in SLO isn’t amazing, and we wanted to find out why. As a group, we figured out what makes the town of San Luis Obispo even whiter than it already is and were told some key things as to why the food here mainly revolves around sandwiches.
We got the idea from one of our group members, Katherine, who works at a local Vietnamese restaurant, @Bites. She was chatting with one of the chefs at the restaurant, curious about why some of the food is so much more expensive than if you were to go somewhere in the Bay area. The chef explained that in order to get the food necessary to make quality and authentic food, they had to pay extra to import the needed ingredients from LA to SLO because they don’t already exist up here. So, we decided to dive deeper and see if that was an issue with other Asian restaurants too.
Turns out, he wasn’t wrong. After chatting with Mee Heng Low, Papas Thai, and Lotus, they all reported having the same issue. Alexandra Ngyuen from Lotus said, “The ingredients that we order from distributors that come from LA to here, the cost has gone up and the quality has diminished also”. So, once we found out that this issue was the same in most Asian restaurants, we wrote up the story.
If I’m being honest, the start to this story was a little rough. According to Erica, one of our group members, “ reporting on this story was a bit of a challenge at first, but once we were able to find the right sources, things came together.” And she was right! Finding sources was not easy to do simply because of the language barrier. However, once we got the sources, everything got much better. According to Katherine, another member of our group, “Restaurant owners love to talk so it wasn’t too hard getting them to talk about the topic. The interviews also showed a light on other issues that the restaurants were affected by as well, so that will be included in the story.”
If anything, this story was really fun to research. According to Joey, another group member, “It was very interesting to learn how these businesses are run through our reporting process. We learned that being in San Luis Obispo provides certain obstacles to these restaurant owners which I think readers will clearly see through our story.”
As for me, I thought the best part of this story was how little reporting there has been done on it in general. I looked up as many things as I could about the Asian restaurants in SLO, but had a hard time really finding anything that relates to the difficulty in finding ingredients.
Overall, while the story was difficult to get started, it was definitely worthwhile. There needs to be more of an understanding for restaurants like these and if more people know why the food is a little more expensive, then hopefully there will be more overall support. The SLO community isn’t super large, so we might as well uplift every part of it as best we can.