During COVID, Carmen Kept Serving

Ask Carmen what the hardest moment of her whole business life has been, and she answers right away. "When the cash flow wasn't enough." That was the pandemic. Sitting in the shop in September 2026, she talked us through those years, including one decision she is still proud of.

Two restaurants closed, a shop open two hours a day

Besides Fosetter, Carmen runs restaurants in Chinatown. When the pandemic hit, the restaurants were completely shut and nobody was allowed to come in and eat. The ginseng shop could only open for two hours a day, and even then, there was hardly any point. "There was really nobody here. Not even a shadow of a person," she says. "A gust of wind would blow through, whoosh, and the rubbish would roll down the street. Like a ghost town in a movie."

Help from the government, paid back fast

She gives the Canadian government credit for how it handled things. Employees had their own government support, which stopped once they went back to work. For business owners, there was an interest-free loan of forty thousand dollars per store. She no longer remembers whether it had to be repaid in two, three or four years. "Because we paid it back very quickly," she says.

The first year, everyone was anxious. Then there was the stock. Health products have expiry dates, and the shop ended up throwing out tens of thousands of dollars' worth of them.

The battle she says they fought well

Then comes the decision. Around Chinatown, some restaurants took the subsidies and then opened only now and then, or shut early in the day. Carmen saw a risk in that. "If your customers are used to eating at your place, and during the pandemic you stop serving them, then when you want to do business again there is a gap," she says. "They have already got used to somewhere else. They have built a relationship with someone else."

So her restaurants did not step back. Apart from about three months when closing was mandatory, they kept serving. A friend helped set up group chats and collect orders, and the team switched to deliveries and group buying, which you can read more about in Winter Roads Are Icy, So We Deliver.

"The road the other restaurants took, we didn't take," she says. "They have a gap. We don't." Then she sums it up. "This battle, we fought quite beautifully."

Who she thanks

When we asked how she got through it all, her first answer was simple. "Here I really have to thank my best girlfriend." Her landlords, the suppliers who, as she puts it, act as her eyes, her business partners and her family are all on the same list. "Without them, there would be no me," she says.

Fosetter is still at 78 Rue De La Gauchetière Ouest, and you can read how the shop itself began on our About us page.