One of LA’s only lesbian bars had to close because of the fires. Here’s how they hope to reopen.
One of LA’s only lesbian bars had to close because of the fires. Here’s how they hope to reopen.
Two years ago, Emily Bielagus and Mara Herbkersman opened up the Ruby Fruit, a wine bar and restaurant. It was Los Angeles’ first lesbian bar in six years, after the last one closed in 2017. Right now, there are only 34 lesbian bars across the United States, including the Ruby Fruit, according to the Lesbian Bar Project. That’s down from about 200 lesbian bars in the 1980s.
In 2023, “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal spoke with Bielagus and Herbkersman about how they decided to open the Ruby Fruit together, why there are so few lesbian bars, and the struggle to obtain capital as women starting their business. As a result, they opened with no reserves.
About a month ago, they announced on Instagram that “operating The Ruby Fruit is no longer possible due to financial impact from the current natural disaster.” But Bielagus and Herbkersman hope this is a “pause,” not a permanent closure, as they told Ryssdal when he visited the Ruby Fruit last week. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Kai Ryssdal: How did you come to the decision to pause? The way I read the post on social was the fires were a bad thing that happened, but it had been sort of a series of events.
Emily Bielagus: Yeah, you know, when you lose a week of sales, which we did because of the fires, there was no money coming in. And for us, because we have no reserves. I mean, when no money comes in, you don’t have any money.
Mara Herbkersman: And things started to get tricky for us when the Hollywood strikes were an issue in LA, and that was the first moment that we were starting to see issues, fall 2023. And our first year, we were really fortunate, and we kind of rode the wave of opening excitement. And the money that we made our first year, we were able to pay off the business, which was very graciously funded by the previous owners. But paying that off coincided with the strikes happening, and we saw slow down in restaurants all over Los Angeles. This wasn’t a Ruby Fruit problem. This was a Los Angeles restaurant economy problem.
Ryssdal: Before any of this happened, between the strikes and the fires, how were you guys doing? I don’t come down here a lot, but when I drive by during your business hours, it seems pretty crowded.
Herbkersman: Yeah, I mean overall it was really great. We have a really amazing community following, and we are really fortunate to have a very dedicated clientele.
Bielagus: But again, I think it’s hard to overstate just how dependent we are on every single dollar that every single person who comes in here spends. And some days our sales are truly down to the dollar in order to break even.
Ryssdal: Which translates into margins, right?
Herbkersman: Yeah, exactly. Labor is expensive as it should be, because people should get paid what they’re worth, of course. But the cost of food, the cost of rent, the cost of utilities, all these things are really expensive right now. People feel it when they go to the grocery store, it’s no different for us.
Ryssdal: This is none of my business, and you should never take business advice from me, but why aren’t you selling cocktails?
Herbkersman: We would love to get a full liquor license, and that has been cost prohibitive for us.
Ryssdal: How much does a liquor license cost?
Herbkersman: Well, first of all, you can’t just go and buy one. There’s a certain amount that are available, and so you have to find one. And between the fees and how much they cost, that can easily run you $150,000 if you’re lucky. But also, that doesn’t even cover how the bar needs to be modified in order to accommodate the possibility of serving cocktails.
Ryssdal: So what’s the plan? What are you going to do? Because the place is still here. The lights are literally still on. You’ve paused, but how are you going to get somewhere?
Herbkersman: Well, I think the first thing to note is that we have obligations, right? We have a lease, but we hope to reopen. We hope that this is a step for us to take a minute and sort of regroup and assess what was going really well and what we needed to fix in order to move forward.
Ryssdal: Okay, so let’s interrogate that for a second. What was going really well? You had a community, right?
Bielagus: Yep, community engagement. And I think this speaks to the next part of like, what we need to address in order to move forward, the space and the community and the needs of all of that became, I think, so much larger than we thought. If you look around around, there’s about 30 seats here. So there’s that, there’s physical space. But then there’s also this sort of need, when a thing you built immediately sort of outgrows what you can offer.
Ryssdal: That’s such a good problem to have!
Herbkersman: It is, but now the biggest piece of this puzzle is money. This is marketplace after all. We started with nothing, and in order to grow, we need more money behind us, and so we are right now looking for an investor or some sort of financial backing to help us bring this, you know, larger project now to fruition.
Ryssdal: You’re not necessarily only looking for investment and interest from your community, right?
Herbkersman: Yeah, I think it’s important to note that the Ruby Fruit cannot ride on the backs of a marginalized community, and it is necessary that we offer seats at the table to folks outside of our community so that they can support a queer space.
Ryssdal: What’s your biggest worry?
Bielagus: Oh my gosh. That’s a great question. I have like 4,000 that pop up that I don’t even want to get into. There’s the state of things in this country right now and globally. I think my biggest worry is that we will not be able to put all of these pieces together. And pardon my use of like a very tired old cliche, but it’s like this chicken or the egg thing, where I don’t know what part needs to happen first.
Herbkersman: And I think my biggest worry is the time constraints, because we are really on very limited time frame here. We ultimately probably only have till the end of March.
Ryssdal: That’s like, tomorrow.
Herbkersman: You’re right, yeah. So that’s the thing that worries me most. I know that we can garner support from our community. I know that we can somehow find this money. But I’m worried that we can’t do all of these things in time.
Ryssdal: Here’s a very practical question: How are you doing it? Are you just leveraging your contacts and saying, do you know anybody with a quarter million dollars?
Herbkersman: I mean, we have a lot of folks who have reached out to us to offer support, and so we are reaching out to our community and asking for help in ways that we have not asked for before. I think Emily and I have been a little bit stubborn and sort of we can handle this ourselves. And that is simply just not true any longer, and so we need help. And that’s what we’re doing right now, is reaching out for help.
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