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New York restaurant owners with an immigrant background receive support from viral TikToker

Pepper-laced clouds of smoke lure residents to Irie Jerk seven days a week in Brooklyn, New York. The small Jamaican restaurant on Nostrand Avenue fits perfectly with the simple, hole-in-the-wall aesthetic that locals love to visit.

Owner and chef Niki Gordon tends two sizzling grills all day long. She said her little business is doing so well that she sells an average of about 400 pounds of jerk chicken a day, compared to just a few dozen pounds a day last year.

“I have customers from Singapore, California and London,” Gordon said. “I mean, these people flew here just to get my chicken.”

Gordon is just the latest New York City business owner to go viral thanks to content creator Nicolas Nuvan.

Nuvan, 29, has built a following of over 2.3 million people on TikTok. Nuvan posts his travels through the boroughs of New York City and creates profiles of anyone who wants to talk to him. Interviewees include small business owners, street vendors, and even regular passersby.

“It's just me and my videographer Jaime, and we almost never have a plan,” Nuvan said. “Sometimes we walk 30 blocks and nothing happens. And sometimes we go out and walk around and something happens.”

His videos mainly focus on Caribbean communities, especially in Brooklyn and Queens.

“I’m just someone who is interested in cultures and communities and likes to share with people,” Nuvan said.

This curiosity even took Nuvan abroad and he traveled to Trinidad and Tobago and Grenada to expand his interview series.

After a brief career in HR, Nuvan turned to video making, which was once just a hobby for him.

“I've been making videos for 10 years, since I was a kid,” said Nuvan, whose impromptu street interviews are inspired by his childhood in New Jersey and New York.

“I'm really just trying to recreate what I experienced as a kid,” said Nuvan, who was born in Colombia. “I remember growing up and everyone just going outside and hanging out with whoever was outside. And I think the beauty of it is that there's a certain spontaneity to it.”

The videos are part of the recent evolution of “FoodTok” trends, following South Korea’s mukbang craze and the “Keith Lee effect” that went viral in 2022. On TikTok, creators like Lee and now Nuvan have used their influence to highlight small family restaurants, small shopfronts and undiscovered gems.

“When we grow up, we idolize famous people,” Nuvan said. But it is Gordon and other ordinary people who do extraordinary things, he added, “who we should learn from.”

Gordon's eatery, Irie Jerk, is located in the center of a bustling neighborhood with people from across the Caribbean diaspora.

“We have every nation you can imagine – all of them,” Gordon said. “And the good thing is we all come together. One thing affects the Jamaicans, it affects the Guyanese, it affects the Bajans, it affects the Trinidadians and Tobago Indians. We all just come together, you know what I mean? Because it's one Caribbean and that's what we have here in Brooklyn.”

Gordon said she owes everything to her family and the sacrifices the women in her life have made for her.

“I think of my grandmother, born in 1915,” Gordon said. “I have two nieces who graduated from Howard University. The younger one graduated summa cum laude from Johns Hopkins University with a degree in nanotechnology. They are descendants of a woman who always signed her name with the red X because she could not read.”

“Giving up is not an option,” Gordon added. “If she had given up, I wouldn't be here to tell you her story about how much sugar cane she chopped. So you have to hang on. She chopped sugar cane so I wouldn't.”

After her family immigrated to the United States, Gordon said, her mother saved enough money to buy all seven of her children's buildings in the city so they could open their own businesses.

Opportunity and entrepreneurship are two of the key components of the so-called American dream, yet there are significant barriers to entry and challenges for many black and brown entrepreneurs.

According to the Association for Neighborhood & Housing Development in New York City, immigrant-owned small businesses make up nearly half of New York City's roughly 220,000 small businesses. And while they contribute nearly $200 billion to the city's gross domestic product annually, challenges like high rents, lending hurdles and harassment threaten their survival, according to an ANHD survey.

Although owning and running a small business comes with its ups and downs, Gordon said Nuvan's viral video has made a big difference in her restaurant's profitability as it continues to battle the growing waves of gentrification in New York.

“Miracles happen every day. And they really exist,” Gordon said.

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