Bon Me got its start when Boston-bred duo Alison Fong and Patrick Lynch entered the city of Boston’s Food Truck Contest. Patrick had happened upon an ad for the contest while looking for jobs in urban planning, and the two decided to enter for fun.

The contest involved creating a concept and business plan, a video, and an in-person taste test on city hall plaza for 500 people. We borrowed every pot we could find to boil ginger for our Spicy Ginger Lemonade and grilled chicken by flashlight late into the night. It was quite a challenge, but we ended up as one of the winners, earning a spot to vend on City Hall Plaza in 2011. Bon Me was born!

All we needed was a truck.

That winter we bought a used DHL truck from a guy in Connecticut named Big Jim, and had it converted into a food truck by Creative Mobile Systems. After getting our permits, we were excited and ready to go.

On a rainy Monday in April 2011, Bon Me opened for business. It was a slow and rainy first couple months, but business picked up into the summer, and we started making plans for the longer run. That fall when the vending season at City Hall ended, we moved over to the Greenway at Dewey Square, where we’ve been for almost 10 years!

After a successful first year, Bon Me started working on our first restaurant in the spring of 2012. We signed a lease for a perfect (meaning tiny!) space in One Kendall. We thought our experience in food trucks would give us an edge getting the most out of a small restaurant space.

After way too many meetings and a lot of stress over permitting, we were finally ready to open in February 2013. Our first month was quite a challenge! We thought that it would be pretty easy translating our food-truck experience to a permanent location, but there were a whole new set of hurdles to deal with. Our business was now operating out of a shared commissary in Malden where we could only work off hours, and we were running a restaurant in Cambridge and three food trucks around the city. And coordination was becoming quite a challenge!

After a challenging summer, Bon Me signed a lease on our own kitchen space in Roxbury. We finally had the chance to organize a space how we wanted and work when we needed. The building had 6,600 square feet, mostly kitchen and storage, plus a small office. It also had 3 walk-in fridges! (chefs love their walk-ins, if you get a kitchen tour, this will always be a prime stop)

As we moved into the space, we finally had a chance to buy our own equipment, organize our own schedules, and install outlets to plug in all of our trucks. We finally felt like we were in a good spot to start growing!

After moving into our new home, we started looking for additional restaurant spaces. We had been running a food truck once a week in Fort Point on Seaport Boulevard for several years. It was one of our busiest spots, with lines stretching down the block. So when a spot on Congress St in Fort Point opened up, we jumped on it and signed a lease for our second restaurant.

For this restaurant, we started working with Stack + Co for architecture and construction. It would be a great relationship, with them designing seven of our restaurants. We started construction in Fort Point in the fall of 2014 and opened in early 2015. Our new restaurant was busy right away, and stayed our busiest restaurant for years.

In early 2015, we negotiated to buy an old pizza place near Fresh Pond. We wanted to try out a more suburban location, yet stay close to our comfort zone in Cambridge, so Alewife seemed like a great fit! After doing an extensive renovation to the space, we opened for business in September 2015. This small location started fairly slowly, but has steadily picked up, and now is our busiest restaurant!

Meanwhile, we also opened a booth in July in the Boston Public Market. This indoor farmer’s market has been a great match for our healthy cuisine featuring lots of fresh veggies!

One of our main goals in running Bon Me is to provide good jobs for our employees, and more broadly, to support better labor practices in the restaurant community. In 2016, we decided it was time to throw our support behind the Fight for $15. We raised the lowest wage at our company to $13 and announced plans to get to $15 over the next few years, assuming we could maintain certain labor-cost targets.

It’s tough for a business like ours to raise pay in isolation though, and we need the minimum wage to increase to create a level playing field. So we wanted to create more awareness about how higher minimum wages could help employees and employers alike. We held a press conference to announce these changes and were lucky enough to have Boston Mayor Marty Walsh and City Council President Michelle Wu join us for the announcement. Later that year, Ali testified in front of the state legislature, arguing for minimum wage legislation. We were excited to see this pass in 2018, and glad we could do our part to support it!

2017 was a big year, as we opened our food carts at Copley and Post Office square in the spring. Then we opened two more restaurants: a location on Stuart Street in the Back Bay in June and then our “Test Kitchen” on Binney St. in East Cambridge in October.

Our East Cambridge location was a major step for our company It featured: amazing design from our architects, Stack + Co, an efficient setup designed to crush the lunch rush, and a spacious kitchen so that we could test our latest new dishes. We also debuted our self-order kiosks and TV menus, and it was our first location with a beer license!

In 2018 we started working on two new locations. A booth in Harvard’s new Smith Campus Center and a restaurant in the Longwood Medical Area.

We opened at Harvard in September. Their new campus center is open to the public, and features a modern update of the Brutalist Holyoke center in Harvard Square. Our booth is surrounded by green walls, making for quite a stunning location!

In October we opened our eighth restaurant, in the Longwood medical area. Longwood had been a target for us for a long time, since we thought our healthy and innovative food would be a great fit with the hospital community. This location was also designed and built by Stack + Co, and features a beautiful wood interior.

2020 started well, but everything changed in a hurry in March. As with most other consumer businesses, we had to completely shut down due to the COVID crisis, and spent most of the year carefully reopening and operating at greatly reduced capacity. We ended up with a 75% decrease in revenue from April-December..

A year like this really reminds us just how fragile things are, and it reinforces the extent to which we rely on our team and community for our success. We’re thankful for all the help we received during this challenging time from employees, customers, landlords, city officials, and federal aid programs.

As business slowly improved this spring, we decided it was finally time to guarantee that all of our employees will make at least $15 per hour. It’s been a challenging few years in the restaurant business, and it took longer than we expected to get to $15. But we’re excited to take this step. It’s important to us that we’re able to continue to build a strong team as business grows, and this will make sure we’re rewarding everyone who is working on this recovery with us.

The one bright spot of being shut down for the year is that we had a lot of time to work on building a stronger company for the future. We’re a lot smaller than we were at the beginning of 2020, but we’re also a lot better trained and organized. We’ve updated our menu and restructured our operating systems. Most importantly, we have a great team we can rely on. Even though the first quarter has been slow, with our revenue still down 65%, we’re optimistic and ready to go!