A Seattle restaurant that has served Mexican food since 1976 found its parking lot full by noon on Saturday after a granddaughter's social media plea convinced strangers to show up and eat. La Palma Family Mexican Restaurant, located near Ballard, had been facing the kind of financial pressure that forces family businesses to consider shutting their doors for good — until a post asking for help turned into a weekend-long rush.
Loren Jewett, whose family has owned and operated La Palma for 50 years, posted a plea on the restaurant's Instagram and TikTok accounts on October 30, warning that the business was running out of room to maneuver. According to KOMO News, Jewett said, “We're pretty close to a point where we have to make a decision, or close down.” She said in the same video that she planned to post every day for 30 days in an effort to revive the restaurant.
Jewett has a full-time job elsewhere and had not worked at La Palma in about 10 years before stepping back in to help. She told the station that costs have only continued to go up and margins have become even thinner — a squeeze she said pushed the restaurant toward a breaking point. Her plea went viral overnight, and the post has since racked up more than 26,000 likes, several thousand shares and hundreds of comments, per the same outlet.
A Packed House Within a Day
The response showed up almost immediately. The restaurant was packed less than a day after the plea went viral, with its parking lot full when it opened around noon on Saturday and the dining room staying busy through most of Sunday as well, the station reported. La Palma's social media accounts gained thousands of new followers over the weekend, and Jewett said the post motivated some of the new visitors to come in specifically because of what they'd seen online.
Jewett told KOMO she asked her mother to pass along a message to her grandfather: the restaurant needed more staff to keep up. Her mother, a German immigrant, has long run much of the restaurant's day-to-day logistics. Jewett said she plans to keep posting consistently going forward, hoping that a steady social media presence can keep La Palma visible and its business more stable than it has been.
The Man Behind the Recipes
At the center of the story is Pedro Perez Estrella, who is 80 years old and spent about 25 years as La Palma's main cook, creating all of the recipes still used on the menu today. Perez Estrella and his wife opened the restaurant in 1976 after taking it over from a business partner, naming it La Palma after a store his father had owned back in Mexico, according to the KOMO report. He came to Washington from Mexico with a friend in the early 1970s, drawn by a work opportunity with Weyerhaeuser, and said he had mistaken Washington state for the location of the White House before he arrived.
Perez Estrella learned about the viral posts when an employee called him on Saturday, and he told the station he was surprised and happy about the outpouring of support. He described La Palma as friendly to everybody and said the restaurant is his life and something he genuinely enjoys. Reflecting on his decades in the business, he said the American Dream is still here — only you have to work.
La Palma has been described as a Seattle staple for Mexican cuisine and is known locally for a large margarita. Accounts differ on how many locations the business has had: KOMO reported that La Palma once had five other locations, leaving the Ballard-area restaurant as the last one still open, while a separate listing from Intentionalist points customers to a second location in Lakewood. La Palma's own website states that it opened in January 1976 and is marking its 50th year in business.
Part of a Tougher Citywide Squeeze
La Palma's struggle fits into a broader pattern across Seattle's restaurant industry. High operational costs, regulatory changes and low foot traffic have made Seattle one of the most difficult environments in the country to run a restaurant, according to the Puget Sound Business Journal. The outlet reported that high labor and operational costs, combined with shifting regulations, have created what many local restaurateurs describe as an untenable business environment — pressure that contributed to restaurateur Brendan McGill closing his last two Seattle concepts in June, citing weak foot traffic and rising costs.
Data from the Seattle Restaurant Alliance paints a similarly grim picture. Roughly 89% of surveyed restaurants said their first two months of 2025 were down or flat, and half of respondents reported losing money in 2024, with more than one-fifth losing greater than 15%. The alliance also found that 56% of restaurants saw sales decline by more than 5%, while labor costs ranked as operators' top concern — and the only issue the alliance identified as one policymakers could directly affect. The group reported that the operating margin for restaurants in Washington runs 60% lower than the national average, with many businesses responding by cutting hours, trimming staff and narrowing their menus.
For now, La Palma's weekend surge offers a rare counterpoint to that trend, even as the underlying cost pressures Jewett described remain unresolved. Whether the viral attention translates into lasting, steady business beyond the initial rush is something only the coming weeks will show.
