Hard Work At Pach's Is Woman's American Dream

It is 3:30 in the morning - every morning - and Isun Maen is stirring.

She does it because she has to. She is her own bailout, her own stimulus. She is what most of us are all about, doing what we have to do, sometimes just to pay the bills until next week.

Four or five hours later, the tables at Pach's will begin to fill up and Maen will be all over the small South Tampa restaurant, schmoozing the regulars, who are like a part of her family, while at the same time making sure the flow of hot coffee and (trust me on this) mountainous breakfasts continues.

If it is Sunday, there is likely to be a line of regulars waiting to get in. In fact, it was one of them, radio legend Jack Harris, who suggested I needed to tell you about Maen.

Pach's, in an office building just off Bayshore Boulevard on Bay to Bay Boulevard, is only open for breakfast and lunch, but it is frequently dark before Maen finally goes home.

She would tell you her story is the American Dream, although my guess is it is a dream more than a few of us might have given up on long ago.

Maen was a young waitress at an American service club in Korea when she met the Army officer who would marry her and bring her to the United States. It would be in Tampa that he decided he no longer wanted to be married and left the Korean woman who spoke little English, along with three young children, to fend for themselves.

"My mom went to work," says daughter Cathy, who is married and runs the restaurant if her mom is not around. "She worked three different jobs at once. Since her English was poor she couldn't be out front as a server and instead worked in kitchens or bused tables.

"Finally she saved up enough money to open a small Chinese restaurant. It was a bad location and it was difficult to just keep the doors open. We struggled for almost 10 years before we had to give it up. She had managed to keep enough money and we tried again with a small deli, and it was a reasonable success. Unfortunately, the building manager wanted to do something else and we had to give up on that."

"My mom is one of those people who refuse to buy something when she doesn't have the cash to pay for it, so our lives were very frugal. At the same time she was determined to bring her family over to America from Korea, where their lives were very difficult.

"One by one she would send the money for them to come until she had paid for five people in all."

It was then that Maen saw the advertisement in the paper for Pach's, which was up for sale. "She came over for breakfast and fell in love with the place," Cathy said. "The next day she insisted we all come here. The idea of trying to run a restaurant one more time gave me the shivers. We all had night jobs to pay our bills, but she was determined and soon Pach's was ours.

"At first we struggled, but mom was determined. Gradually we built the business back up and the people who had been on the staff stayed and now we are making it. We will never be rich or live in a mansion on Bayshore, but our customers are like family and mom loves to sit with them and show them pictures of her family. I think we are living the American Dream."