Alternative theory: time travelers from the far distant future with only the vaguest idea of how restaurants work BUT they have seen filmed entertainment. They only have a limited amount of budget/time so didn't invest heavily in the subterfuge, and don't care anyway. The old lady is a frustrated culinary historian absolutely thrilled to try out her recreated recipes on some unsuspecting locals.
my friends and i used to frequent a little Thai place that was For Sure the front for some kind of money laundering. we loved it. the food was amazing, also cooked by a single elderly woman. the vibes were absolutely chaotic.
the tables were separated by raw plywood dividers. the walls were covered by woven plastic mats. the plumbing was ancient, so there were "please only flush toilet paper down the toilet" signs--written in red sharpie on copies of their last repair bill?? the out of order stall in the ladies' room was indicated by a potted tree holding the door open. they didn't have a liquor license, but you could bring your own wine; they only charged a corking fee if you borrowed their bottle opener, so by the second visit everyone had started carrying one in their purse. there was one (1) soup dish that came with a vaguely threatening caveat against sharing.
that place gave us so much flavor, laughter, spice sweat, and tears. i hope the owners pulled off whatever they were trying to do. bless.
I was an employee and a regular at the cash only coffee shop that the owner used for laundering money from his cocaine sales for a local extralegal organization.
We had a very stable clientele of 30 of so people who would come in once a day, buy a cup of coffee for a dollar, and then hang out for twelve hours. Most of these people (me included) were Weird But Not The Kind Of Weird That Attracts Police Attention and if anyone did start attracting police attention (by starting fights, dealing meth in the parking lot, or leaving their bong on a table on the patio) they were promptly banned.
It turns out that having 5-20 broke, chainsmoking misanthropes on the premises at all times does a great job of making it look like you're a real business while keeping the overhead low because you can pay under the table and your customers never care when you run out of milk, bagels, or to-go cups. (I had one shift there near the end where I sold a total of $6 of product because we were out of everything except whole milk, flavor syrups, and decaf coffee)
For the last six months of operation that place didn't even have a working coffee machine (one of the employees brought in his grandma's Mr. Coffee when the heating element on the Bunn died) and in the last two months even coffee stopped getting delivered and the employees were buying ice and ground coffee from the grocery store out of the drawer and leaving receipts in our cash-out envelopes (which were kept in the fridge until the manager showed up once a week and did everyone's paycheck out of whatever was in the fridge).
So if you were a normie who wandered in we just looked like a shitty coffee shop that didn't even take cards that sold canned drinks and black coffee and was always out of ingredients for smoothies and you didn't want to hang out on a date or study or bring you kids there because the place was full of smoke and angsty teenagers who were all fucking each other. But if you kept coming back we would eventually adopt you as a regular and someone would tell you why there was a 6-foot-long mirrored table in the lounge where the manager did the cash count.
