Owner of The Hammered Lamb shares struggles of running a small business

Amid the pandemic and Orlando’s ongoing growth and development, Jason Lambert has been striving to keep his businesses running while also being a force for good in the community.

“So 2020 and 2021 during the pandemic and trying to survive through the pandemic, I thought were the roughest years we’d ever have to face,” Lambert said. “And then we got into 2023 and we were finally stable, and kind of had gotten caught back up from that two years of craziness and then in October of 2023 is when all the construction started in Ivanhoe Village, and it has just been just detrimental to the whole neighborhood.”

Ivanhoe Village, the historic community where the Hammered Lamb sits, has seen substantial growth since the restaurant first opened in 2013. That growth has led to the need for improvements to the area’s sewer system.

Those improvements have caused issues with parking and navigating the area, keeping potential customers away.

“There’s been so much construction there, and it’s always moving around, that people are just over even trying to — just avoiding the area, because they don’t know how to get in to support local businesses,” Lambert said.

The problem has gotten so bad that Lambert recently held a fundraiser to help keep his first restaurant, The Hammered Lamb, open.

“In 2023 we were having a record year — busiest year we would ever had, setting monthly records — and then the construction started, and now we’re down anywhere from 30% to 50% a week from where we were last year,” he said.

The problems at The Hammered Lamb are starting to affect his other business, Jack & Honey’s in Thornton Park.

“We are now closed at Jack & Honey’s on Mondays and Tuesdays, and we’re closed at Hammered Lamb on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, which were just our slower days,” he said. “We’re hoping that it’s temporary and it could just kind of help us, but those days we just — we weren’t making even enough money to pay the people that were there, so it was just costing us money to be open.”

On the latest episode of Florida Foodie, Lambert shares more of his experiences in trying to keep his businesses running. He also talks about his activism and how he likes to use his businesses to support the community.

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