I ran a restaurant that turned customers away — and it stayed profitable.

Seven tables. A staff of three. My own POS and online ordering. No delivery apps, no monthly software fees. This is the story of Yami Grill, and why it became FreePOS.

In 2016 I opened Yami Grill in a small neighborhood shopping center in Mountain View. It cost me $350,000 and a year of my life to open the doors. Almost everything about how I ran it went against the standard advice — and that is exactly why it survived.

I kept the operation deliberately tiny: myself, my chef, and his father waiting on our seven tables. Short lunch and dinner hours. After the dining room slowed in the evening, the kitchen took to-go orders only — and I steered those orders to the online ordering platform I built myself, because I refused to hand 30–35% of every ticket to a delivery app.

"I see restaurants come and die. After long deliberation myself, I understood this is the only way to do it: run it as a family restaurant."

Most restaurants die chasing volume. Volume means more staff, more waste, more rent, more software subscriptions, more commission taken by middlemen — and the margin never arrives. I went the other way. Small meant I controlled every cost and every plate. When diners wandered in looking for something we didn't do well, I cheerfully pointed them toward Castro Street. Quality and word of mouth were my entire marketing budget, along with paper coupons I left in the newspaper racks outside.

I trained in computer science at Cornell during my PhD years, and I spent the first dot-com wave at a Silicon Valley startup. So when POS vendors and delivery platforms came asking for monthly fees and revenue cuts, I did the math and built my own instead: the point of sale, the online ordering, the kitchen flow. The restaurant ran on software that answered to me — not the other way around.

That decision, more than any recipe, is what kept Yami Grill profitable. Your POS is either your servant or your master. Your payment processor is either your partner or a parasite. I learned that by living it, one service at a time.

Around 80% of our produce came from an organic garden run by a Buddhist temple in Fremont whose monk I count as a good friend. The menu changed with whatever the farm had that week. My chef, born and raised in Guam, added a menu of traditional chamorro dishes — for years we were the only restaurant on the Peninsula serving Guamanian food. My rule for the kitchen was simple: what we cook, my baby will eat.

In January 2020, the Mountain View Voice told Yami Grill's story, and it was syndicated across the Palo Alto Weekly and Redwood City Pulse — not because I had grown into a chain, but because I hadn't. You can read their original article here: "How does this Mountain View restaurant owner stay afloat? By keeping things really, really small."

Today I operate restaurant technology the same way for other owners that I did for myself. Everything I learned standing in that kitchen — about processing fees, delivery commissions, POS systems, and vendors who never show up — is now what FreePOS does for independent restaurants across Silicon Valley.