The story below is from our July/August 2025 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
FarmBurguesa’s Kat Pascal will serve her community as a real estate agent and school administrator after closing her popular restaurants.
It was an ordinary evening last October. Roanoke small business owner Kat Pascal was cooking dinner for her partner Jimmy Delgado and their two middle-school-aged sons in their Raleigh Court home. The family pups jostled underfoot.
Pascal’s mind wandered as she chopped and stirred. The past months had been hard, making the decision to close the family’s two popular FarmBurguesa restaurants. The couple was worried about money and stepping back from community involvements and how the kids would handle the changes. But a new path was emerging. Both Pascal and Delgado had landed full-time jobs. Pascal had recently met with Vinton officials to map out a payment plan for meal taxes still owed. It was a sad ending to some big dreams, but they were taking it one day at a time.
Then, Pascal’s neighbor knocked to let her know that Roanoke City police officers had stopped by earlier in the day. Pascal had no idea why. She phoned the station. The dispatch officer told her to stay put; they were sending a police car.
As she walked down her driveway, the officers pulled up. They told her she was wanted for embezzlement and 11 counts of failure to pay meals tax. Then they handcuffed her and put her in the back of the car.
“I was in shock,” she remembers. All she could think was ‘I have a payment arrangement!’”
The nightmare dragged on as she was transferred from Roanoke City custody to the Roanoke County jail, strip-searched and issued an orange jumpsuit. Officials took a mug shot and placed her in a cold cell with two other women, she says. At 11 p.m., they locked her in for the night and she passed a few sleepless hours with her head pounding, a painful pressure building behind her eyes.
The next morning, she was cuffed and led into a Roanoke County courtroom, where her father, always so proud of Pascal, sat in the back, feeling helpless.
He paid her bond and drove her home. Pascal says she didn’t get out of bed for four days.
She kept playing the arrest over in her head. How had it come to this? She, who had worked as a bank manager and served on the boards of the Grandin Village Business Association, the Vinton Chamber of Commerce, The Spot on Kirk and more. She, who had co-founded a thriving nonprofit, Latinas Network, and worked for the Roanoke Regional Small Business Development Center as a business adviser; whose face had appeared on billboards all over the city and the cover of The Roanoker magazine. She, who had shown up on countless panels and presentations and gatherings. Her restaurants had received a national Plating Change grant to deliver food to the community during COVID. How had this Katheryn Pascal spent the night, hungry and scared, in a Roanoke County jail cell, for owing $6,700 that she had already agreed to pay?
“This can ruin a person’s life,” she recalls thinking.
Vinton town officials say they never wanted the meals tax violations to escalate. No other Vinton restaurant owner has been criminally charged in as long as officials can remember.
“We have 56 other businesses who did pay on time,” says Vinton Town Manager Richard “Pete” Peters. “We gave [FarmBurguesa] as much time as we possibly could.”
Vinton Treasurer Andrew Keen confirmed that Pascal met with him and the town attorney to draft a schedule for paying past due taxes. When Pascal missed the deadline for her first payment, Vinton alerted law enforcement officers. “At that point it was out of our hands,” Keen says.
In Vinton, restaurants owe five percent of sales to the town and 5.3% to the state. Taxes are due monthly; fines begin accruing once a business owner is 30 days late with payment. Pascal faced meals tax charges for every month from October 2023 through August 2024.
Pascal says she was struggling to keep her family’s businesses afloat, in the wake of COVID closures and rising prices on food, labor and supplies. She says she kept hoping she could turn around her losses. She was trying to move slowly as she shuttered the businesses. In hindsight, she says, “I should have just ripped off the bandaid.”
Pascal says it was community members who pulled her out of bed and helped her back on her feet: texts from people telling her “we are here for you” and offers of legal counsel, money and help that made it possible for her to begin again. All the relationships she had made over the years in so many circles, they turned out to be her saving grace.
“The way that people show up, that’s why I love what I do,” Pascal says. “That’s why I will keep being who I am.”
On March 7, 2025, all charges against Pascal were dropped, except one. She pled guilty to a misdemeanor for failing to pay her meals tax on time. That same day, she paid off everything she owed the Town of Vinton.
In the months since, Pascal has focused on taking online college classes to complete her undergraduate degree. She is leading Latinas Network, working as a real estate agent with Boothe Bell Real Estate Team and will begin as an English Language Learner liaison for Roanoke County Public Schools in the fall. The family’s cleaning business, Spotless America, is once again taking clients.
What Pascal wants most, though, is to use her experiences — even this traumatic experience — to help small businesses in whatever ways she can.
She hopes that by telling her story she can work to erase the shame that so often accompanies a business closing. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 20% of small businesses shutter in their first year. Another 50% close by Year 5, and 65% of small businesses close before reaching their tenth birthday.
“Finding yourself in that spot where you have to make that hard decision,” Pascal says, tears springing to her eyes, “as entrepreneurs, we’re used to it, making tough decisions.” But, she says, those calls typically happen quietly, in defeat. She wants to lift up all the good that small businesses do while in operation. “We started, from literally nothing, and we did some pretty cool things for our community.”
Pascal also wants to see Roanoke area leaders invest in more support for small businesses when things get hard, not just celebrate them when they open.
“Businesses will close,” Pascal says. “What then? Do we throw these business owners deeper into darkness?”
Though the last year has been unthinkably heavy, Pascal says she is not defeated.
“I want my very public journey to serve as proof that with determination and community, anything is possible.”
The story above is from our July/August 2025 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
