When word got out about the impending closure of Leyenda, a fixture in its Brooklyn, New York, neighborhood, the place started filling up early every night. 

“Everyone wants to get a piece now that we're closing,” owner Ivy Mix said with a laugh. “I mean, I get it. I've gone to places when they close. … But the other part of me is like, ‘Where were you? Where were you, though?’”

Mix opened Leyenda, a pan-Latin cocktail bar and restaurant, in the upscale Boerum Hill area in the spring of 2015. In early 2025, she and her co-owners decided not to renew their lease, joining a growing list of small, independent restaurants shutting down. The list includes lots of places that have been around for years, some famous, like Marlow & Sons and the Pencil Factory, and others that are beloved locally.

“There’s many reasons,” Mix said. “The restaurant-bar industry is difficult. It's become more difficult over time, the whole country over, but I think New York City is not necessarily the most hospitable place for small businesses a lot of the time.”

Rent, which has always been high in the city, has become much more expensive in the last few years, since the pandemic. Insurance has, too, along with almost everything else — utilities, food, labor. 

“Labor is big,” Mix said. “I'm the type of person that thinks that it should go up. But as a business owner, I'm like, ‘Whoa!’ If you look at our labor costs now compared to 2017, it's a huge difference.”

Credit card processing fees are also taking an increasingly big chunk out of many restaurants’ already-thin profit margins — every time someone pays with a card, which is all the time, 2% to 4% goes to the credit card companies. 

“At the end of every month, it's like, here you go, Mastercard and Visa,” Mix said. “Here's all this money.”

It all adds up in a business where, if you’re doing really well, you’re making maybe 10 cents on the dollar.

“At the end of the day, we're like, is the juice worth the squeeze?” she said. “Like, maybe not. Maybe not right now, maybe not like this, maybe not this iteration.”

A lot of restaurant owners she knows feel the same way. Five years out from the start of the pandemic, people tend to think of it as being over, Mix said, but “the effects of COVID are still very much here. If you got loans out during COVID, they're due now. If you are trying to still make up from losing all that revenue in COVID, we're still in that now.”

And the jubilance of post-vaccine 2021 and 2022, when everyone was going out a lot, is decidedly over — now, people are eating out less, and drinking less when they do. 

Then there’s the future, with all its economic and political uncertainty. And tariffs.

“Everything I sell here is from a different country, literally everything. Also, most of my staff is from a different country,” Mix said. “It is very scary to look at this and be like, OK, if I'm forecasting two or three years from now, do I like what I'm seeing? If my lease is up now, and I'm not gonna get penalized for leaving it, I might just take the out.”

It was tough to make that call; Leyenda wasn’t struggling. But running a restaurant is a lot of hard work, even in the best of times. And right now, Mix said, “it's like a Jenga game, and like the pieces are just getting pulled left and right, and we're just like, wobbling around. And wobbling around is so exhausting.”

One of Mix’s biggest worries about closing was what would happen to her staff, but she said almost all of them have jobs lined up. And she’s not leaving the business entirely — she still has a wine bar in a different part of town, Whoopsie Daisy, and a wine store, Fiasco, and she’s already starting to think about new concepts for the future. 

But Leyenda was her first place, where she built her career and a community.

“This little place, this little bar, has been my whole life,” she said. “I built my career here. You know, most of my friends had actual children, and I had this. So to see it go is heartbreaking.”

Even if it’s also a relief.

In the bar’s last days, lots of regulars, past and present, came through to say goodbye to Mix, to the staff and to the space, with its long, wooden bar, arched windows and gold ceiling.

Devon Flynnperrault used to come in a few nights a week when he lived in the neighborhood, to sit at the bar and have a cocktail and tacos. 

On the last Thursday night Leyenda was open, he got there early to make sure he snagged a seat. He’d made the hourlong subway trip from his home in Queens to be there on Tuesday and Wednesday too, and he planned to do the same on Friday and Saturday. 

“Five nights in a row,” he said with a laugh. “Tonight I'm gonna be here for a very long time. I will definitely be going cocktail, mocktail, cocktail, mocktail. It’s a celebration of how great the bar was. And also a bit of a wake.”

Flynnperrault’s old, regular coffee shop nearby just closed recently too. It’s weird, he said, and sad.

“Businesses and people make up a neighborhood. I consider this neighborhood my favorite neighborhood in the city. But without my friends — a lot of them have moved out — and without the businesses, I might have to start rethinking that.”