SAN ANTONIO — The Texas Restaurant Association estimates that the state lost 9,000 to 10,000 restaurants since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Another hometown favorite in San Antonio is closing down.

“Oh, I was a little girl when he taught me how to cook,” Vicky Adams, vice president of Mr. and Mrs. G's, said.

Vicky Adams is the youngest child of Air Force veteran William Garner.

“We grew up on Brooks Air Force Base,” Adams said. “And even with him being a young GI raising three kids alone, he could always make a meal stretch to our friends.”

Adams, like her dad, enlisted in the service. She joined the Navy around the same time Garner and his wife Addie opened Mr. & Mrs. G’s Home Cooking in the '90s.

“I’d come home on leave and I’d come to Mr. & Mrs. G’s, and the line was out the door at lunchtime,” Adams said.

While she was deployed, her older sister and brother were their dad’s right hand at the restaurant.

“My dad at 82, he was still back there frying salmon croquet,” Adams said. “This is what he loved.”

He was making sure the customers were satisfied.

“Yeah, it’s all good,” longtime customer Odis Williams said.

But business slowed down after Mrs. Addie died in 2016. Adams says the pandemic only made things worse, forcing them to close down for seven months.

“Maybe 15-20 customers when my dad made the decision to close down because of COVID,” Adams said.

Mr. G passed away in 2021. And after 32 years in business, Adams made the tough decision to close the family restaurant.

“He knew he had a good thing going on,” Williams said. “I’m sorry they’re closing.”

Between low sales, the cost of food rising and building repairs, Adams says it was too much to overcome.

“Even having staff just became really tough,” Adams said. “We’re still undermanned. We’ve been undermanned. The help wanted sign has been in the window since COVID.”

Severa Armstrong has worked at Mr. G's for seven years. She says he was like a father figure.

“Mr. G was a very nice man and I miss him so much,” Armstrong said. “It’s going to be a rough moment when we close down.”

News traveled fast that the soul food staple is closing, and customers have been flooding in.

“Thought that we had enough to last us until we closed,” Adams said. “Just running out of stuff constantly, which we are not complaining. We love it.”

At the end of the day, Adams knows owning a Black business for three decades was a blessing, and thanks the community for making her dad's dream come true.

“And I know they are looking down and they’re saying, look at San Antonio,” Adams said. “They still got us.”

The family says as long as San Antonians remember "Mr. G's” name, there’s hope they could reopen one day. The restaurant's final day will be July 30, 2022.