Monday's ribbon-cutting at the new Norma G's Caribbean-themed restaurant on Detroit's far east side illustrates both the progress and the challenges in redeveloping city neighborhoods.

Mayor Mike Duggan joined restaurant owner Lester Gouvia on Monday to welcome his eatery, located at 14628 E. Jefferson Ave. With 15 employees, Norma G's is said to be the first new sit-down restaurant to open in the Jefferson-Chalmers neighborhood in 30 years.

That it opened at all in such a hard-hit district testifies to how Detroit is learning how to overcome the myriad obstacles — lack of funding, control of real estate, and more — that stymie such projects.

"What the Norma G’s experience taught us was orchestrating all the different funders, all the different support resources, to make it happen," said Joshua Elling, CEO of the nonprofit Jefferson East Inc. civic group that guided Gouvia through the process, which included a grant from the city's Motor City Match retail development program and other assistance.

But Norma G's also shows how long it takes to pull even a modest win like this. Gouvia, who earlier operated a food truck, worked with Elling and the Detroit Economic Growth Corp. for nearly 18 months to put a final deal together.

And while that may not sound so terribly long, there are thousands more storefronts in the city that are still waiting for someone to come along to fill them.

Many of the city's redevelopment programs face the same dilemma. There are multiple innovative programs at work for blight removal, workforce training and business development. But the need remains so great that scaling up from the initial successes to citywide progress could take many years indeed.

Duggan sounded an optimistic note Monday at the Norma G ribbon-cutting. He noted that the city's Strategic Neighborhood Fund, a $250-million package of aid aimed at 10 different neighborhoods, will make projects like Norma G's happen more frequently. More announcements are coming soon, he said.

"This is the way neighborhoods come back, a storefront at a time," Duggan told reporters.

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Building on other successes

The Norma G's opening built on earlier successes elsewhere. Duggan cited the work in the West Village district, where a combination of city assistance and money and mentoring from DEGC, JPMorgan Chase and other sources helped multiple storefront businesses open in recent years.

”We had to prove it worked," Duggan said Monday. "And we proved it down the street in West Village. If you subsidize the early projects, that area has now taken off. So we’re subsidizing the early projects here (in Jefferson-Chalmers) and in a year or so you’ll see development take off in this area."

The Jefferson East Inc. civic group has owned the building occupied by Norma G's since 2006, as well as several other buildings along Jefferson in the district. That helped move the process along since redevelopment officials didn't have to wrest control of the site from a speculator as in other parts of the city.

"If we control the real estate it makes it much easier for us to incubate businesses and get them started," Elling said.

It also helped that a group like Jefferson East Inc. was on hand to guide Gouvia dream from concept to reality.

"Having a competent place-based organization like Jefferson East makes it much more likely" to happen," Elling said.

And Gouvia was able to take advantage of multiple assistance programs offered to Detroit entrepreneurs, from mentoring at the TechTown business incubator to help offered by DEGC. He also was a finalist in the Hatch Detroit entrepreneurial contest.

Mostly, it was about following his dream.

“You get downsized in the corporate world and my family said do what you love doing, which was cooking," he said.

Duggan, admitting the size of the challenge, struck an optimistic note Monday.

"When people show up in my office, developers from out of town, they say there’s no deals left in downtown and Midtown. I say, 'no kidding,' " Duggan told reporters. "But there’s deals left in southwest Detroit, there’s deals left in Jefferson Chalmers, there’s deals left in the North End.

"There’s lots of opportunity in Detroit."

Contact John Gallagher: 313-222-5173 or gallagher@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @jgallagherfreep.