Granada, Nicaragua's oldest colonial city, sits alongside some of the deepest poverty in Central America, where glue-sniffing has become the cheap, common escape for street kids with no school and no job prospects. The film follows four of them, Orlando, Oscar, Juan Carlos, and Moises, as they enter Café Chavalos, a program that combines culinary school, working restaurant, and rehab center, teaching them to cook, wait tables, and manage a small business. Each has a history of drug use, gang involvement, family violence, or suicide behind him, and the film treats the program's daily routines, kitchen shifts, dining room service, counseling, as the mechanism by which that history might not repeat. The story turns when the nonprofit-funded café loses its head chef and runs out of money, forcing it to close mid-program. The camera stays with the four young men through that collapse, watching what happens to people who had just started to believe in an alternative when the alternative disappears.