Built inside a real Queens pupuserĂa.
Lighthouse is a bilingual prep course for the NYC Food Protection Certificate — the exam every restaurant in the five boroughs needs at least one supervisor to pass. Our family runs Mirna's PupuserĂa in Astoria. We grew up watching new hires struggle with the city's free course, give up, and get nagged for weeks about a card they couldn't pass an English exam to earn. We built the version that finishes.
Why we built this
NYC requires every food-service establishment to have at least one supervisor certified in food protection on-site whenever it's operating. Roughly 30,000 food establishments across the five boroughs, around 50,000 active certificates in circulation. The official course is free and online — and ServSafe, StateFoodSafety, and every other national credential are not accepted as a substitute. Every supervisor in the city has to go through the DOH's own course and sit the city's own proctored, in-person English exam.
What that means in practice: the cooks and dishwashers at our family's restaurant — most of them Spanish-first speakers — try the official course, stall against a wall of English text, and give up. Dropout among ESL learners exceeds 60%. The free option is not the same as an accessible one. The product gap isn't a software gap; it's a cultural-authorship gap.
So we built Lighthouse around the actual exam. Fifteen short animated modules in Spanish with always-on English subtitles, because the proctored test on exam day is administered in English. A 90-minute timed practice exam — 50 questions, 70% to pass — that mirrors the real DOH format minute for minute. A manager dashboard for restaurant owners who need an audit trail. The examples are about pupusas, not pizza. The voice is Salvadoran-accented, not Castilian. The vocabulary on test day is vocabulary the worker has already seen.
“We didn't build this because we thought there was a software gap. We built it because we watched cousins, cooks, and dishwashers in our family's restaurant try to get through the city's free course, give up, and then get nagged for months about a card they couldn't pass an English exam to earn. The product is small. The problem is the size of every kitchen in the city.”
Who's behind it
Doña Mirna
Cultural authorship and on-camera narration
Doña Mirna has operated Mirna's PupuserĂa in Astoria for more than 12 years. She is the subject-matter authority behind every Spanish-language module. Her voice — Salvadoran-accented, conversational, grounded in real kitchen practice — is what separates Lighthouse from translated competitors. The examples, the analogies, the way temperature and time get explained on a busy plancha: all hers.
Nova
Founder
Nova is the daughter of the family that runs Mirna's PupuserĂa. She has spent her life inside the small-restaurant economy the NYC Food Protection Certificate is written for, watching new hires struggle with the official course week after week. She leads product, strategy, and business development at Lighthouse and is responsible for the bilingual-first design choices. She also directs the engineering work.
Anthropic Claude (Opus + Sonnet)
Engineering, under Nova's direction
We're upfront about this because the product's positioning depends on cultural authorship, not on pretending to be a 10x engineering team. The codebase — TypeScript, Next.js, Supabase, Stripe — is shipped by Anthropic's Claude models under Nova's direction. The illustrations are AI-generated through a Midjourney pipeline that Nova art-directs. The Spanish content, the voice, the product decisions, and the cultural calls are Nova's and Doña Mirna's. The code and the art are tools, the same way a kitchen uses a thermometer.
What we are, and what we're not
We are prep
Fifteen short modules, knowledge checks, a 90-minute timed practice exam in the real DOH format, and a manager dashboard with an audit trail. Built so a Spanish-first kitchen worker walks into the Health Academy already familiar with the English vocabulary on the proctored test.
We are not the certificate
The legal credential only comes from the NYC Health Academy — $24, in person, in English. We don't issue it and we never will. We say that on the homepage and we'll say it again here. Lighthouse gets you ready; the DOH gives you the card.
Talk to us
If you operate a restaurant in NYC, run a workforce-development program, or just want to know more about how the pilot is going, we'd genuinely like to hear from you.