Today we’d like to introduce you to Isaiah Seay.
Isaiah, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
After years as a chef, general manager and consultant for a ton of restaurants all over L.A., I was tired of being overworked and underpaid and giving my food recipes and ideas away, basically for free to owners who would make a killing off of them. My wife and I were living paycheck to paycheck, and I was fed up.
After coming home defeated one night from what would end up being my last “worst job ever”, my wife said “thats it, I want my happy husband back, and I don’t care what we have to do to get him back”. We had just sold our only asset in the world, our tiny two-bedroom shoebox of a condo that had been underwater since the market crashed from the great recession. We held onto it, barely making the mortgage payments each month until we sold it, where we were able to scrape around $20k profit from the sale. We had just had our third kid and were renting a tiny house, not much bigger than the condo we had just sold. My wife said “Take the money from the condo, and start what you know you should have been doing all along…. start the catering business”. I was not as optimistic as my wife… I said “There is a very good chance I will fail… catering outfits have a higher fail rate than restaurants… which is already bad enough!” She said “You won’t fail, your food is great and so are you”.
“Besides she said “I’d rather have you fail and us living out of the back of a truck with our three kids, knowing that we tried, then never know if you’d fail or not, because we were too timid to go for it.” It was then that L.A. Roots Catering was born. We are now five years in and have exploded in popularity and reputation. In the beginning, I would beg, borrow and steal for any catering event we could get our hands on, just to get legs. Now we are turning down events because we are too busy to take them on. We now own a bar company as well, Black Lab by L.A. Roots, and are about to open a restaurant named Ma Dukes. Which is dedicated to my mother and father, who both passed away from cancer in August of 2019, 3 weeks apart from each other to the day. My mother passing the day after my father funeral. They also believed in and were so proud of L.A. Roots Catering.
Has it been a smooth road?
Growing the business, especially our rate of growth is always challenging, rarely smooth. We started in the kitchen of the tiny house we were renting and have since grown it to a fully functioning commercial kitchen with a (soon to be open) restaurant operating out of the front. Operating a small business in California is really quite expensive and hard to navigate, but we are learning more and more as we grow, and the growth itself has been unreal. My accountant is an event professionals accountant with an emphasis on caterers, and he said he has never seen such explosive growth in all of his years doing what he does. I feel incredibly fortunate and very proud of this fact.
We are now starting the next challenging chapter with the restaurant opening, and we changed the concept completely from a place to push a simple menu out the door to just offset expenses… to dedicating it and revamping the space into an homage to my parents, who never got to see the restaurant fully realized. We quite literally changed the name from “Flathouse” to “Ma Dukes” as that was my nickname for my mom. Sadly, I was on my way to tell my mother that I was going to rename the restaurant after her, the morning that she died. She passed away minutes before I arrived at her house to give her the news. I never got to tell her. So it became my mission to make this place bigger and better than we ever initially intended it to be. So that, in and of itself, has been the biggest struggle to date. Not even in the business, but in life.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the L.A. Roots Catering & Ma Dukes story. Tell us more about the business.
We are full-service catering that does events as small as a birthday dinner for four at a client’s dinner table, to as large as last Feb. when we catered the Spotify – Grammy Party at the Hammer Museum for 1300 guests. Though we are happy to, and quite often do, custom menus for our clients we specialize, (and I was informally trained in) Rustic California Fusion, with heavily embedded elements and influences of Latin, Polynesian, Mediterranean, and Asian cuisine. It’s a diverse yet cohesive menu, that is as much a melting pot as the city that birthed the company. I was born and raised in Venice Beach hence the name L.A. Roots, but developed and made this company successful in Agoura Hills, the farthest northern city in L.A. County without spilling into Ventura County. That said, we travel to the city a lot, as most of the events we cater are in Los Angeles proper, or the surrounding areas. Our overall reach however, is San Diego to Santa Barbara.
Our unique but approachable fare, with realistic pricing is what sets us apart, and is my main source of pride with this company. We are told over and over again that we have the most unique and downright flavorful food that people have ever had at a corporate event, or wedding, or cocktail party or Bar Mitzvah, etc. What sets us apart is not only the fare but the personal touch on our service. We treat every client like family and truly care about the experience they have with us. A big percentage of our business is repeat clients and referrals, which speaks volumes for us as a company and what we provide. There are a lot of caterers out there, but not many who can deliver at this level consistently and with a smile on their face. Wow, saying that out loud sounds super conceited and terrible, but it’s just plain true. Take good care of those who take good care of you. We currently have all 5 stars on Yelp, and gleaming reviews on the Knot, etc. Those reviews are 100% unprompted from truly happy clients that just want to sing our praises. I don’t ask them to review, they just do it. I actually am not a fan of Yelp and other review sites. It’s a necessary evil, and I admit I even use it when I’m out of town looking for a good place to eat or drink, but I don’t like what it does to the creativity and freedom of a business to run the way it sees fit. However, the fact that we are rated so highly by our clients on yelp is a testament to who we are, so I tolerate it. 🙂
How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
Drastically. Even now, over the past few years, everything seems to be changing in the way we initially connect to, or are contacted by, our clients. Everything is becoming more and more automated. Corporate event planners and couples getting married want to streamline the whole process. No phone calls. No multiple vendors. Quick. Easy. Automated. Digital. And within that simplicity, they still want everything to be elaborate and to turn out perfect. Well, perfection without so much as a phone call or a walkthrough before the event challenging. We are currently taking steps to be able to provide more of a one stop shop for future clients. Its why we bought a half stake in the bar company Black Lab, to be able to offer bar services along with our catering. It’s why we are partnering with the brilliant minds at Event Cinch, which is a software platform that helps you create a proposal online for your client in minutes, and they can edit their own “shopping cart” of a la carte event aspects and menu items. It’s also a big factor in opening a brick and mortar to accommodate the events with lower budgets, so they can come to us. We are pivoting to more automation in our proposal process for clients to give them an idea of pricing before ever even picking up the phone, as this is what this generation of cliental seem to want. Every business goes through an adjustment period I suppose. An “adapt or die” period. At least we are ahead of the curve when it comes to stellar food and service, and a reputation for excellence and reliability. So then it simply becomes a matter of carrying those aspects onto a more impersonal digital platform. But we love the challenge, and we now have a solid foundation to back us, with the catering, the bar company, and the restaurant.
For my wife and I however, 5-10 years from now, the plan is to expand either the restaurant concept, or the catering, but hopefully BOTH, to a few key cities where my wife and I always talked about retiring. Then eventually pass our legacy of this business to our kids for them to take over. We don’t want to dominate the industry, just carve out a humble chunk in the cities we love. Monterey, Ca. or Hanalei, Kauai would be just a few we have discussed. A dream to be sure, but something we have just recently decided to go after.
Pricing:
- We have a $$1750 minimum for L.A. Roots Catering events operating on site. $1250 minimum on drop and go orders.
- We have a new service called the $1k Charcuterie Grazing Table and its amazing and affordable.
Contact Info:
- Address: 30651 Thousand Oaks Blvd. Unit E. Agoura Hills, CA 91301
- Website: www.larootscatering.com
- Phone: L.A. Roots Catering – 8188351115 & Ma Dukes – 8183093919
- Email: [email protected] or [email protected]
- Instagram: @larootscatering
- Facebook: L.A. Roots Catering
Image Credit:
L.A. Roots Catering website images: IG: @mariawallerphotography web: mariawallerphotography.com
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