Today we’d like to introduce you to Nicole Ghafourian.
Hi Nicole, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I grew up watching my sister, April, cook in our home kitchen, and while not tall enough (at that time) to properly reach our countertops, I’d still find my way to participate and would get so much joy pretending to be her “sous chef”. My passion started there, but I never thought that I would become a restaurant owner.
At 20 years old, I was in school studying Psychology, working two jobs one of which was managing April’s Mediterranean restaurant Crimson. There I learned the ins and outs of daily restaurant operations and once I graduated from college in April and I saw an opportunity to open another restaurant. I have now been the owner of Society Kitchen for the past ten years.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I always tell people that owning a restaurant isn’t always as glamorous as they make it in film and television. Before the pandemic, we saw a major decline and considered closing our doors, but I begged my sister to give me a chance to go in the kitchen and start from scratch. I launched the new menu in February 2020 right before the pandemic and was receiving a lot of good feedback from customers. During the pandemic, we managed to draw the attention of social media influencers, and with just one video that went viral, everything just took off.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
I’d like people to know that Society Kitchen is a family-owned and operated business born out of two sisters’ desire to share their love of cooking in the community they were raised in. Society Kitchen is an all-day brunch, lunch, and dinner cafe dedicated to serving ingredients sourced from local farms, using naturally raised meats, poultry, and fish. Our goal is to satisfy our guests with the simple pleasure of a great meal, the same feeling my sister and I would experience when returning from college and heading straight home to our mom’s kitchen for a nice warm home-cooked meal.
How do you define success?
I measure success in a few ways: emotionally, am I happy, content and at peace and also have I reached my goals that I wanted to achieve?
Contact Info:
- Website: societykitchenla.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/societykitchenla/?hl=en
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/society-kitchen-santa-monica
