For 40 years, the Caribbean restaurant started by Donald Coley has been an L.A. institution. Now run by his daughter Candice Coley-Thomson, the restaurant has shifted from a physical location to a ghost kitchen pick-up model but now is preparing to come back as a sit-down brick-and-mortar restaurant.
What is your business model?
We’ve been in the ghost kitchen for three years. We’ve expanded to a bigger kitchen since we first moved here. We primarily do our business now through Postmates, Uber Eats, Door Dash and Grub Hub as well as our online system where customers can order and pick up. And we offer curbside pick-up as well.
What was the inspiration for this business?
This year marks 40 years that we’ve been in business in L.A. County when my Dad (Donald Coley) first started the business in 1982. The first restaurant was in Leimert Park. He since then opened a few restaurants. We were in Inglewood and our last restaurant was in North Hollywood, which was a 4,000-square-foot sit-down restaurant. The North Hollywood closed in 2015 and we opened the ghost kitchen in 2019. So many people were demanding and calling for our food. It’s hard to find that Caribbean cuisine here in the Valley.
How has the pandemic affected you and your business?Â
The pandemic has affected us both negatively and positively. My Dad was not able to leave Trinidad. He got locked down in Trinidad for six months. So that’s a lot of stress on me. He’s turning 80 years old this year and he’s still in the kitchen. It put a lot of stress on me to find more workers. We had to go from a six-day work week to a five-day work week. We shortened our hours. That was the most difficult.
How did you recover?
Because there’s been so much light shined on black businesses, we’ve been featured in a number of publications, and it has been wonderful. A lot of people who thought we had closed entirely have rediscovered us. They can still get that good authentic Jamaican food. We have generational customers. We’ve been feeding from the grandparents to the parents to the children to the grandchildren, so it has been wonderful to reconnect.
What’s the best aspect of running your own business?
Running your own business is a lot of work. For me, the benefits of being able to serve our community and feed our customers brings me a lot of joy and happiness and fulfillment in this business. To be able to have my Dad’s legacy for 40 years and to continue that is amazing.
And the worst?
The most challenging right now is to find good help, to find reliable workers. Also being in a ghost kitchen, because we’re not visual, we have to step up our marketing a lot with Instagram, Facebook, Tik Tok and being able to navigate (all of that) at this time.
What are some of your signature dishes?
Our signature dishes are more of the traditional Jamaican dishes like jerk chicken, curry goat, ox tails and Jamaican’s national dish ackee
 salt fish.
What advice would you give someone who wanted to start their own business?
Get up every morning with a positive attitude and grind. Hustle every day. Do not give up. There was one point in time where I was working from my house after the restaurant closed. I would cook, pack and deliver. It wasn’t easy. But at the end of the day, the work you put in is what you get out of it. Â
What’s next?
We still have a demand for people who want to sit down. We’re working on getting another location now that the restrictions from COVID have been lifted a little bit. So we’re looking for a new brick-and-mortar restaurant location.
– Michael Aushenker