So.

My name is Leon Charles Bronson.

I'm from Panama City, Florida.

I've been in Tallahassee for seven years now.

Goodness.

Actually, I moved here in 2016, so most.

What does that.

Nine years.

Nine years now.

So I started cooking at waffle House.

I didn't cook at home with my mom, my dad and my grandma.

None of us cooked at home.

My mom was working at Winn-Dixie, so she oftentimes got us fast food.

And my dad is working for the city of Parker, so he really wasn't trying to cook when he got off.

And I needed a job to pay for gas money.

And at the time, gas is pretty expensive.

And I had this giant van, so I applied it to a couple places.

Waffle House is the only place they called me back and I just loved the rest.

I loved the restaurant.

And yeah, at the end of that waffle House tenure and I was kind of getting to the end of high school, I was either torn on going into music and being a musician, or should I continue and just be a chef?

Or should I continue to try to be a chef?

And I decided to go into food.

This thing happened because of Cool Beans Cafe.

The owner of Cool Beans Cafe ended up purchasing this business from Mickey's Lakeside Cafe.

I believe they started going out of business in 2017 or 2018.

And Keith, the owner of Cool Beans Cafe, had had looked up and got the note that this place was going to be available.

So we ended up acquiring the business.

After we acquired the business, he did a bunch of leasehold renovations and had a concept in mind, but I think when he got in here, he realized how small the spot is and how difficult it would be to operate a high volume lunch service.

So two years down the road, he announced that he wasn't going to open the restaurant, and he jokingly said to me, he was like, do you want to buy a restaurant?

I was like, I mean, I'm a broke college kid at the time, so I'm like, well, how much are you asking?

So I ended up, you know, kind of having an idea of how much he wanted.

I did a fundraiser I raised.

I kind of got the money together.

I had a concept.

I went to the family small Business development center and had them look at my, business plan.

Went to him and he had said, sorry, I just ordered yesterday.

And I was like, oh my God, I didn't even really want this restaurant.

But I did for a half second.

It turns out the pandemic was like a week later, so it actually lucked out really well.

And over that year, from the pandemic and when I wanted to restaurant initially, I did all these private dinners and Tallahassee and catering and kind of got my footing with business.

I did a lot of online promotional cooking classes and people couldn't leave their homes.

And you fast forward and I had a lot of word of mouth sharing through Tallahassee Foodies.

One person booked me for a private dinner.

Then people realized they wanted to have that elevated food experience inside their own home.

From that point on, I was just booking after booking.

After booking.

A year later, I went to Keith and I was like, hey, I need a commercial space that I can like grow this thing out of.

And he ended up, you know, giving me a really great deal, a wonderful view.

And that was in 2021.

So once I got in here, I had this big concept for if I keep going, the path that I'm going, this place is going to be too small by the time it opens.

And here we are.

So actually, before I got this location, I was a private chef for a family.

And even before I was, you know, here doing all the dinners, I would start all my dinners at my house.

I go do all the prep and the small cook stuff, nothing that needed to be cooked.

And then I would get to the home and finish it.

But really, I started doing my cooking classes in my home.

I had built this elaborate cooking class set up in which I had a giant cutting board.

I had four cameras, and I had and had a mini pro that I could run my own live stream class and produce it at the same time.

So I had a master, I had a top down, I had a three quarters, and I had a food angle that all plugged in to something that I would switch, and I would stream this on Twitch, stream it on Facebook.

And as I'm talking, I would talk to the main camera.

If I had something top down, I would switch to the top down view.

If I was finished with a plate, it would get three quarters angle, you know I would.

I built my own audio and I was able to interact with the guests that were watching these classes as I'm producing it, as I'm cooking.

And that's what really got me started in this online media space to, you know, eventually do cooking competitions with T-Pain.

And I wanted a high quality production for what I was doing.

I was just going to go straight into production and social media.

But then I started getting books for private dinners here in Tallahassee.

So I actually put all of that on a hold so I could start doing private dinners here.

I feel like I always engage in a lot of like hobbies or activities in my life.

And the biggest thing that I always want to do is make sure that I give the most effort that I possibly can in this thing that I'm engaging in, so that it pays back all the way to my mom because my mom's going to be the reason that I'm like, she's going to support me and make sure that I go through and do whatever I want.

If I wanted to play DDR, I wanted to play you.

You know, if I wanted to, you know, get saxophone lessons no matter what, regardless if we had the funds to do it, she always made sure that there was something that she could do to make it happen.

And for me, I couldn't pay that back monetarily.

How it could pay that back is by making sure that I achieved the highest skill, the highest, you know, treatment of whatever it was that she was going to, you know, put in for me.

So if those dance games, I was winning tournaments for saxophone, it was all county.

And then for the restaurant that was a little more difficult because, like, how do you how do you justify going into the hospitality and restaurant field?

It would mean awards.

It would mean TV shows.

It would mean all these different things.

And when I got into the field, that kind of stuff almost seems imaginary.

Like you don't get into it for that.

So to be able to have my family come here to the restaurant, to be able to have the show, have the restaurant featured on Food Network, to be able to just be supported by the community.

It's awesome because it shows like to my parents, specifically my mom, that this is this is something that like was worth it, like it was worth every single investment, any kind of missed.

It just just justifies all the time.

It's like I miss from the family.

They're able to see it full force.

For me.

What's next is going to be kind of putting a bow on this restaurant and getting all of the, you know, I started and T's crossed, beer and wine online, ordering consistent hours, maybe even extended hours and just kind of getting all the details of this restaurant finished.

And honestly speaking, then after that, I just want to focus on media.

I want to see what it's like to then produce a cookbook or, start doing interviews on bigger shows or see if there's a way to, you know, promote this thing bigger than just Tallahassee because I feel like I have the opportunity to, you know, I have the the social media.

I could potentially have the personality to then go in and impress a lot of these people on, on networks.

So I want to see what that's like.

So I don't want to open restaurants, I don't want to expand the business.

I don't want to do any of that.

I just want to set up something great for people here at Lake Ella that they can count on, know when they can come in, have a consistent meal, bring family members in.

I want to be able to help with the food insecurity situation here in Northwest Florida.

And then I just want to see what this looks like on a national scale.

I think that's just about it.

I'm tired now.

I'm tired.