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All right.

My name is Brian Shaw.

I'm actually from Tallahassee, Florida.

And here we are.

Alicia Africa and Tallahassee, Florida.

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She was trying to come up with the name at the time, and I was at, I was traveling, visiting different parts of Tanzania.

I went to Dar es Salaam, and I remember being in the museum and, this museum in Dar Salaam, every every picture or monument, statue or whatever, said, Haley, see this Alice, see that?

And most of them said Alice, the Africa.

And when it was Alice in Tanzania, like Arusha, something like that.

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And and I at a time I was just taking a picture of something, you know, a picture of whatever I saw, you know, and, and later on, and she kind of was like, I really like the sound of the how is it pronounced?

And I was like, Kolisi, okay, that's it.

You know, that that's that was from my perspective, you know what I mean?

But that's what I saw it.

Kiswahili is the language spoken in East Africa.

And it's spread about 100 million strong people speak it.

It's actually considered to be the Pan-African language.

So when we think of Kwanzaa, for example, that's most of the words from that are in Swahili.

Any time they have, like a major film.

So Hakuna matata.

Swahili.

Like a lot of the things that we're familiar with in terms of Africa, they use Swahili as the first language, and, and Alizee itself means real, authentic or original.

We combined with African means made in Africa or authentic to Africa, originating from Africa, that type of thing.

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Oh you do are you do you my mom and I are super close.

We've been doing this type of stuff.

I feel like entrepreneurial spirit all our lives.

Even my grandfather was an entrepreneur, and, we started a bunch of different businesses.

Things that, that resonated with our, our time, our lives during that time.

I, I remember I was traveling to, I was in Spain when I was living in Spain.

We tried to do a study abroad type deal that was going to be unique.

We did a video series teaching about Spanish and how to speak Spanish.

And then when I went to Tanzania, we we both went together.

And, it was really beautiful experience.

We, we so much enjoyed it.

And we have been to different parts of Africa at this point.

When I made the decision to go back into stay there to live there, I was actually, planning on going to Kenya to study, study Swahili and linguistics.

But also looking at the University of Nairobi is really big, beautiful university.

And, they actually recommended that I study Swahili in Tanzania first and then go to, go to Kenya and, and things just kind of ended up rolling into place.

We started figuring out, okay, what business are we going to formulate now?

What are we going to develop now?

And, it started with African birth, right?

We were doing a, study abroad or travel experience that will allow people to go to Africa, see some of the things that we saw and different places.

And then, I think we needed a physical location here to make that happen.

We felt like we needed, you know, a store, a boutique, kind of a front for a business for and for the study abroad, etc., so that people had a location to come to and not just a flier.

And from there developed into, a boutique.

The boutique started taking off on its own.

Wasn't really intentional.

Well, it was definitely intentional, but it wasn't like our intention to be full time retail store owners, you know, at that time.

And then the restaurant was definitely an accident that just happened after, after the pandemic, as part of the pandemic, retail outlets weren't considered essential, but restaurants were, and we already had a kitchen.

We had already been doing spices and tastings and things like that.

And so we just decided, you know what?

Let's let's stay open based off of that offer, the kitchen kind of keep that, you know, going.

People tried the food, loved it.

And and they kind of they kind of pushed us into into a corner.

Like, we need more of this, bring us more.

And, and here we are a couple of years later, we are on the Food Network, You.

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And that kind of is how, we, how we want to be represented.

We want to show the African palate as sort of a, as more than what we're kind of exposed to in terms of, you know, starvation and hunger and instead, no, these are unique flavors that they've been eating and we've been eating for for generations, you know what I mean?

And also the nutritional aspects of it in terms of a lot of the stuff, the superfoods, okra as a superfood, you know, now baba and so many things.

So we, you know, we like to introduce those things to people kind of, for the first time, through this sort of Afro fusion lens, we're creating a palette that you use to.

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