Blog

Anelly Perdomo and Claudia Ortiz rebranded the Shakespeare Protein House last April 2022. They have since renamed it The Protein Spot.

“It was very hard because we changed everything,” Ortiz said.

They based The Protein Spot on a similar place they saw in Miami but added the food options, starting with protein donuts. They tried every recipe themselves to ensure the food was not only healthy but also tasted good. It took a few months to get them right, particularly the waffles, but they enjoyed the challenge.

Ortiz is from Guadalajara and has lived in America for nearly 30 years. Perdomo is from the south of Mexico and has lived here for six years.

“It’s my favorite place because [of] the weather and the green areas, definitely,” Perdomo said. “I love that.”

One of the main reasons they opened The Protein Spot was the lack of healthy protein options in the restaurants in the area.

 “I have lived a healthy lifestyle for five years,” Perdomo said. “So I learned the importance of protein.”

The primary source of protein in their shop is Herbalife. Perdomo has worked with the company for ten years and is very familiar with the ingredients and how they work.

The Protein Spot is her first shop, and she’s found that customer service is one of the most important things. The other is cleanliness.

“Something I love is working with people,” Perdomo said. “I didn’t know how to do it, but I learned.”

Her main strategy is getting to know her customers and being as flexible as possible with them. For example, she doesn’t mind working with them if a customer asks for an option that’s not on the menu.

Perdomo’s favorite items are the banana caramel shake and the wild berry punch refresher. Ortiz loves their dark chocolate and coconut shake and waffles.

Perdomo and Ortiz love plants and nature. They go on hikes together every week, incorporating that passion into the shop’s interior design.

 

Every Saturday in March, the Oenophile Institute had vineyard classes that doubled as wine tastings for different Eastern European countries. Finally, on the last Saturday, March 25, the owner Chelsea Young finished the series with sparkling wine from those regions.

Manj Desilva, a Slovenian wine expert in Atlanta, taught a class of wine enthusiasts.

Slovenia didn’t gain independence until December 1990. Nevertheless, Deslivia has a passion for the new country.

“If you know nothing else about Slovenia, if you know Ribolla Gialla, if you know that grape, that’s half the story,” Desilvia said.

Photo Gallary:

Samanta Holley taught a class of 6 wine-enthuistasts about Austrian Wines on March 11, 2023, at The Oenophile Institute in Smyrna.

Holley lived and studied in Austria during college. When she moved back, she started sourcing different, smaller family-owned quality Australian wines and brought them to import. Holley’s also a Wine and Spirits Education Trust level three, currently studying for her diploma.

Photo Gallery

Saturday, March 4, 2023

The Oenophine Institute

Atlanta private chef Christina Glass will launch Monique’s Dinner Club in March of 2023.

Monique’s Dinner Club will be a subsection within Glass’s private catering. It’s a unique dining experience that differs from her everyday personal chef work, which consists of things on her catering menu done a family style. Glass primarily specializes in Creole soy food and smoked meat. The Dinner Club is a sit-down experience brought to a maximum of 12 people, where Glass serves dishes and handcrafted cocktails. Unlike her other work, this includes décor and “brings a Michelin-star restaurant to your home.”

“It’s just getting back to me doing more fine dining,” Glass explained. “Because that’s where my background is.”

Glass has been a chef since 2013 and graduated from the Art Institute of Indianapolis. She was head chef at Silver Creek in Urbana for years, but while she enjoyed it, Glass didn’t like the lack of breaks or vacation days. In addition, it was a stressful job with long hours and no relief. So she quit and moved to Atlanta, where she had more opportunities to live her dreams.  

Her favorite thing about cooking is the joy people get from her food.

“I’ve always known I wanted to be a chef,” Glass said. “I knew at a very young age that I wanted to be a business owner. I didn’t like working for other people and always loved cooking.”

Glass cooked a lot when she was young at her grandmother’s house. She often found her grandmother’s cookbooks around the house, and her uncle would join her, teaching her new recipes every week. It has been her passion since day one.  

“When she was a little girl, she watched cooking shows back-to-back,” Ramona Hursey said, Glass’s mother. “And we used to go to different restaurants, and she would order all these different types of foods to taste it and see the quality of it.”

According to her mother, for years every restaurant Glass would go to, she’d look for the main dish and how it was served. Then she’d take the techniques she observed and practice them on Hursey.

All her hard work paid off, but owning a private business brings challenges. Glass expressed how difficult it was doing everything herself; the shopping, the cooking, and the cleaning, but she finds it rewarding. She balances it all by staying organized with lists, notebooks, calendars, and frequent email checks. Glass takes pride in responding to clients in a timely fashion.

“I have a sous chef who is my best friend,” Glass said. “He works with me when I really need assistance, but he’s not into culinary like I am. So I’ve been thinking about finding somebody who’s maybe coming out of culinary school to teach them.”

Mar’ques Reed, her sous chef, enjoys working with her and admires her “go-getter” attitude. She’s a person who he’s watched set goals for herself and then accomplish those goals. Reed finds her to be an “awesome all-around chef.”

Razia Sabour, the winner of HBO’s Great Soul Food cook-off season one, has a mission as a chef to preserve her heritage through food.

“I’m African American, which means I’m of African descent,” Sabour said. “What we added to the American food culture was based on the resources we were given and crops and things we brought over here. So there are specific dishes that became staples in African American cooking and the American food culture.”

She believes the American food culture was created through her ancestors and their traditions in different parts of Africa, specifically West Africa, which they then merged with the resources they had at the time.  

“So those staples were, I guess, pridefully called Soul Food,” Sabour said. “In an era where it was about black pride.”

Keedra Keeley, chef and mentoree of Sabour, relates to her desire to preserve her heritage. She also cooks Soul Food and think it’s important to protect it from the negative connotations she’s found often come with it.  

Sabour has mentored many young chefs. Another was Caisey Blump, who spoke highly of how Sabour showed her how to maneuver in different venues depending on clientele. Blump loves Sabour’s Soul Food.

“If you come from the culinary world, it’s so many different versions of chefs,” Blump said. “It could be chefs that know techniques but have no soul. It’s not just the flavor, the soul enhances the flavor but you have to care about the food.”

What Sabour has developed over time, as a business owner and as an individual, is using her cooking to showcase who she is as a person.

“I want to feed people from my roots, from who I am. Soul Food, over the years, hasn’t been highlighted as a cuisine of popularity, respect, or anything good.” Sabour said. “So I, along this journey of business ownership, and just becoming, period, wanting to be myself, I just made it a point to showcase soul food, to cook soul food, beautifully and tell the stories of who I am, who my people are, who my ancestors are, that history, black history, African American History, and tell it through food, through my medium.”

Before her career as a chef, Sabour was a social worker for nine years as the clinical director of adolescent treatment homes. However, she wanted to be more present after she had her first daughter.

“Because I would drop her off early in the morning and pick her up late at night from my parents’ house,” Sabour said. “And so I was really seeking something to do that, you know, just allowed me to be an active mom.”

According to Sabour, the universe sent her visions of herself in a chef coat. She spoke about them with her mother, who encouraged Sabour to follow her gut. That’s when she started the process of becoming a chef. Her first thought was to get a food truck, as they were popular in Washington D.C, where she lived before moving to Atlanta in 2003. It wasn’t meant to be, though, because after she finished the licensing, she got a call from Tyler Perry’s Studios, telling her the chef for the following day fell through. She immediately rushed to the restaurant depot to get supplies.

“I had to go through such a process to get onto the lot for Tyler Perry Studios, so I was just thinking, ‘I can’t show up with disposable cookware; I have to show up looking official,'” Sabour said.

Initially, it was only supposed to be for one day. But after they finished eating, the manager asked her to return for five more weeks – lunch and dinner – which led her to a 12-week job at Week-TV  

“So I became a production caterer, just kind of being prepared,” Sabour said. “Or not being prepared because I didn’t know what I was doing at all. I looked like I did, and I did what I knew to do: cook. I cooked from my soul, from my heart.”

She has since branched out into being mostly a private chef. By 2024, Sabour plans to stop catering completely. Sabour wants to open a market of her own with a lunch counter. It will have all her artisan products in it. She also has plans to get her products into grocery stores.

“It’s so much,” Sabour said. “Even coming up with the formulas to create the product via to make a self-stable product.”

There’s a chemistry behind it. Sabour explained how she had to develop the math formulas for different products. Vinegar, for example, is in her collard greens, and she had to create the precise recipe to make it taste right while also being marketable.

“So, yeah, it’s a process, but I’m in it because that’s one of the vison I had 11 years ago. It was a Mack truck driving down the interstate with my name on it, so I want to have that,” Sabour said.

A thought of an Atlanta restaurant begins to form. The doors open to an inviting space with walls a lovely shade of lavender. A warm, lightly sweet bread-like smell mixes with the vibrant scent of fresh fruit while people enjoy a delicious mid-morning brunch. The sign on the wall reads “Heaven Sent.”

Soon, that dream will be a reality for Asia Garner. Currently, she works as a personal chef and caterer. Where she cooks the food in her kitchen and takes it to whatever location needs it; her favorite thing about being a chef is seeing people’s reactions when they taste her food.

Born and raised in Ohio, she moved to Altana 6 years ago.

“I have family here, so I always spent summers here,” Garner said. “I knew this was where I wanted to be when I grew up.”

During the pandemic, cooking is where she turned whenever she wanted to do something fun. Then, one evening, when a friend was visiting, Garner saw her looking at social media sights of people selling their food.

“And I was like, ‘Do you think I can do it?'” Garner recalled fondly. “She said, ‘Uh, yeah, I’ve been telling you that!'”

With her encouragement, Garner decided to follow her dreams and pursue a culinary career. Her sister, Althea “Pinkie” Forest, wholeheartedly supported her decision.

“She has that entrepreneurial spirit,” Forest said. “And she’s always been able to cook, ever since she was little.”

Cooking was something Garner held close to her heart. She said her “job” during the holidays was the cake when she was little. So it was a proud day for her when she moved up the macaroni and cheese. Back then, her mother was the cook in the family. Although, they aren’t the only two who share that passion.

Her son is in culinary school, and her brother roped her into partnering in his bar-and-grill, Dreamz, in Ohio in October 2022. Garner opened the kitchen while he did the bar. She flies out frequently to cook specialty dishes – a week or two out of every month.

“It’s kind of challenging,” Garner said. “Being here, running it.”

However, she doesn’t let that slow her down. Between that, her catering, and looking for a location to open Heaven Sent, Garner keeps a full schedule.

According to Forest, being the youngest of the family didn’t stop her from being a born leader and “go-getter.”

“You know what?” Forest said. “We’re having a Paint and Sip Saturday, and we’re making sure she’s gonna come because we know it’s going to run right when she’s there.”

Although Forest is in Ohio now, as soon as Heaven Sent opens, she said she’d run the office.

“With both of them, I make sure I’m right there,” Forest said. “We’re going to be there to assist as much as I can, my mom as well. We’re a family that kind of works with each other. We all try to do our part to help.”

There are many challenges to opening a restaurant. Garner found one of which was writing down all her recipes so everyone could follow them.

“It’s challenging for it to be the same every time because I just know what to do,” Garner said.

But, Kenisha Oliver, long-time best friend and assistant chef on a few catering runs, praised Garner.

“I’ll be like, ‘Girl listen, look how they are,'” Oliver said.

While being a chef might have challenges, Garner always gets raving reviews on her cooking. Oliver said they always approached her afterward, wanting to know who cooked the food so they could book Garner for future events.

Heaven Sent is coming in 2023, and Asia Garner will take Atlanta by storm.

The price of food has been increasing all over the United States.

Energy and Economics

According to Thomas Garr, an economics professor at Kennesaw State University, energy prices are one of the big things causing the food increases. Oil-related products are used to power tractors to operate and harvest food. Then the truck transporting it to wherever it needs to go also needs fuel. That, in turn, means the price they must sell the food to the end customer will be higher.

“There’s a lot of chatter that gas prices have come down,” Garr said. “They’re still massively higher than they were two years ago. We’re not refining as much energy; we’re not producing as much oil.”

The second thing driving commodity prices is the conflict in Ukraine. They are one of the leading world exporters of grains and vegetable oils. Even though shipments haven’t yet been affected, Garr expressed concern that commodity prices will rise in anticipation.

Fertilizer is also something produced in Ukraine. The World Bank reported that fertilizer prices in 2022 rose nearly 30%.

Food Manufacturing Plant

The price of meat products has gone up and down, according to Michael Karakos, with Country Ranch Foods. They mainly sell to distributors: Cisco, US Foods, Kroger, Ingles, and various restaurants. They’ve been affected by the turkey increasing due to the avian flu viruses. However, chicken prices have gone back down.

“The biggest issue with inflation, to me, is labor and fuel costs,” Karakos said.

When fuel went up, companies started using more corn to make gasoline. Cows, chickens, pigs, and anything that eats corn went up with it. When Country Ranch food increased their prices, Karakos said they experienced a lot of backlashes with their customers.

“I had a conversation with a customer yesterday that we make turkey for, and he was like, he might have to cut back on how their menu cycle runs and reduce the turkey because he loses money on every meal that has turkey,” Karakos said.

Restaurants

Randy Elias, the owner of Moe’s and Aloha in Acworth, was almost put out of business when he couldn’t raise his prices fast enough in 2022 to keep up with the demand for increased commodities. In the last 18 months, chicken has doubled, and cheese tripled. So while he is “finally” back to pre-covid numbers, it has been just surviving for him for the last several years.

“Our main complaint now is that prices have gone up, but portions have stayed the same, which is the reality of our world today,” Elias said.