We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Ashad Ruffin Michelle Reyes a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Ashad Ruffin, thanks for joining us today. Naming anything – including a business – is so hard. Right? What’s the story behind how you came up with the name of your brand?
The name for Lucy Mae’s Kitchen just fit and made sense as it was a way to honor Ashad’s late grandmother who unfortunately passed away from COVID. Grandma dedicated her life to her family, her friends, the church and good home style cooking. Growing up at her house in Baltimore, Ashad picked up on her recipes and cooking style at a young age. Ashad hopes to bring over her dishes (with his own twist) and cooking style she taught him as a young kid to California as a way to keep her legacy alive. As for our logo, we decided to keep it a classic, clean look that would be easy to recognize. It’s been great having people come up to us in the grocery store or when we’re out wearing our logo shirts to let us know they’re following us on IG or FB!
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?
Ashad always talked about wanting to own a food truck or selling his food but it seemed more of a long lost dream since he was caught up in his current job at the time. In 2020, his grandmother sadly passed away due to COVID-19. After a year of being quarantined and in a world wide pandemic, Ashad and Michelle looked for hope and better days in 2021. When talking about their New Years’ resolutions, they held each other accountable and questioned how they could be better for the upcoming year.
One day when Michelle was at work, she got a random text/pic from Ashad saying “Lucy Mae’s Kitchen”, which she knew at the time was the name of his (then) future food IG that they were talking about. From then on, it’s been a process of growth owning and managing a business. It’s been a rollercoaster but we’re blessed to be proud small business owners!
As of now, Lucy Mae’s Kitchen takes online orders, catering requests and participates in multiple markets and pop up events all throughout SD. We have different specials throughout the week such as Mac and Cheese Monday, Wing Wednesday, Fried Friday and Soul Food Saturday! We are now ranging between 2-4 events weekly and are known for our Tameka wings, truffle fries, Maryland style crabcakes and so much more. Proud to bring that MD flavor to SD!
Our hope is to spread the name of Lucy Mae’s Kitchen all throughout San Diego by providing gourmet soul food and home style cooking.
We’d love to hear the story of how you turned a side-hustle into a something much bigger.
Lucy Mae’s was started before COVID vaccines were given and the world was still in a pandemic. At that time, Ashad was no longer working.
When we finally opened our kitchen doors, we started only being open on weekends for #SoulFoodSaturday. We were taken back from the support we got from our friends and random strangers wanting to order! It shocked us how many people were wanting to try our food. Eventually, we chose to open up another 2 extra days, including #WingWednesday with $1 chicken wings. Slowly but surely, we extended our work days and hours. We are now open 6 out of 7 days a week (if no events) from Monday through Saturday 12-9pm or sell out. Starting last month, we have popped up more and more and are now doing about 2-3 events a week all throughout San Diego. Come find us!
Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?
We truly are blessed with the best customers who constantly come through, share the word and speak highly of us to their friends and family. We gained a lot of our customers from word of mouth. We also would host giveaways as a way to bring in new clientele. We just recently celebrated our 6k follower giveaway! One thing that doesn’t change no matter where you go is that people are willing to travel for good food.
We’ve been humbled by all the love and support we’ve received from other small business owners since day one. From them just sharing about us on their page to offering us advice, we have built a family within this community. We constantly come out to different events and markets to meet vendors and show our support. That is also why we have #SundayShoutOuts as a way to show the same love to new upcoming businesses like how we got when we first started out.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: LucyMaesKitchen
- Facebook: SDLucyMaesKitchen
- Other: Phone: (619) 432-8788