We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Francesca and Kate Avitto and Wnek a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Francesca and Kate, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you talk to us about a risk you’ve taken – walk us through the story?
The biggest risk we both took with starting this business was leaving our old careers behind, knowing that we had a craving to follow our passion for creating fun, elevated versions of healthy, Plant Forward vegan dishes for our community.
We both spent years honing our careers, we just knew the timing for this was right.
Kate was a School Teacher and Francesca was a Hair stylist. Two very solid careers for us both. In the years leading up to opening, Kate and Francesca had already been on a journey towards this chapter. We were Private Chefs / Event Planners. We would go into our clients homes and create Coursed Dinners and events, we’d create a restaurant atmosphere in peoples homes, business openings and more. We fell in love with what we were doing.
At the same time, we began to understand the correlation between food, lifestyle and disease. We spent 10 years watching Kate’s mom’s world change and deteriorate from Early Onset Alzheimer’s to full Alzheimer’s which was a catalyst for changing our lives and outlook.
Witnessing the unthinkable took us on a journey and gave us the desire to learn as much as we could about food and disease. As well, our family history of health issues and disease on both sides our family were prevalent – Francesca’s mom, a breast cancer survivor, dad suffered a massive heart attack and Francesca herself with half of her lifetime living with Autoimmune Disease, most recently being diagnosed with Stage 3 Chronic Kidney Disease. Kate with Inflammatory reproductive diseases such as endometriosis, we’ve both taken the path of a low inflammatory, Whole Foods Plant based lifestyle which has improved our health over the years. And now we are proud and excited to share this with others through the dishes we create!
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
Opening a restaurant is not unique, there are so many of us out there making a living with our food businesses and restaurants and it’s almost always born out of passion for creating and cooking. But what we do is unique to us.
When we were Private Chefs, living a busy life with limited time to grab something to eat ourselves while on the road, we realized that it was impossible to find a simply clean meal. Anywhere! Finding Salads that were vegan just meant you had to omit the meat, cheese and the dairy based dressing on top – leaving you with greens and maybe a tomato slice or two with Oil and Vinegar. You couldn’t find a plant forward meal, so we decided to create what we realized was necessary! A completely Plant Based Vegan, Plant Forward eatery using seasonal local ingredients! What sets us apart is the fact that we are actually Holistic Nutritionists who get to put our research into practice everyday!
When we first opened in 2018, there was no health food and definitely no vegan food in our town or any surrounding towns! We are however, excited that over the years more places are starting to pop up, because we like to eat out also!
How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?
We believe that just being who we are and doing what we do has really helped build our clientele over the years!
People knew from the start why we embarked on this journey. We were already vegan – the animals and the environment has always been at the forefront of being vegan. But our “why” for changing our own relationship with food and turning our veganism into a complete lifestyle change was it! Our “why” is so relatable and so many people know they need to change the way they eat and their relationship with food and with that, so many customers over the years have told us that we’ve helped them change their relationship with food. We’ve taught people that good, clean food does not have to be boring, if anything it’s so much more creative when you have to be imaginative with your dishes!
How did you build your audience on social media?
Food is visual. The desire to eat a certain dish is visual and our food is visually appealing and colorful! We believe in eating the Rainbow and that is what we serve!
Down to our biggest seller, the “Rainbow” is a menu item full of colorful, fresh produce! So that’s a big draw, especially through social media! Vibrant, colorful dishes full of nutrients is what we do!
If you take a stroll through our social media, you’ll see what we mean!
Our advice to anyone starting to build a social media presence, be you and stick to what you believe in! The skits and all the little things we do to get recognition online is fun, keep that for fun! But make the focus of your restaurant’s social media – the food! And take advantage of the different settings on your phone’s camera to really catch the essence of your dishes! For example, whichever dish we post each morning is always what we sell out of first each day! People crave what they see!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://Ladyandtheshallot.com
- Instagram: https://Instagram.com/ladyandtheshallot
- Facebook: https://Facebook.com/ladyandtheshallot
Image Credits
All photos are taken by Lady and the Shallot, with the exception of the 7th picture which was taken by Steven Schilling a local and amazing Photographer!