Today we’d like to introduce you to Symone Rodney and Diamond Fedrick-Hunte.
Symone and Diamond, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
Monie’s Kitchen: Run by Symone est.2017. Hospitality has always been second nature to me. I attended FIU majoring in Event Planning and minoring in Culinary. I actually never thought I would lean that much into the culinary side even though I’ve been cooking for friends and family my entire life. But after enough push from my friends, I decided that everyone did need to taste my cooking. I began doing dinner sales on the weekends, just selling basic family dinner meals. I worked a full-time job and attended school. Any day that I was off, I dedicated to cooking and selling plates. I soon fell in love with it and was actually seeing a profit. It became more than a hobby or side hustle, but a passion. Eventually, that turned into me cooking full time. Being booked for catering to baby showers & weddings, and even doing meal prep and becoming a personal chef for professional athletes. Two years into my business, I decided I could use my other passion, event planning, and I decided to start another business with one of my best friends, Diamond.
The Cave Entertainment: Run by Diamond & Symone est.2019. Why call ourselves The Cave Entertainment? Imagine having your own man or woman cave at home. Now imagine how that cave makes you feel. When you come to any T.C.E event, it’ll be an incomparable experience. We absolutely love to go out and party with our friends so we decided to handcraft our own party experience. We soon learned this was a male-dominated game and we accepted the challenge. In May of 2019, we went out on a limb and decided we were going to throw our first event. We threw a mansion pool party in July of 2019 called Adult Swim. Then we threw our first annual all-women networking event on international women’s day in March 2020. It’s starting off small with us just throwing parties and planning events but we are growing into much more. We built a team of our most talented friends and we will continue to build to deliver a one-stop-shop experience when it comes to events. We plan, decorate, cater, bartend, have hookah services, audio/visual services, photographers/videographers, anything you can think of, all at an affordable price!
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
Monies Kitchen: I have run Monie’s Kitchen by myself from the beginning. All the prep, cooking, setup/breakdown, and deliveries are done by me. It’s very challenging running a business by yourself, juggling school, and still dedicating 40 hours a week to a job. And these are just the struggles of every small business owner. Being in the hospitality business has its own obstacles. You constantly have to find ways to be different and stand out to keep your audience’s attention. But the loss of business and extra precautions that now have to be taken ensure the safety of my clientele during this pandemic has been the most tedious obstacle by far.
The Cave Entertainment: Balancing both of us still having full time jobs while running the business has always been an obstacle, during the pandemic we lost our jobs, so it gave us so much time to practice perfecting certain things and mainly plan what our next step will be after Covid19. The biggest obstacle of the pandemic and social distancing is not knowing how this will ultimately affect the economy and society for the rest of the year. Our type of business is completely on hold, there’s no telling when we’ll be able to start actually making money again. There’s no way to throw an event with crowds of people at this time, and who knows when we’ll be able to? Not being able to see your business be profitable can crush any business owner but we’re using this time to be ready to open back up as soon as the world does.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
Monie’s Kitchen: We are a catering company specializing in catering events, large or small, and meal prep orders. We also do private dining and very often, we do dinner sales giving people a taste of our island-American cuisine. I love preparing classic Caribbean food, and soul food the most. Our best selling items have to be our jerk chicken pasta and chicken wings & fries. We have grown so much over the years and acquired so much clientele and been able to experience so many new things just off being able to connect with people through my food! I love making people happy and the best way to do that is through their stomachs. I’m proud to have a business that can never go out of style.
The Cave Entertainment: Our company is a one-stop-shop for any type of event. We offer food and drink services, planning, entertainment, decorating, audio, photography and videography. We are different from the rest because we are able to deliver a high-end event experience without breaking our guest’s pockets. We specifically hand picked every single person on our team. Customer service and giving our guests the best experience is our #1 priority. The passion of hospitality in our entire team and staff ensures that when you’re at one of our events, you’ll be taken care of.
What were you like growing up?
Symone: I’m the youngest and only girl of my family, so its safe to say I was the baby boss. I was an extremely outgoing, fun kid and that definitely hasn’t changed since I’ve aged. I come from a Bahamian & Trinidadian background, which reflects a lot in my personality and my cooking. When I am not working at a party or event, it’s likely to catch me dancing at one!
Diamond: Born and raised in south Florida with a Trinidadian background. I played basketball from middle school all the way to college. I’ve always been a goofy, vibrant and shy kid. I graduated from Bethune Cookman with a recreation degree.
Contact Info:
- Phone: 3059827396
- Email: caveent19@gmail.com
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/thecave.ent
- Facebook: www.instagram.com/monies.kitchen
- Twitter: www.twitter.com/monieskitchen
- Other: Monies.kitchen@icloud.com
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