Our Story
Who are we and how did we get here? Why bees?
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We get these questions a lot. Read below to follow the journey of The Bee-stro and owner Katie.
The beginning - starting a business
After working in hospitality for many years, and always working for someone else, I (Katie), started my own little cake business, making custom (delicious) cakes for events, friends & family. This was a pinky toe dip into the pool of entrepreneurship, little did I know what was to come. I think like most people the unknown can sometimes hit you in the face and for me and my little cake business it was COVID 19. 2020 was the year I got married but the world changed in more than one way. COVID 19 closed a lot of small and tiny businesses, mine along with it, so I entered commercial kitchens once again. During my new job I met a fellow chef and we thought, why are we working so hard to make other people rich? Let's work hard and make ourselves rich! I had done it before, she was intimately involved in the running of this business, how hard could it be?
The middle - starting another business
Were we naive, maybe but we stuck to our guns. We found a lovely spot at WEX in Cape Town and began the build that would change our lives forever. We installed a fully new kitchen, got all the equipment, hired the staff (in the midst of the 2021 uncertainty the at was still hanging over us post-COVID 19). Build it and they will come or so they say. They didn't come, well at least not in the numbers we needed. We reshuffled, we reorganised, we advertised and we even took on supplementary bun baking to make it work, in the end our partnership dissolved and I was stuck with a business that was half mine and half hers with a lot of spent money and 3 employees relying on me to feed their families. So the question became, what next?
The end - starting The Bee-stro
I knew I did not want to give up but I did not know how to move forward. After a lot of tears and a lot of support from my loved ones and staff we decided to make something new out of something old. We decided to create a restaurant that was not only about the food but also about the people, about the stories they come with and are writing as they work. We found our new home at Riverlands Mall, a much busier and more ideal spot for a restaurant. We changed up the decor and colour pallete and introduced the concept of bees. So why bees? We get this question a lot and the bee of it all is that I truly believe a workplace should function like a hive. Bees work together and communicate seamlessly to create their product, honey. If one bee is not there to do its job, another will come into its place, everyone is always where they need to bee. They improve the environment around them with pollination and they are needed to keep flora around them alive. I would like us to be like that, a flawless team that leaves everything around us better. And so that is how we got here, to The Bee-stro, and it is hopefully not The End.