Article by media partner Cuisine Noir, the country’s first Black culinary lifestyle outlet since 2009 dedicated to connecting the African diaspora through food, drink and travel.
For Rickey Booker, Sr., the CEO of Breakfast Brothers, making meals for family and friends is something he enjoys.
“I cook at home and a big Thanksgiving feast every year for my friends and family. I have favorite dishes that people would call and ask me to cook for them. It [cooking] just comes natural to me. I just never knew that one day I would do it as a full living,” says Booker, the co-owner of the popular Dallas-Fort Worth area eatery. He founded the restaurant chain specializing in breakfast and Southern comfort food with business partner Jonathan Biley-Smith.
While not a formally trained chef, Booker credits his grandmother and other women in his family for the passion of cooking, which eventually became his purpose.
A native of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Booker moved to Dallas, Texas in 1994 with the desire of creating a better life. “I used to travel and come to Dallas a lot,” he recalls about his job as a project manager for an office interior company. “I knew Dallas was a place that I wanted to be…So it was just a mindset of wanting more. And at the time, Oklahoma wasn’t moving fast enough for me.”
From Custom Cars and Stars to Culinary
The beginning of Booker’s entrepreneurial journey didn’t land him immediately in the culinary field. “When I first moved here [Dallas], I worked at a Chevrolet dealership and that’s where I got some education and got my Chevrolet, Chrysler Jeep and Mitsubishi certifications when it came to the car business,” he shares about his automotive background.
“Then I transitioned from there and went into my own custom auto shop with [retired NBA player] George Lynch. That’s when the entertainment and the car business started to entwine,” details Booker about the business that gave him the opportunity to reconstruct and customize a car for acclaimed Pastor T.D. Jakes.
The bright lights of show business burned brighter and Booker shifted into his second business: CKB Entertainment, an independent production and entertainment company operating out of Dallas-Fort Worth. The company is known for managing hip-hop artists and organizing large-scale nightlife events. “I managed some of the top hip hop artists locally that went far in the music industry,” says Booker.
The Birth of Breakfast Brothers
From custom cars to entertainment management, how did this serial entrepreneur end up in the culinary industry with the popular Breakfast Brothers brand? It began with a nightclub in 2017. Booker explains. “We had a nightclub [in a rental building] but it didn’t have a kitchen in it. So we bought this little trailer, we called it The Little Black Shack, and put it out back. One of my partners hired some cooks and they started cooking in it.”
But while the nightclub was making money, the food was not. “I got involved because the food wasn’t very good,” says the businessman. “We were just buying inventory to pay these three cooks to cook and it was pointless.”
Taking matters into his own hands, Booker created a menu based on his recipes and hired cooks to make the food. “The food that I created from the small menu took off,” says Booker. “People were lined up throughout the wee hours of the night till the sun came up buying that food at the little trailer.”
The chicken wings, pork chop baskets and catfish baskets were a big hit with the after-hours nightclub clientele at The Little Black Shack. Then the building was sold—and the new landlord didn’t want a nightclub on the premises, let alone a food “shack.”
He continues, “We had to move. We bought a small nightclub in Dallas and put the food trailer there and business took off,” relates Booker. But there was a problem. “We were right in the middle of a homeowner’s association [area], and [people] complained to the city about all the traffic. The city came out to investigate the complaint and they found out we had a food trailer. We didn’t have a permit to sell food…So when they shut the trailer down, people just quit coming to the nightclub.”
By Jocelyn Amador
