From France to Washington Avenue: How this Black-owned steakhouse came to life
Five years ago, Miami Beach entrepreneur Kathia Joseph was on the verge of closing her first restaurant. With one of her dreams hanging in the balance, she refused. Instead, she pivoted by turning the business into a hookah lounge, a decision that ended up being profitable.
'I'm the type of person that never gives up,' said Joseph, 40. 'I said that I'm not going to close.'
Joseph's knack for betting on herself is what led her to open Casa Matilda, a Miami Beach steakhouse, in early 2024. In her first year of running the business, the Washington Avenue restaurant has welcomed celebrities ranging from rapper 50 Cent to actor Cuba Gooding Jr. and multiple cast members of the 'Real Housewives of Miami' and received a Diners' Choice designation from OpenTable. As many South Beach 'clubstaurants' focus on keeping up with trends, Casa Matilda is working to define itself by its fresh cuisine and detail-oriented service.
But the path to becoming a restaurateur wasn't a straight line for Joseph, a native of Haiti who worked for more than a decade as a translator in the film and TV industry in France. She was 17 when she moved from her home in Cap-Haïtien to live with relatives in France in 2003.
Joseph excelled in her new French school and, because she had grown up speaking and writing French and also spoke English well, one of her teachers soon connected her with someone they knew in the film business. Joseph took a test that ended up being an audition for Dubbing Brothers, a French studio that creates translations of major film and TV productions.
As Joseph became more successful at writing translations, she began planning for her goal of working on Disney shows. A supervisor explained that she needed a minimum of three years of experience, but when another coworker didn't show up for work one day, she took the opportunity to show her skills.
'It was for 'Hannah Montana' with Miley Cyrus,' she said. 'I start, and they love what I did. [I was] doing 'Hannah Montana,' 'The Suite Life of Zack and Cody' and 'Wizards of Waverly Place.''
Still just a teenager, Joseph went to school during the day and after 5 p.m. made about $260 per episode that she translated. She eventually got so fast that she translated up to three episodes a day.
By 2010, Joseph had made immense progress with her translation work and was responsible for training new writers. She had her daughter Joyce and began wondering how she could be a screenwriter of her own original films in English.
When Joseph's father Octavil died in Haiti in 2013, she thought about what goals mattered most to her as she mourned his death. A mentor suggested that immersion would help her become a better English screenwriter and that she should live in Miami for a few months. A year later, Miami was her new home.
But the move ended up changing the course of her professional journey in a different way. In 2015, Joseph was walking through Miami Beach when she realized that she would like to invest in the community and own a business. She had always loved cooking and frequented Paul, a restaurant on Lincoln Road.
With an enduring curiosity about opening a restaurant, Joseph began learning everything she could via YouTube videos and Google searches.
'In France, you need a degree for everything,' she said. 'I thought you had to have a degree to do a restaurant.'
On a phone call with a friend in Switzerland, Joseph talked about her restaurant idea and was pleasantly surprised when her friend offered to help her with an investment of over $300,000.
The landlord for the building Joseph lived in told her that a storefront on the first level was available. She signed a lease in July of 2019 and began bringing her first restaurant to life.
On Nov. 30, 2019, Blue Paris Bistro finally opened. Just three months later, her entrepreneurial dreams met a sobering reality: the COVID-19 pandemic.
She had to pivot fast and changed her eatery into a hookah lounge.
'That's the best decision I [ever] made,' she said. 'Oh my God, I started making good money.'
However, her change in fortune didn't go unnoticed by her landlord. Following the boom in business at her hookah lounge, rent went up to $25,000 a month for the 1,500-square-foot space in 2021 from the $15,000 that she'd paid before.
After closing the hookah lounge in June 2021, Joseph opened the Cuban restaurant Matilda's Kitchen that September on Collins Avenue. She still owns and operates the restaurant today.
In September 2023, Joseph and her business partner purchased Casa Matilda, an existing restaurant in South Beach, after six months of negotiations. She said she remembered when the building was constructed and had always pictured owning a restaurant in the space.
While the concept was not originally her own, Joseph kept the Casa Matilda name, updated the decor and took time curating the menu, which features Mexican-inspired dishes with a twist, like Oaxaca crab enchiladas and duck carnitas tacos, as well as steakhouse fare like bone-in ribeye and a dry-aged porterhouse.
Joseph is aware of the support Black customers have given her businesses and appreciates it that much more as a Black woman in a community of entrepreneurs that do not often look like her.
'The Black community is really helping its own people because when I turned [Blue Paris] into a hookah lounge, 70% of my customers were Black, and they really pushed my business a lot,' she said. 'Even here at Casa Matilda, I have a lot of customers because they know me from Blue Paris.'
With five years of business lessons under her belt, Joseph is considering expanding her restaurant portfolio and said she has more potential investors reaching out than ever before. She has also recently gotten into consulting, saying that helping others navigate the ups and downs that come with restaurant life is just as important to her.
'I want to help Black people, women and other minorities as a consultant,' she said. '[This work] is really challenging, and people sometimes give out false information.'
Despite the challenges Joseph has endured running multiple businesses, she said doing what she loves makes it all worth it.
'[With a] restaurant, you have to love it,' she said. 'It's all about love because it's a tough business.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Los Angeles Times
2 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
'Étoile' Stars Gideon Glick and Luke Kirby Reflect on Canceled Series, Dance Immersion, and Palladino Magic
Actors Gideon Glick and Luke Kirby of the Prime Video series 'Étoile' recently discussed the show's first season with Los Angeles Times moderator Matt Brennan. The Q&A, held on June 11 at the NeueHouse in Hollywood, covered various aspects of the series, which is set in New York City and Paris and follows two ballet companies swapping their star dancers to save their institutions. Glick and Kirby revealed they learned of the show's cancellation shortly before Glick received an award for the series. Both actors shared their introduction to the dance world for their roles; Glick, from musical theater, shadowed choreographers, while Kirby, with family ties to dance, took ballet classes, gaining appreciation for the art form's physicality and dedication. A significant part of the discussion focused on their collaboration with creators Amy Sherman-Palladino and Dan Palladino, with whom they previously worked on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Glick likened the Palladinos' writing to Steven Sondheim, noting, 'It is all there and it's so well constructed and it's psychologically potent that for an actor it's pretty much a dream.' Kirby compared it to Shakespeare, explaining, 'You don't do the text, the text does you ... things are revealed in the writing in the moment.' Glick, who also worked in the 'Étoile' writer's room, described Amy Sherman-Palladino's creative bursts as 'being struck by lightning,' with dialogue 'spitting out almost word for word.' He also shared that his character, Tobias, was specifically written for him, an experience he called 'pretty life-changing' that expanded his ambitions to include writing. The actors also reflected on filming in Paris. Glick, who is hearing impaired, found the French accents challenging but noted, 'I did feel a little isolated and I felt it really helped me stay in Tobias's mind.' Kirby described the experience as 'just great to be in Paris,' highlighting the dedication of the French crew and the 'rare gift' of working with international talent. They reminisced about shooting pivotal romantic scenes, with Glick calling it 'the most magical day of shooting.' Kirby, recalling his scene, praised his co-star Lou de Laâge: 'Lou is exceptional and I was staggered by her, always staggered by her talent.' Finally, they touched upon the show's theme of art as a form of 'insanity' or 'ecstasy.' Glick described the creative process as sometimes 'manic,' akin to the Greek word 'ecstasis,' meaning 'to leave the body.' Kirby said, 'I think it's a shame if you've never been insane ... it's a great gift to know you have that option.' They concluded by expressing profound gratitude for the collaborative and enriching experience of making 'Étoile,' with Glick stating, 'It was one of the greatest artistic experiences of my life. Everybody was extraordinary.' Kirby added, 'I think it asserted the whisper that we all have within us. And to listen to the whisper, don't shut it down.'
Los Angeles Times
2 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
Journalists get a guided tour of totalitarianism in ‘Meeting with Pol Pot'
French Cambodian director Rithy Panh has often cited the genocidal regime of the Khmer Rouge, which killed his family and from which he escaped, as the reason he's a filmmaker. His movies aren't always directly about that wretched time. But when they are — as is his most memorable achievement, the Oscar-nominated 2013 documentary 'The Missing Picture,' which re-imagined personal memories using clay-figurine dioramas — one senses a grand mosaic being assembled piece by piece linking devastation, aftermath and remembrance, never to be finished, only further detailed. His latest is the coolly observed and tense historical drama 'Meeting With Pol Pot,' which premiered last year at Cannes. It isn't autobiographical, save its fictionalization of a true story that happened concurrent to his childhood trauma: the Khmer Rouge inviting a trio of Western journalists to witness their proclaimed agrarian utopia and interview the mysterious leader referred to by his people as 'Brother No. 1.' Yet even this political junket, which took place in 1978, couldn't hide a cruel, violent truth from its guests, the unfolding of which Panh is as adept at depicting from the viewpoint of an increasingly horrified visitor as from that of a long-scarred victim. The movie stars Irène Jacob, whose intrepid French reporter Lise — a perfect role for her captivating intelligence — is modeled after the American journalist Elizabeth Becker who was on that trip, and whose later book about Cambodia and her experience, 'When the War Was Over,' inspired the screenplay credited to Panh and Pierre Erwan Guillaume. Lise is joined by an ideologically motivated Maoist professor named Alain (Grégoire Colin), quick to enthusiastically namedrop some of their hosts as former school chums in France when they were wannabe revolutionaries. (The character of Alain is based on British academic Malcolm Caldwell, an invitee alongside Becker.) Also there is eagle-eyed photojournalist Paul (Cyril Gueï), who shares Lise's healthy skepticism and a desire to learn what's really happening, especially regarding rumors of disappeared intellectuals. With sound, pacing and images, Panh readily establishes a mood of charged, contingent hospitality, a veneer that seems ready to crack: from the unsettlingly calm opening visual of this tiny French delegation waiting alone on an empty sun-hot tarmac to the strange, authoritarian formality in everything that's said and shown to them via their guide Sung (Bunhok Lim). Life is being scripted for their microphones and cameras and flanked by armed, blank-faced teenagers. The movie's square-framed cinematography, too, reminiscent of a staged newsreel, is another subtle touch — one imagines Panh rejecting widescreen as only feeding this evil regime's view of its own righteous grandiosity. Only Alain seems eager to ignore the disinformation and embrace this Potemkin village as the real deal (except when his eyes show a gathering concern). But the more Lise questions the pretense of a happily remade society, the nervier everything gets. And when Paul manages to elude his overseers and explore the surrounding area — spurring a frantic search, the menacing tenor of which raises Lise's hackles — the movie effectively becomes a prison drama, with the trio's eventual interviewee depicted as a shadowy warden who can decide their fate. Journalism has never been more under threat than right now and 'Meeting with Pol Pot' is a potent reminder of the profession's value — and inherent dangers — when it confronts and exposes facades. But this eerily elegiac film also reflects its director's soulful sensibility regarding the mass tragedy that drives his aesthetic temperament, never more so than when he re-deploys his beloved hand-crafted clay figurines for key moments of witnessed atrocity, or threads in archival footage, as if to maintain necessary intimacy between rendering and reality. Power shields its misdeeds with propaganda, but Panh sees such murderous lies clearly, giving them an honest staging, thick with echoes.
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
Miley Cyrus Leaves Little to the Imagination in Racy Outfit: 'Should Be Illegal'
As the pop star prepares for her upcoming album to drop, is capturing attention with a daring outfit that put her trim figure on full display. In a new Instagram video, shared on Tuesday, May 27, the "Flowers" songstress showcased a bold ensemble comprised of a turquoise, intricately-beaded bra top paired with matching chaps made of feathers. The pop star showed off her backside in the flirty number, wearing a pair of black cheeky boy shorts underneath the barely-there legwear. While no specific information was provided with the post, the caption gave clues as to what she may be wearing the outfit for. "Easy Lover out May 30th with Something Beautiful the album," it teased. The Hannah Montana star also appeared to be in a studio of some sort, alluding to the fact that the 'fit could be featured in a music video, or as a show garment for future live performances. Fans erupted in the comment section, flooding in to praise the "Wrecking Ball" singer for the risqué upload. "All cheeked up on Tuesday. 🤭❤️," one quipped, while another admitted, "I'm shaking mom 😩💛." "It should be illegal to look this good," a third declared, further exclaiming, "I'm sorry I CANNOT handle!!!!" More supporters dropped in to rave, "this is really EVERYTHING ❤️," "I'm SCREAMINN," and "this outfitttttttt slayyyy." Someone else hoped, "queen tell me you're going on tour," with an additional Instagram user agreeing with that sentiment by confirming, "i will buy a ticket in every state and country." Cyrus' latest project Something Beautiful drops on May 30, along with a musical film and visual album of the same name set to release on June 6, 2025. Next: Miley Cyrus Leaves Little to the Imagination in Racy Outfit: 'Should Be Illegal' first appeared on Parade on May 27, 2025
