00:00My name is Greg Tillery and I'm the owner of Weedat's New Orleans Zone Chicken and Shrimp.
00:30I remember being in Alabama and this is when like the food truck races was hot, you know, so I was like, man, that's something that I can do.
00:40Wound up taking everything that I had saved up from working in corporate America those six and a half years, invested in a food truck, from the food truck brought the, well, I got the food truck down here and opened up shop and I mean, it exploded, you know, like dynamite.
00:55Appreciate y'all coming in with you all, the wazam wings, fully loaded fries, got the garlic parmesan.
01:02We try to come in every day.
01:03Man, we appreciate the support, bro.
01:04We used to get so much, so many hits on Google where the food truck was that it started to become a landmark.
01:10My name is Keisha Dennis and my salon name is Keisha Beauty Hair Studio.
01:25I've been in business since 2015, but on my own since 2016.
01:35Not too long.
01:37I have you, I actually have Uncle Ken coming too.
01:40What led me to be an entrepreneur is I wanted to be my own boss at my own hours and come and go as I saw fit.
01:50Mark Broussard, owner of Bless to Cut Apparel and Barbering.
01:55I've been in business since September of 2015.
01:58What's up, brother?
01:59How you doing?
01:59How you doing?
01:59How you doing?
02:00Everything good?
02:01Yes, sir.
02:01Good, man.
02:02How's it going today?
02:04Everything's good, man.
02:05How about yourself?
02:05Good, man.
02:06I hope it's nice.
02:06I opened around the same month of September simply because I wanted to explore the entrepreneurship and just believe in myself.
02:17Just step out on fate and just start my barbering business.
02:22I feel that there's a lot of freedom that exists within owning your own business.
02:27I like that people enjoy celebrating with you by supporting your business.
02:34And it shows them that, hey, they can have their own business one day as well.
02:42My name is Wayne Bakke, Sr.
02:47And I've been in business for 50 years.
02:51My brother, my older brother, was working at the restaurant with my dad and he told me, he said, you need to come back in.
02:56And I went back in, and not knowing the details of running it, I just stayed in the background, but I had learned how to run a business.
03:09Then the history goes on.
03:10I move on to open up my own independent restaurant, left the business with my dad and my brother after we had two businesses.
03:17There's another one on Claiborne and Espinade, and the story is too long to tell you the whole story.
03:24I've had nine, ten different restaurants.
03:28And currently, the current restaurant is Lil Dizzy's Cafe in Treme.
03:34Today, it is run by my son and his wife, Wayne, Jr. and Akeesha.
03:46Hi, welcome to Dizzy's.
03:48How are you?
03:49Wonderful, how are you?
03:50Pretty good.
03:50Is this your first time at Dizzy's?
03:52Second.
03:52I had a love affair with your potato salad, and I needed to come back.
03:55Okay.
03:55Welcome to Lil Dizzy's Cafe in the Horta Treme.
03:58So you are here in the dining room, where you can dine inside or outside.
04:01Here's some of the foods that we have every day.
04:05We have our sides, our candy yams, greens, dirty rice, a vegetable, our awesome cheesy mac and cheeses every day.
04:14And you pick up, the food is picked up here on this side, and then we bring it to our customers, whether they're inside or outside.
04:25My name is Jamal McCoy.
04:27I'm the owner of Headquarters Barber and Beauty Salon.
04:30And Headquarters has been established for 15 years.
04:37Headquarters and the barbershop impacts the community.
04:41I mean, we gave an event last weekend with a group called Son of a Saint.
04:47They mentor black boys that don't have a father.
04:52Your father has to be incarcerated for over 15 years, or he has to be deceased.
04:58So they have over 200 kids in that program.
05:01And it just shows you the need for things like this.
05:04Lil Dizzy's impacted the community is right in the Horta Treme, which is the oldest black neighborhood in the country.
05:13In fact, built by free people of color and slaves who are all related.
05:20We built up a legacy in this restaurant.
05:23It didn't start with this restaurant.
05:24It started in the 60s, in the 40s, when we started cooking our food and frying our chicken and doing all this good stuff.
05:33Because we get a cross-section of folks.
05:36You could come in Lil Dizzy's, and you will see when you come the cross-section of people that come, white and black.
05:43If you notice that in New Orleans, the homeless population is huge down here.
05:50So every morning we used to cook chicken and just, you know, have a line of people that was just homeless that, you know, come in and get something to eat.
05:58How you doing?
05:59Hey, how y'all doing?
05:59Order number 10.
06:00For me, it's just all about just paying it forward and always trying to reach back and just try to help.
06:06So, you know, if I see somebody doing something positive, they got a business or whatever, give it to me.
06:12You know, I put it on.
06:14You know, even if it's something that I might not close, that I might not necessarily, you know, want to wear, I'm still, I'm going to put it on and I'm going to tag you in it.
06:23And I'm going to just bring exposure to your business because already you make money selling clothes than you being there having to go on the corner and have to sell dope.
06:32You know what I'm saying?
06:33So I just try to do what's right.
06:35I just try to just be a vessel.
06:37I try to be a positive vessel in the city that just sometimes people say it got a dark cloud over it.
06:44Annually, we do a back-to-school drive and we also do a Christmas drive where we tend to give out more books than toys.
06:50We take on kids in our community that may have lost parents, that have parents that may be incarcerated or just need extra help and guidance.
06:58It's important to me because for one, we have too many kids on the streets doing wrong.
07:02So if I can make an impact to get them to do right, that's important to me.
07:05I don't have any kids.
07:06So I'm the great aunt to all the kids that are around me.
07:112020 was very, very uncomfortable.
07:14I shut my restaurants down because I didn't want to be a part of the problem.
07:19You know, it was very, it was probably one of the most difficult decisions I've ever had to make in my life.
07:27We definitely had to shut down for over a month.
07:30My clients were calling out crazy trying to get us to sneak into the salon, but we unfortunately did have to shut down.
07:36I lost a booth renter.
07:37And the social distancing has altered the way we interact in the salon.
07:42It's never jam-packed like it used to be.
07:45It's hurry up and get your hair done and leave so the next person can come in.
07:48It was a lot of precaution.
07:50It was a lot of face masks, sanitation, different things of that nature that had to take place.
07:56And we still currently follow through with those processes today.
08:00I am vaccinated.
08:02My husband is vaccinated.
08:04My 17-year-old son is vaccinated.
08:06And I'm waiting until the age limit is available for my 8-year-old son to be vaccinated.
08:10I truly believe it is vital that everyone gets vaccinated so we can get back to some normalcy.
08:17I got vaccinated so fast, as soon as I could.
08:21Me and my wife before, when it was very limited people, very few people getting vaccinated.
08:27We was in that line getting vaccinated quick.
08:30Black communities, where the numbers was the highest.
08:33You're talking 70% of African Americans that was in the hospital on ventilation machines.
08:40And, you know, that's the ones that were passing away.
08:43The people that have the diabetes, you know, high blood pressure, you know, all of these,
08:50you know, hypertension, all of this kind of stuff that's going on that's heavy in our community.
08:55And it's a lot of reasons why, you know, it's important for just us just to make sure that we're straight.
09:02We are a community.
09:03We are a family.
09:04We are strong together.
09:06We got to keep trying because that's something that we haven't always done in the past.
09:09You know, we got to identify with the fact of who you are, where you came from, and don't forget the past.
09:23So what we got to do is just fight very hard for our kids and our grandkids and our family
09:31and have ownership so that we can, we know how to flow and how to get our fresh air.
09:39The barbershop, to put it in a nutshell, is the hub of the community.
09:43Without the, without, I can't speak for every barbershop, but without headquarters,
09:48this area of the city wouldn't be what it is.
09:50Without the, without, I can't speak for every barbershop.
10:09Without the, without, I can't speak for every barbershop.
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