The Brickhouse Seafood & Café located at 315 Martin Luther King Boulevard and was birthed by two entrepreneurs who already have three other businesses established. March 18 the restaurant will host the monthly Elizabethtown-White Lake Chamber of Commerce.
CHAMBER BREAKFAST
ELIZABETHTOWN – The monthly Elizabethtown-White Lake Chamber of Commerce breakfast will be held next Tuesday, March 18 at Brickhouse Seafood featuring special speakers from Star Communications who will be teaching how to promote your business with their business.
The meeting will begin promptly at 8 a.m. and you can register online or call the Chamber. Breakfast is $12 and you will need to choose a breakfast option of fish and grits, shrimp and grits, salmon cake and grits, chicken and waffles OR choose to build your own breakfast that comes with eggs, grits, toast, the choice of one meat; smoked sausage, bacon, link sausage, county ham, turkey sausage or turkey bacon.
The Brickhouse Seafood & Café located at 315 Martin Luther King Boulevard was birthed by two entrepreneurs who already have three other businesses established.
John and Rochelle Pridgen are a couple that hail from the East Coast, her from New Jersey and he from New York.
“I have family from here,” he said. “After college (Hampton University in Virginia) I came to follow my sister who had moved here. Then my mother came.”
Pridgen went to college and majored in business management.
“I started with computer science and programming before I switched to business management,” he said.
Rochelle waited until a year after high school and then moved to North Carolina.
Brickhouse is an offshoot of an earlier venture put together by Pridgen who opened JR’s Grill in Tarheel for a year in the midst of running Jay Michaels. In that business, he found it hard to find and keep helpers and finally decided to close the business.
It did give him a good taste of what running an actual restaurant might be like, and he liked the idea. He also said that Rochelle had always wondered what it would be like to run a food business.
To make a long story short, the ribbon was officially cut welcoming the business to the community in November. Rochelle runs the business administration and John oversees makes sure things are running smoothly. So far, so good, he said.
Another deciding factor to open the restaurant is John’s son, Tyrone Love who has been cooking on the East Coast for close to 13 years and was once a chef for the Philadelphia Eagles among other big seafood restaurants.
“He always had this thing about cooking,” Pridgen said. “I watch and I see that he really wants to cook and he is so good at it. See, I knew that Rochelle wanted to own a restaurant, my son wanted to cook, and I am pretty much the entrepreneur who makes it all happen.”
The restaurant began more as a lunch menu and has evolved, slowly adding new things each week such as a breakfast menu.
“We’ve been getting very good reviews on our food,” he said. “I think the thing that helps us out the most is the fact that we have my son who creates his own specialty sauces. He has a Brickhouse sauce that everybody wants. He also makes his own seafood breading. So, our food is a little bit different from everyone else’s. It’s like a small family-owned business. We have family here that we feature their baking.”