Let it Reign
Red Door Catering’s Reign Free is in the business of happiness.
So much of a restaurant’s success depends on mastering the details, and doing it consistently: seasoning every dish correctly, placing the lighting and the tables at the proper distance, gauging each table’s progress to catch diners before they hunt their server down.
The same applies to catering, except the details shift every day. Reign Free, owner of Red Door Catering in Oakland, says that each new client has to be read and every problem anticipated. “You can’t assume things in this business because you will be really wrong,” she says.
Here, for example, are the kinds of details Free catches: Making sure a packed-up van destined for an Atherton dinner party is carrying mats to roll out across the client’s opulent floors. Realizing that her most loyal client would miss his own staff appreciation lunch and sending a portion packed just for him. Strategizing how to load supplies for a 3,000person tiki party onto a crane in order to hoist them onto the deck of the USS Hornet.
Free plans with PowerPoints, sometimes six months out. Yet in person she does not exude persnicketiness. Now 38, with 11 years of experience catering, she has the kind of poise that reassures rather than intimidates, a polish that allows for the occasional guffaw.
Catering was a surprise career for a woman with a degree in public health. “Red Door Catering wasn’t started because I wanted to open this business and I had all these dreams,” Free says.
“It actually started because of a bad divorce.”
A short-lived marriage brought the Ohio native from New Orleans to Oakland. The divorce stranded her in a onebedroom apartment where she would watch “Law & Order” night after night.
She says that two neighbors finally told her, “Dude, you’ve got to get it together.” They brought her a plant. They encouraged her to do the thing she enjoyed most: cooking for friends. Free had learned to cook from her mother, who is Jamaican, as well as from the cookbooks she would pore over and the high-end restaurants she would spend her spare money on.
One of the guests at a dinner she prepared asked her if she catered. “My dad always said, ‘Fake it till you make it,’ and so I said sure!” Free recounts. “I went by her office to find that it was an event for 600 people.”
Fake it till you make it meant spending three days without sleep, cooking in her apartment oven, storing food in coolers and fridges, making dozens of trips up and down the 50 stairs from the street to her front door.
She didn’t make a cent, of course. But she realized two things: One was that she was a planner with an intuitive sense of how to break a 600person dinner down into discrete tasks and times.
The other: “It makes me happy. It makes others happy.”
She quickly sought out the proper paperwork to become a legal business and found a commercial kitchen that would rent her a table until Red Door grew big enough to occupy its own kitchen. She remarried — happily — and
had a son, who now is 8. For a short while, she was the chef of a Caribbean-Southern restaurant in Oakland named Kuwa, but she found that managing a kitchen, a catering company and a young child was too much.
The restaurant, though, gave Free a visibility that she hadn’t had before. Catering companies like Red Door are largely invisible to the public, even though they orchestrate intense moments in our professional and personal lives.
With catering, word of mouth is even more powerful in building a business than it is with restaurants. Word of mouth allowed Red Door last fall to graduate into a warehouse in West Oakland, a short bike ride from her house, with a vast kitchen that lets her compete for bigger events. During peak times, when the conferences pile onto weddings and corporate events like the ones on the USS Hornet, her staff can grow to 50.
Business has been successful enough for Free to set aside money and time to help local nonprofits, particularly those that work with children, hold fundraisers. She’s now strategizing how to smooth over the peaks and valleys of catering work, keep her best employees working in the slow weeks and give them the ability to take vacations.
“I want to be a business owner, I don’t just want to create a job for myself,” she says.
The itch to connect with the public again — especially her West Oakland neighbors — has returned.
Last month, Red Door opened its kitchen and showroom for a “pop-in.” Lance Dean Velasquez, Red Door’s chef and a respected figure in the East Bay culinary world, prepared a quartet of macand-cheese dishes, ranging from classic (cheddar, Gruyère) to ornate (roasted mushrooms, fontal cheese, truffle). The beer distributor next door picked craft brews to pair with each. Despite the fact that Free only advertised on social media and email, the front half of the warehouse was filled with families. It went so well, Free thinks she’ll do it again.
Now she just has to sort out the details.