South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Providing a second chance
New FK Your Diet has a provocative name — and a mission
On a rainswept drive home from her new restaurant job, Uniyah Gollett begged her boss to pull over.
From the passenger seat, she had been watching homeless people sitting by the roadside, unsheltered from the storm, and it had brought her to tears. Gollett, who was raised in Broward County’s foster-care system most of her life, felt as if she was looking in a mirror.
The 23-year-old talked her supervisor, Jake Miller, into an impromptu shopping spree. They pulled into a Dollar General and stuffed deodorant, sunscreen, feminine hygiene products and toiletries into 20 plastic bags. At stoplights, Gollett and Miller handed out care packages to every homeless person they saw.
“I was one of them,” Gollett says. “I know what it’s like to be a woman on the street with your cycle on. They’re still people. They deserve a chance like everyone else.”
Perhaps it was her new server position at the Sunrise eatery, FK Your Diet, but Gollett felt light years away from her recent past.
The rainbow-colored diner
opened in August on Commercial Boulevard with an ambitious premise: pairing heartwarming good deeds with ridiculously overthe-top breakfast foods.
The FK in the name is not an expletive. It stands for “foster kids.”
Roughly 30% of FK Your Diet’s employees are former foster kids. A few are former convicted felons and recovering drug addicts.
The restaurant — which provides second chances — showed up exactly when Gollett needed one.
She had just aged out of the foster-care system July 22, her 23rd birthday, when her temp agency job expired. A social worker told her that FK Your Diet was hiring.
“I didn’t know where to go,” she said. “I didn’t have anyone to call, and God brought me to Mr. Jake.”
Mr. Jake is Miller, the 24-yearold owner of Sunrise’s FK Your Diet and himself the son of a former foster kid.
During the job interview Miller says, he heard Gollett describe a lifetime of foster-care hardship. She said she’d worked at Chipotle, McDonald’s and The Cheesecake Factory at Sawgrass Mills. She’d even graduated from culinary school. He hired her on the spot.
When Gollett admitted she didn’t have transportation, Miller offered to drive her to and from work. But Miller says he was astounded when Gollett proposed care packages for the homeless last weekend.
“I was like, ‘This is a great idea. Why didn’t I think of that?’ ” Miller said. “She’s worked here, what, three weeks? She’s already phenomenal.”
Now Miller is training Gollett to one day replace him.
“She’s got a great attitude,” he said. “My dream, I told her, is to help teach her how to run a restaurant, become a general manager and then own this place.”
‘The bad always outweighed the good’
Born in Pompano Beach, Gollett says she lived with biological parents who kept her out of school and abused her in ways she prefers to forget. By age 7, she says, the state’s foster-care system intervened.
Her guardian ad litem at the time, Beverly Russell, “taught me how to read and write and instilled in me that education is power and made me into the woman I am today,” Gollett said.
Over the next 11 hardscrabble years Gollett bounced around 15 shelters, foster and group homes, sometimes out of state, including in New York and North Carolina.
“It was like a box of chocolates,” she said. “A lot of the homes I was in, I was neglected and abused. But I can honestly say the bad always outweighed the good.”
In Broward, about 2.5 out of every 1,000 children enter the state’s child welfare system monthly, while that number is 1.73 out of every 1,000 children in Palm Beach County, according to a Florida Department of Children and Families report published in October 2021. That number is higher statewide: 2.92 out of every 1,000 children.
In Florida foster children age out of the program at 18. After that, they become eligible for “after care” programs until their 23rd birthday, provided they meet certain criteria, such as finishing high school or being employed at least 80 hours per month.
The stability of home life constantly eluded Gollett. By the time she turned 11 she lived exclusively in group homes with 15 or more children, most of them even younger.
Foster parents who worked all day left them unsupervised, sometimes without meals. By necessity she taught herself to cook.
Gollett boiled rice and scrambled eggs at least three times a week for younger kids in the group home. She baked biscuits from scratch by reading back-of-the-box instructions. She grew to love honey so much she drizzled it over everything, especially fried chicken.
Gollett even acquired a new nickname around the neighborhood — “Pooh” — because, like Winnie the cartoon bear, her love of honey was insatiable, outmatched only by her joy of cooking.
When she turned 18, Gollett aged out of foster care, but she discovered an organization, Fort Lauderdale’s FLITE Center, that helped her learn self-sufficiency, like filling out job applications, and found her transitional housing. She enrolled in the culinary program at Coconut Creek’s Atlantic Technical College and graduated in May.
A criminal background check for Gollett reveals some significant charges, including two felonies and a 2019 stint in a Broward County jail. Gollett does not dispute this, adding that she was “young and had no guidance,” and that her new employer does not judge her past mistakes.
“Being incarcerated was a wake-up call for me and a blessing because I know now what not to do,” Gollett said. “But I haven’t been in any trouble the past few years. FK cares about the now, not my past, and I’m grateful for the opportunity.”
“People make mistakes,” Miller said. “I mean, we’re dealing with the foster-kid system here. What guidance did they ever have not to do the right thing?
“To me, it makes Pooh’s story that much cooler. It shows that she’s really turned her life around.”
Once she landed the server job three weeks ago, Miller insisted Gollett have breakfast on the house. She declined out of modesty, but “they were serious, like, ‘Take the meal, take the meal,’ ” she said,with a laugh. “I had some very amazing shrimp and grits with biscuits and lots of honey on my very first day, and it was really good.
“People like Mr. Jake are supposed to live forever. This job is more than a job. This place makes sure that you always have a huge quantity of food.”
‘We give you so much food’
Picture hamburgers sandwiched between deep-fried doughnut buns, 5-pound “belly buster” breakfast burritos as fat as footballs, maple bacon-flavored milkshakes and Southern-fried chicken eggs benedict.
FK Your Diet Sunrise’s indulgent menu is the brainchild of Miller’s father Doug, who was raised in Ohio’s foster-care system.
Doug Miller and his wife, Amy Eldridge, opened the diner’s flagship location in Fort Myers in 2018, later adding outposts in Orlando and Cape Coral. He says he created FK Your Diet to help foster kids overcome the fears that had defined his childhood. One solution: a comfort-food menu overstuffed with “cheat meals.”
“You never know where your next meal is coming from,” said Miller, who lives in Fort Myers. “So we give you so much food that you don’t know what to do with it. We’re pushing all this food so maybe, if you’re in foster care, you’ll worry less.”
He remembers the bitter spitefulness he felt toward “foster parents who abused and neglected me” as he bounced around more than a dozen foster and group homes. His guardians would put padlocks on the refrigerators, he says. One foster mom served him nothing but cake for three consecutive months. Other times, public-school lunch was the only meal Miller ate in a day.
“I didn’t feel empathy toward my foster families then, but I do now,” he said. “It’s not easy being one of those parents. The burnout rate is high.
“I learned to cook all these recipes from kind foster moms. Our cooking is not fancy, nor is it exotic. It’s how you would cook at home if you knew how to cook.”
The restaurant’s locations partner with area foster charities to host Thanksgiving feasts and Christmas gift giveaways in the dining room.
FK Your Diet Sunrise has already begun working with Broward nonprofit organizations that support foster kids, such as 4KIDS, The Hands and Feet, Jewish Adoption and Family Care Options and Flite Center. FK Your Diet’s menu also includes so-called “Meal Deals” that benefit local foster kids, ranging from $12.50 for single meals to $500 for multiple pairs of Nike sneakers.
During her shifts at FK Your Diet, Gollett is fast and intuitive.
“Bacon smells ready!” she called to a line cook on her way to bus tables in the dining room. She loves the slogan written on a rainbow mural in the dining room: “Be the rainbow in someone else’s cloud.”
“I love seeing that,” Gollett said. “You don’t know what a human being has endured when they come to the restaurant. Their cloud can be stormy, but what’s important is you make them feel happy.”
Last week one of her former caseworkers surprised Gollett with a visit to the restaurant.
“She told me God has a plan for me, and she’s proud of the woman I’ve become,” Gollett said. “I may be a foster kid, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to fail. There’s room to prosper and elevate.”