Amelia Cooper has learned to keep her phone on hand. “Everything important in my life seems to happen over text message these days,” says Cooper, an entrepreneur of more than 10 years.

Before she ever received the text that would lead her into a partnership with two established restaurateurs, Cooper owned Amelia C & Co, a successful local hair and makeup agency. Cooper’s diverse client base included politicians and gala attendees, but the city’s $2 billion wedding industry had become the agency’s most profitable connection. At the height of the pandemic, Cooper says, Amelia C & Co was working on some 700 weddings a year.

“That’s what was happening when the world shut down,” she says, “and then the agency, and really the entire wedding industry as we know it, went down the drain.”

A week before the pandemic shutdown, wedding client cancellations began trickling in, and in the days that followed, Cooper’s agency lost hundreds of thousands of dollars, she says.

“The special-event industry not only lost our source of income, but most of us were in the position of having to give refunds on deposits paid,” she says. “It would be like you losing your job and then having to give back six month’s worth of paychecks.”

As Cooper navigated her way through both unemployment and business loans, she doubled her volunteering efforts in order to help the community—and counteract her own feeling of helplessness. “I know for a fact that there’s a lot of people that were worse off than we were, because I served them,” she says.

Cooper also started spending more time in the kitchen. “I was cooking a lot for myself, for friends, for family, out of passion and a little neurosis,” she says. She became a personal meal prep chef for some of her buddies. And then Tabitha Simmons, a friend of a friend, texted, hoping to order some barbecue-friendly sides for Fourth of July weekend.

Cooper made it happen, and Simmons soon wrote back, “That was some of the best vegan food I’ve ever had. I don’t know what your plans are for the future, but would you ever be open to a partnership?”

Cooper soon hosted a tasting for Simmons and her husband. “Now I have John Simmons, owner of Firefly Tapas, [where] I’ve had one too many mojitos, sitting in my kitchen, and I’m frying cauliflower for him,” Cooper remembers.

The meal, which also included a Brussels sprouts salad, a blueberry buckle and a signature cocktail, was a success, and Cooper and the Simmonses began envisioning her running a ghost kitchen out of Firefly. But before long, it became much more.

Today, they are partners behind the plant-based restaurant Graze Kitchen, located a few doors down from Firefly’s southwest location.

“The restaurant business is extremely complicated, competitive and hard to succeed in,” Cooper says, “and with absolutely no experience … I would never have opened a restaurant [without] experienced partners to do it with.”

And Amelia C & Co, her pre-pandemic hair and makeup agency? “Very slowly, very painfully, very hopefully, we’ve started to build it back,” Cooper says.

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