Five years ago, Miami Beach entrepreneur Kathia Joseph was on the verge of closing her first restaurant. With one of her dreams hanging in the balance, she refused. Instead, she pivoted by turning the business into a hookah lounge, a decision that ended up being profitable. “I’m the type of person that never gives up,” said Joseph, 40. “I said that I’m not going to close.” Joseph’s knack for betting on herself is what led her to open Casa Matilda, a Miami Beach steakhouse, in early 2024. In her first year of running the business, the Washington Avenue restaurant has welcomed celebrities ranging from rapper 50 Cent to actor Cuba Gooding Jr. and multiple cast members of the “Real Housewives of Miami” and received a Diners’ Choice designation from OpenTable. As many South Beach “clubstaurants” focus on keeping up with trends, Casa Matilda is working to define itself by its fresh cuisine and detail-oriented service.
But the path to becoming a restaurateur wasn’t a straight line for Joseph, a native of Haiti who worked for more than a decade as a translator in the film and TV industry in France. She was 17 when she moved from her home in Cap-Haïtien to live with relatives in France in 2003. Joseph excelled in her new French school and, because she had grown up speaking and writing French and also spoke English well, one of her teachers soon connected her with someone they knew in the film business. Joseph took a test that ended up being an audition for Dubbing Brothers, a French studio that creates translations of major film and TV productions.
As Joseph became more successful at writing translations, she began planning for her goal of working on Disney shows. A supervisor explained that she needed a minimum of three years of experience, but when another coworker didn’t show up for work one day, she took the opportunity to show her skills.
“It was for ‘Hannah Montana’ with Miley Cyrus,” she said. “I start, and they love what I did. [I was] doing ‘Hannah Montana,’ ‘The Suite Life of Zack and Cody’ and ‘Wizards of Waverly Place.’” Still just a teenager, Joseph went to school during the day and after 5 p.m. made about $260 per episode that she translated. She eventually got so fast that she translated up to three episodes a day. By 2010, Joseph had made immense progress with her translation work and was responsible for training new writers. She had her daughter Joyce and began wondering how she could be a screenwriter of her own original films in English.
When Joseph’s father Octavil died in Haiti in 2013, she thought about what goals mattered most to her as she mourned his death. A mentor suggested that immersion would help her become a better English screenwriter and that she should live in Miami for a few months. A year later, Miami was her new home. But the move ended up changing the course of her professional journey in a different way. In 2015, Joseph was walking through Miami Beach when she realized that she would like to invest in the community and own a business. She had always loved cooking and frequented Paul, a restaurant on Lincoln Road. With an enduring curiosity about opening a restaurant, Joseph began learning everything she could via YouTube videos and Google searches. “In France, you need a degree for everything,” she said. “I thought you had to have a degree to do a restaurant.” On a phone call with a friend in Switzerland, Joseph talked about her restaurant idea and was pleasantly surprised when her friend offered to help her with an investment of over $300,000.
The landlord for the building Joseph lived in told her that a storefront on the first level was available. She signed a lease in July of 2019 and began bringing her first restaurant to life. On Nov. 30, 2019, Blue Paris Bistro finally opened. Just three months later, her entrepreneurial dreams met a sobering reality: the COVID-19 pandemic. She had to pivot fast and changed her eatery into a hookah lounge.
“That’s the best decision I [ever] made,” she said. “Oh my God, I started making good money.” However, her change in fortune didn’t go unnoticed by her landlord. Following the boom in business at her hookah lounge, rent went up to $25,000 a month for the 1,500-square-foot space in 2021 from the $15,000 that she’d paid before. After closing the hookah lounge in June 2021, Joseph opened the Cuban restaurant Matilda’s Kitchen that September on Collins Avenue. She still owns and operates the restaurant today. In September 2023, Joseph and her business partner purchased Casa Matilda, an existing restaurant in South Beach, after six months of negotiations. She said she remembered when the building was constructed and had always pictured owning a restaurant in the space.
While the concept was not originally her own, Joseph kept the Casa Matilda name, updated the decor and took time curating the menu, which features Mexican-inspired dishes with a twist, like Oaxaca crab enchiladas and duck carnitas tacos, as well as steakhouse fare like bone-in ribeye and a dry-aged porterhouse.
Joseph is aware of the support Black customers have given her businesses and appreciates it that much more as a Black woman in a community of entrepreneurs that do not often look like her. “The Black community is really helping its own people because when I turned [Blue Paris] into a hookah lounge, 70% of my customers were Black, and they really pushed my business a lot,” she said. “Even here at Casa Matilda, I have a lot of customers because they know me from Blue Paris.” With five years of business lessons under her belt, Joseph is considering expanding her restaurant portfolio and said she has more potential investors reaching out than ever before. She has also recently gotten into consulting, saying that helping others navigate the ups and downs that come with restaurant life is just as important to her. “I want to help Black people, women and other minorities as a consultant,” she said. “[This work] is really challenging, and people sometimes give out false information.” Despite the challenges Joseph has endured running multiple businesses, she said doing what she loves makes it all worth it. “[With a] restaurant, you have to love it,” she said. “It’s all about love because it’s a tough business.”
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