Vibes Southern Cuisine Grew From Home Kitchen To Restaurant Despite COVID

By Kia Lisby // PHOTOGRAPHY BY ALICIA ADAMS

Different occasions bring people together for various reasons – like birthdays, graduations, family gatherings and many other events. More often than not, these gatherings include food.

Food can make or break an event or ambience depending on who made it, the taste, and if there’s enough good food to go around.

Food can also be comforting. For those far away from home, a good meal can remind one of family, where you come from, strike nostalgic nerves of comfort and culture.

Husband and wife business owners Andre and Karen Smith-Moore are doing just that at Vibes Southern Cuisine restaurant located in Upper Marlboro, Md.

The couple has been together for 21 years and married for 14 years. One of the many great things the marriage has produced is good food. Vibes Southern Cuisine serves about 400 to 500 customers per day – and customers come from across the DMV to get it. Their top three sellers include the jumbo lump crab stuffed salmon, jumbo lump crab cake platter, and meatloaf. Today, Vibes is a winner and one of the hottest new up and coming restaurants in the county.

Before entering in the food serving industry, Andre had been a truck driver from 18 years old, up until he started Vibes Southern Cuisine with his wife, Karen.

Karen was a daycare teacher for several years before becoming an office manager (seven years) for a company that worked with D.C. Public Schools.

That was all prior to starting Vibes.

She explained the way Andre encouraged her to try her own food business. He would tell her, “Oh, you can cook so well, your food is good.” Karen’s typical sarcastic response: “Yeah. Okay. Whatever.”

Smith-Moore admitted to not wanting to quit her job to start a food business for fear that it wouldn’t work out.

Her concerns were based on tough experiences finding work in her field of study. Holding a master’s in criminal justice, finding a job was still difficult. Smith-Moore applied to dozens of jobs but no one was calling her back.

A mutual acquaintance of Andre and Karen shared their positive experience of selling food out of their house and how well it was working for them.

It only took a little further encouragement from Andre: “Why don’t you just give it a shot and see what happens since you’re not working. Why don’t you just try?”

And so it began. “We just picked the name, made a Facebook page, made an Instagram page, and I had started cooking plates, making meals, and everything like that,” Karen said. “Took a couple of pictures, just to advertise a little bit because, of course, people eat with their eyes. They want to see what they want to be ordering. We posted some pictures. I added people that we knew from our personal page. Posted a picture, posted a menu.”

The couple wanted the restaurant’s name and ambience to represent their southern family roots.

Karen’s father and grandmother are from North Carolina as well as Andre’s paternal family. His mother is also from the south.

“Of course, my grandmother taught my mom how to cook and I was always in the kitchen with my mom. You know the little phrase everybody says, “good vibes,” we wanted to have the southern vibes feel. We just ended up calling it Vibes Southern Cuisine. I feel like it’s southern,” Smith-Moore says.

When the couple started Vibes, Karen explained that she and Andre first tried to sell food from their home, but customers would start calling and placing orders by phone instead.

From that point, the young entrepreneurs moved their business into catering where orders quickly increased. They brought on delivery drivers who got their food to customers in Greenbelt, Laurel, Suitland, Silver Spring, Washington D.C., northern Virginia and many other surrounding cities within the D.C. metropolitan area.

The business grew and after nine months of delivering food, Karen and Andre opened a food truck in 2017 and continued to cater from there.

When the couple opened in Upper Marlboro, clientele started to grow, and the line kept getting longer.

As their customers and the demand for the food grew, so did the wait time. It was then time to move to a brick and mortar location.

Karen said, “The wait was getting longer and longer, because, of course, the demand for the food. Then we started looking for the storefront.”

Along the way, like any business, a few speed bumps came about in the search and securing of a storefront location. The couple received some no’s and maybe’s before obtaining a yes.

In the summer of 2020, Karen and Andre signed a lease and opened Vibes storefront January 20.

But without knowledge of food truck and restaurant rules and regulations within the county, the couple had troubles.

“Starting out with a food truck in Prince George’s was a headache,” she says. “A lot of the people in the food truck industry say Prince George’s is the most difficult county to move your food truck around in,” said Smith-Moore.

“We [originally] thought ‘Oh, yeah, we’re going to go get this food truck and we’re going to go wherever we want. We thought we could just pull up wherever we wanted to pull up and sell food. It wasn’t that way. They want you to be in a food truck hub. Of course, all you can do are hubs or events in Prince George’s.”

Despite all the other problems they came across, COVID-19 wasn’t one of them. It actually helped the business. Since many could no longer dine in, customers resorted to placing pick up orders and delivery services.

Karen explained that as business started to pick up, Vibes resorted to doing “pickups.”

Instead of going through the headache of food truck delivery and having customers crowd around, the team created pickup schedules for their customers.

“We set pickup times. We did 2:00, 4:00, 6:00, and 8:00. We did that four to five times a week. We did pre-order,” she says. “Everybody just stayed in their cars. We would have them place their orders. Food was still getting made fresh. Then we actually took the food to the location where we used to park the food truck and did it that way. Our business took off from there.”

A typical workday for the duo starts at 10:30 a.m. and goes through midnight on some days.

They begin the day by shopping at four to five different stores for the food and supplies they need for the day. Then staff members come in to help prep the food. Everything is made from scratch including sauces and even fresh squeezed lemonade.

The overall Vibes culture is “good vibes” and positive energy.

“Really number one is great customer service. That’s one thing we do believe in, and I think that’s why we do have such a great clientele. Not just because the food is good, but because of the type of people that we are as well,” says Karen after mentioning that the sign on the storefront reads, “No negativity allowed.”

When customers visit the restaurant, the goal is for everyone to feel like family.

“To me, we want to know you by name. We want to be able to call you by name when you come in because we want that family feel,” stated Karen in an endearing tone.

As of now, Vibes is open on Wednesdays through Saturdays, 4:00 pm to 8:00 pm with extended hours coming soon. When they operate on a full schedule, Karen and Andre plan to open the restaurant starting on Tuesdays with the hours opening between 12:00 pm to 1:00 pm to bring in the lunch crowd.

The couple also plans on doing online orders as well.

Karen and Andre eventually want to open a sit-down restaurant with a bar and jazz music with a possible dessert carryout.

The couple also plans on bringing their food truck back out again once they get the storefront under control, to take their good vibes to other counties.