Restaurants and food / Montrose, CA / 4 years, 4 stages

Monna

A garage kitchen, then 50 stores, then a restaurant. We ran social at each stage

Monna by Gev's Kitchen is a new restaurant in Montrose. We have handled social media for the family behind it for four years, through a garage kitchen, catering, frozen food in more than 50 stores, and now the restaurant.

Before opening

677
followers: 15
posts

Now

6,450
followers: 4.7
on OpenTable: 4
years with one family: 50+
stores carry Gev's Kitchen

The account

Monna's profile before the doors opened, and now.

See @monna__la

Before opening677 followers

Now6,450 followers

The family

It started in a garage

Four years ago, Gev's Kitchen cooked Armenian and Georgian food in a garage kitchen. Gev is the chef, and his wife and partner runs the whole operation.

Today their products are in more than 50 Los Angeles stores and on Amazon nationwide. In Montrose they have their own restaurant, Monna, a steakhouse with a Middle Eastern kitchen. Most agencies work with a business at one stage. We have been with this family through all of them.

The timeline

Four stages, four different jobs

The business changed several times, and each time social media had a new job to do. A strategy that worked yesterday was getting in the way today.

1
Garage. The first job was getting a small kitchen noticed. We sold the people and the taste: a chef cooking by hand, food you want to try.
2
Kitchen and catering. The job was trust. Whoever books catering for a wedding or a corporate party risks someone else's event, so we showed a professional kitchen, not a home hobby.
3
Frozen products. The hardest one. Shoppers never see the food being made, yet the handmade feeling had to reach the freezer shelf, and the brand had to look solid enough for 50 stores and Amazon.
4
Restaurant. A different story: a new place that needed its own brand before it even opened.

The next step

The restaurant they always wanted

Gev and his wife always dreamed of their own restaurant. Gev's Kitchen grew, with social media as one of the engines, and that made the dream possible. When it was time to open Monna, nobody even asked who would run its social media.

The decision

Same family, a separate brand

The full name is Monna by Gev's Kitchen. The Gev's Kitchen part brings trust: four years of reputation and people who already know the taste. But Monna is the personal story of Gev's wife. She paints, and her work hangs next to pieces by other artists, all of it for sale right off the wall.

If Monna had looked like an extension of Gev's Kitchen online, the dream restaurant would have become a branch before it even opened. So we built it as a separate brand, with its own voice and its own look.

Page Management
Content Production
Positioning
Catering Promotion
Restaurant Launch

The content

Its own voice, its own look

We built Monna as a separate brand, not an extension of the kitchen people already knew.

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Food and drinks

Tap for sound

Sample content

Morning and evening

One place, two moods

Mornings are a calm brunch in a quiet neighborhood, with families taking their time over breakfast. Evenings are dinner with live music and cocktails, a different mood and a different guest. Her art and her taste tie the two together, so in our content they are two sides of one place.

The restaurant is not a year old yet. It already has a 4.7 on OpenTable, and guests call it a neighborhood gem and a place for special occasions. On TikTok, people say it feels far trendier than you'd expect from Montrose.

Why it matters

Social media is not a one-season service. The best results come when an agency stays with a business through several stages. Each stage changes the job, and whoever was there for the last one knows your business better than any new contractor.

A second place needs its own brand, even with the same owners and the same kitchen. It has a different audience and a different reason to exist. Carrying old content over is the fastest way to make it look washed out.

And reach is not the best way to judge an agency. A better test is whether a client opens their next business and hands it to you without a second thought.