She’s 16, in high school and making $100K per year opening a new Charlotte soul food restaurant
Gabby Morrison started working in her parents’ southwest Charlotte restaurant, Nana Morrison’s Soul Food, at just 5 years old.
The tasks were all pretty basic, like wiping down tables and stocking up silverware. But her dad, Shawn, and her mom, Kiana, did start cutting her an actual paycheck, and she did file a tax return the following year.
By age 10, her parents say, Gabby was involved in hiring decisions at Nana Morrison’s, which sits in the shadow of Charlotte-Douglas International Airport at Yorkmont and West Tyvola roads. She was creating employee schedules. Doing payroll. Communicating with their bookkeeper. Placing food orders. All while navigating the fourth grade.
So, with those things in mind, it’s perhaps a little bit less surprising to learn that Gabby will be fully in charge of their second Nana Morrison’s location — set to open Monday in Charlotte’s Mountain Island area — despite the fact that she’s not yet 17.
These, though, might still be shockers: She’ll earn $100,000 a year for doing the job, and she plans to skip college to hang onto it.
“I don’t have the desire to go and put the effort in to do it,” Gabby says of continuing her education after high school.
It’s not because she doesn’t want to work hard, or because she’s not a good student. In fact, she’s consistently made the honor roll at Marvin Ridge High School in her hometown of Waxhaw and will graduate early this December. No, she is diving headlong into this new role because she believes there’s a good chance college would just be an expensive way for her to come to the conclusion about what she wants to do with her life that she’s already made.
“I was like, OK, this is the next step in my career,” Gabby says. “I can do this now, or put my career on hold that I know is always gonna be here, and take another path, and it might not work out. So it’s like, just stick to what you know, and continue on with the restaurant business, and I can grow in it.”
At this point, you probably have a lot of questions about this unusual situation. We’ve got answers. But first, a little background about the Morrison family.
‘Nana’s just sounded better’
Shawn grew up in a rough neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, with a mom who was a high school dropout and a brother who was shot five times. Kiana, meanwhile, was born to a Native American mother and half-Filipino father but raised on Long Island by her grandparents on her mother’s side.
Shawn’s brother married Kiana’s cousin, and at 16 Shawn’s family moved to Long Island. Kiana was 13 at the time. They started dating a few years later. By the time she was 17, they had moved in together.
A year later they had the first of their four children, Shawn Jr., and a year after that they were married.
In 2004, they opened a tobacco-retail business on Long Island that became immensely successful, they say. Then in 2006, the Morrisons came to Charlotte to visit Kiana’s aunt and he fell in love with the area. They originally bought a house here as a vacation property but the following year wound up deciding to sell their New York business, move to North Carolina and enjoy a semi-retirement.
The latter didn’t last.
Mainly because Kiana couldn’t find a soul-food restaurant in Charlotte that she liked. It really was that simple.
“I always cooked at home. Everybody always seemed to like my cooking, and it was just like, OK, I want to open a restaurant,” she says, plainly. “That’s how Nana’s came about. It was no desire to get into the restaurant business. It just felt like a lack of the type of food we were used to.”
That was in 2009, after she gave birth to the last of their four children, son Aaron.
The original name of the restaurant was Nana’s Soul Food, but when they went to trademark it, they learned it was already taken. They used Nana because that’s what Kiana called her grandmother, and Morrison to honor Shawn’s surname. Kiana’s mom was “a really good cook” and her grandmother was merely “average,” Kiana says, laughing, but “Nana’s just sounded better” than Mama’s.
The restaurant opened in 2011 with a menu packed with Southern soul-food favorites that Kiana cooked up based on this philosophy: “Kids, when they’re little, they’re picky. So ... if my kids ate it, then I think everybody else would want to eat it.”
Getting all 4 kids an early start
All four of their children started helping out at the restaurant at a young age.
They would start as early as kindergarten or first grade, doing those simple set-up tasks before Nana’s would open for the day. Then once customers started coming in, they’d have to stay in the office or sit in the dining room.
Once they got a few years older — around third grade or so — Shawn and Kiana would let them start operating the registers.
Sometimes people would get freaked out. Shawn recalled getting a call from the Department of Labor after a Door Dash delivery person reported seeing Aaron working at the front counter when he was about 8. In case you’re wondering, no one got in trouble. Because the Morrisons own 100% of the restaurant, their children are allowed to officially serve as employees of the business as long as they adhere to certain guidelines pertaining to limited work hours and safety standards.
None of them were allowed to work on the line, preparing food and cooking, until they were teenagers. But even before Gabby was old enough to do those things, she was interviewing people for jobs in Nana’s kitchen.
“It wasn’t easy being 12” and being in charge of interviewing a job candidate, Gabby recalls, “because people would look at me and be like, ‘You’re 12. What are you doing?’ At the same time, I just had to be like, ‘OK, if you’re not gonna respect me in this interview, you’re not gonna work for me.’”
By that age, she’d been learning the ropes of the business from her parents for five years. And she loved every minute.
“I wanted to be here all the time,” Gabby says.
‘I just felt it in my heart’
Under different circumstances, Gabby might have been headed to Florida in June, around the time she turns 17 on the 25th.
It’s a long story, but here’s the medium version:
The Morrisons had started looking to expand on Nana’s about two years ago. They settled on two locations for additional restaurants, including the one that opens next Monday (just outside I-485 at Mt. Holly-Huntersville and NC 16) and another in Port St. Lucie, Florida, where Shawn and Kiana own another home.
Originally, they thought Gabby was going to graduate from Marvin Ridge this June, a full year early. The plan was then to let her move into their house in Port St. Lucie and take charge of the first Florida Nana’s, set to open in September.
But over this past winter, she learned she needs one more class to complete her diploma; so instead, her older brother Hank, 18, who will graduate from high school in June, is headed south this summer to become the general manager of the Sunshine State location. (By the way, that’ll make three Morrison-family GMs, since 24-year-old Shawn Jr. now runs the original Nana’s.)
As of about two months ago, Shawn Sr. was ready to give the GM position at the new location to a seasoned candidate. In fact, he extended a job offer. While waiting for an answer, however, it struck Shawn that he should have offered it to Gabby.
After all, even though she had one more semester, she had just one in-person class first thing in the morning, so she could be at the restaurant every day in time to open it at 11 a.m. The other three courses she’ll take this fall are online. She could do it, Shawn thought. She could do it as well as anybody.
To his relief, the other candidate ended up turning him down.
“I just felt it in my heart,” he says. “She’s ready. I don’t want to hold her back anymore. I don’t believe in age (being a limiter). ... Kids can play video games and master video games, right? It’s about spending time, and giving the effort.”
About that $100,000 salary ...
Shawn insists the salary he’s promised to Gabby is what he’d give others for the same job who have the same level of experience she does.
“I don’t want nobody to think that any of our kids got the position because they’re our kids and because of their last name,” he says. “No, they have to work for it. If they didn’t, I would hire somebody to be their boss. Period. They’ll tell you that in a heartbeat. Because I’m not giving them nothing they don’t deserve.
“My wife and I were brought up poor. We didn’t have any money. Nothing was given to us. I explain that to them. I explain our upbringing. I explain that they have to work for it.”
He says that his rule when they were growing up was that they could spend 10% of their paychecks however they wanted to spend it, but that they needed to save or invest the other 90%. And while he knows that won’t be possible once they’re out on their own, he hopes his lessons continue to influence their financial lives.
“I always tell ’em, if your money’s right, you can do whatever you want to do,” Shawn says. “If you can’t do whatever you want to do, it’s ’cause you don’t have no money.”
He thinks Gabby will be just fine. So does Kiana. They couldn’t be more proud of their only daughter and her passion for the job.
“She’s always up there” at the new restaurant, Kiana says. “After school, I’ll call and ask, ‘Where are you?’ She’ll say, ‘I’m at the new location.’ She’s always up there. Checking on things, making sure everything is right. She’s handled everything — from the Pepsi contracts to all the food vendors, it’s been her. On her lunch break, she’s calling everybody.”
“I know,” Gabby interjects, “I tell them all the time, I feel like I’m signing my life away.” They laugh, then Dad adds, beaming:
“It’s pretty exciting ... me just thinking about it. Some guys’ 16-year-olds are out chasing guys, and our daughter — our 16-year-old daughter — is gonna be running a multi-million dollar business.”
Nana Morrison’s Soul Food
Original location: 2908 Oak Lake Blvd Suite #106, Charlotte, NC 28208.
New location: 3824 Corning Place, Suite A, Charlotte, NC 28216 (opening Monday, May 1).
Menu highlights: Baked, barbecue, fried, curry and smothered chicken; fried fish and pork chops; ribs; black-eyed peas; collard greens; pinto beans; banana pudding; sweet potato pie; and a variety of cakes and cheesecakes.
Cuisine: Soul food
Instagram: @nanamorrisons.soulfood
