How an unexpected evacuation, a move to Tampa and a grouper sandwich eventually led to Good Food Events + Catering.
A Message From Our Founder
On August 28, 2005, I left New Orleans. I wasn’t moving to Tampa, I wasn’t starting a catering company, and I certainly didn’t have some carefully constructed plan for what the next 21 years of my life would look like.
I was evacuating.
Hurricane Katrina was approaching New Orleans, and like so many other people that weekend, I packed what I could and left the city. As a manager at a small hotel, I had planned to weather the storm, but early Sunday morning we received word of a mandatory evacuation. I spent a couple of days driving to Chicago for a short stint, then a visit to my parent’s house in Louisiana before I realized that the city would not be the same for a long time.
And that I no longer had the life that I had built.
My friend Jason lived in the Tampa Bay area and offered me a place to stay for a couple of weeks with the intention of introducing me to a city he already fell in love with. My plan was pretty straightforward: drive to Tampa, check it out, and then head west to look at Houston and Dallas.
Tampa was supposed to be the first stop. Houston and Dallas never got their turn.
Water Everywhere
One of the first things I remember about Tampa Bay was the water. It was everywhere.
I drove south on I-275 through Tampa and crossed the Howard Frankland Bridge toward Pinellas County. The bay was rough, and I remember watching waves crash over the low parts of the bridge. After leaving a flooded city, seeing all that water was both beautiful and powerful. It’s an image that has stayed with me to this day.
I’d been driving all day, but apparently Jason decided the appropriate Tampa Bay orientation didn’t involve unpacking. We jumped into his Jeep Cherokee and headed to Caddy’s on Treasure Island. I had my first grouper sandwich, we drank a beer, and we watched the sun set over the Gulf with our toes in the sand.
Houston and Dallas were already losing the battle.
Within a couple of weeks, I was offered a job with a large computer distributor in the Tampa area and decided to stay. At the time, it simply felt like the right thing to do.
Twenty-one years later, I think I made the right call.
What New Orleans Gave Me
You don’t grow up in New Orleans without the city becoming part of you. New Orleans gave me a sense of culture and family, and so much of life there is rooted in traditions that have existed for generations: family gatherings, crawfish boils, music, Mardi Gras, restaurants, neighborhood traditions and, of course, food.
Especially food.
Before Katrina, I spent much of my spare time exploring restaurants and the New Orleans food scene. My bartending “career” began as a side job in order to fund my culinary education through frequent dining with friends and acquaintances. One of my other hobbies was writing and I spent an inordinate time on the Tom Fitzmorris message boards talking about food and meeting new friends. I even wrote a food blog called NOLAFoodie.com, one of the first food blogs in the city (before blogging was a thing). Food wasn’t my profession yet, but it was already a pretty big part of my life.
My last career move before Katrina had taken me into hospitality, managing the bar and beverage operation at The Columns Hotel, a small boutique hotel on St. Charles Avenue. Outside of work, I loved throwing parties and entertaining friends. Somewhere along the way, I started thinking about opening a catering company.
The idea was already there. Katrina didn’t create it. It just changed where it would eventually happen.
What Tampa Gave Me
If New Orleans gave me roots, Tampa gave me an opportunity to start over.
One of the things I’ve always appreciated about the Tampa Bay area is its willingness to welcome people who weren’t born here. There is certainly a network of Tampa natives whose families have been here for generations, but there is also a huge community of people who arrived from somewhere else and decided to put down roots.
Tampa gave me equal footing. If you were willing to work, build relationships and become part of the community, there was room for you. That’s what I tried to do.
There was also an interesting little bridge between my old life and my new one. In May 2006, The New York Times found the former New Orleans food blogger now living in Tampa and told part of my post-Katrina story in an article titled “An Exile on Lean Street, Dreaming of Fat Tuesday.”
At the time, I was still working in the computer industry. Good Food didn’t exist yet, but I was still thinking about food.
And increasingly, I was thinking about catering.
Phillippe Diederich for The New York Times
Kevin Lacassin, left, preparing a dinner of shrimp and andouille sausage pasta for friends in his Tampa apartment. Mr. Lacassin is chronicling his Florida food adventures on his blog.
There Had to Be a Better Way
Around 2006 and 2007, I started paying attention to the catering landscape in Tampa Bay, and I noticed something: a lot of the menus looked remarkably similar. The companies all had different names and identities, but the menus all had the same dishes: roasted beef tenderloin, chicken piccata, signature chicken, garden salad and steamed veggies.
Coming from New Orleans, and as someone who spent an unreasonable amount of his free time eating in restaurants, I couldn’t understand why catered food had to be so different from the food that excited me in restaurants. Why couldn’t catered food have that same creativity? Why couldn’t chefs cook more of it onsite? Why couldn’t an event have the energy of a restaurant kitchen? Why couldn’t we take restaurant-quality ingredients and techniques and figure out how to execute them for hundreds of people?
Surely there had to be a better way.
I was determined to find it.
That belief eventually became Good Food Events + Catering, a Tampa-based catering company built around the idea that catered food could be more creative, more chef-driven and more experiential.
One Event at a Time
There wasn’t some glamorous beginning. In the earliest days of Good Food, every new catering opportunity felt like gold. I was a one-man show, handling the sales and marketing, shopping for ingredients, doing the prep, packing everything and then going out and executing the event myself.
Our signature dishes were a hodgepodge of flavors and experiences that I picked up along my journey. Our Braised Beef Short Ribs were a dish I perfected at home after having an amazing version in a French restaurant in Portland, Oregon. My obsession with Shrimp and Grits came from a visit to Magnolia’s in Charleston and I fell in love with the idea of making the perfect version for Good Food. Our Steak, Gorgonzola and Caramelized Red Onion Quesadillas were inspired by my favorite pizza from a place in south Tampa.
It was exciting and scary at the same time, but every event was another opportunity to prove that the idea could work. Could we create more interesting food? Could we cook onsite? Could we approach catering with the mentality of a restaurant while still mastering the very different logistical realities of serving an event?
Little by little, the answer became yes.
One event became another. One client told someone else. The team grew, the events got bigger and the kitchens got bigger—although sometimes those “kitchens” were tents in the middle of a field.
The original idea kept evolving, but it never really changed.
There had to be a better way.
Twenty-One Years Later
This Friday will mark 21 years since I left New Orleans. And truthfully, this year it’s just another Friday.
I think that’s okay.
It’s important to remember the past, but I don’t believe in dwelling on it. Hurricane Katrina caused enormous loss for New Orleans and for countless families whose experiences were far more difficult than mine. I would never try to wrap something like that into a neat little story about everything happening for a reason. It doesn’t. And it didn’t.
What I do know is that August 28, 2005 changed the direction of my life. I left one city I loved and unexpectedly found another. Tampa Bay gave me a place to start over and, eventually, a place to start a company.
Over the years, this community has given Good Food opportunities I couldn’t possibly have imagined when I first crossed the Howard Frankland Bridge. We’ve cooked in parking lots and museums, private homes and waterfront venues. We’ve built field kitchens where no kitchens existed. We’ve served intimate dinners of twelve and events with more than a thousand guests.
We’ve cooked a lot of food.
But when I look at what Good Food has become, I don’t think the most important part of the story is how much we’ve grown. It’s that we’re still asking the same question:
Is there a better way?
A better way to cook it. A better way to serve it. A better way to make an event feel different. A better way to take care of people.
Twenty-one years later, I hope we never stop asking.
And if I could sit down at Caddy’s today with that guy who had just driven in from New Orleans; grouper sandwich in front of us, beer in hand, toes in the sand—I don’t think I’d give him some profound piece of advice.
I’d probably tell him not to obsess so much about becoming successful. Do the work. Do what you know how to do. Keep getting better and give the results a little time to catch up. And if you are on my team at Good Food, you know that I would tell him to always under-promise and over-deliver.
Then I’d probably tell him to enjoy the grouper sandwich. He’s going to be here awhile.
— Kevin Lacassin
Founder, Good Food Events + Catering
August 27, 2026
ABOUT GOOD FOOD EVENTS + CATERING
Good Food Events + Catering creates chef-driven culinary experiences for weddings, corporate events, galas and private celebrations throughout Tampa Bay and Florida.
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