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Owner Rob Perez greets customers at DV8 Kitchen’s East End eatery.

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Michael Harper, a DV8 East End manager, says operating as a cohesive unit helps employees succeed.

To talk with Rob Perez today you’d never believe he had to be convinced to take a chance on the idea that became DV8 Kitchen. But he did.

When his wife and business partner, Diane, brought up the idea of using their business to help people in recovery, “I struggled with this idea … because it doesn’t make any sense,” he said recently, “at least when I look through the prism of a business guy.” Perez was, and is, a business guy. Afer more than 30 years as a manager and an owner, he has no illusions about the economics or realities of restaurants.

Te couple, who met in a restaurant in their native California while still in their teens, had lived many places as Rob’s career in the restaurant industry grew and Diane worked as a fight attendant. Tey spent two happy days one Christmas in Lexington where Diane had a layover, and when he was ofered a job here several years later they decided to settle here. Eventually they created the Saul Good restaurant concept and by the time Diane broached her idea their three locations were thriving.

Te idea was a restaurant where everyone — the people making croissants in the bakery, running the grill, greeting and serving and checking out the guests — is in recovery from addiction.

Now, fve years and a pandemic later, the concept is a reality, with two DV8s, a bakery that serves them both, and a foundation to help other businesses learn how to employ people in recovery.

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Sitting at one of the colorful tables in DV8 East End with light streaming in on well-fed customers served by a busy, sober staf, Perez is more than just a believer. “I now realize it makes all the sense in the world, and I don’t know why every business doesn’t try to do it in a small way.”

Lest one fear that running a good restaurant takes second place to the mission, it’s important to note that DV8 is the only restaurant in Kentucky last year to make Yelp’s list of the top 100 brunch spots in the United States. It has a fve-star ranking from the Yelp online community and reviews consistently include words such as “amazing” and “delicious” to describe the food and “kind” and “attentive” for the service.

“We have three goals: high standards, high efort, build better relationships,” Perez said. Te frst two keep customers coming back while helping the people who work there achieve the third.

“Tis is all about recovery, but it’s also a business that provides a service,” said Michael Harper, who started working at DV8 last summer and is now a manager at the East End location. “People expect to come in here, order food, and get timely, delicious food. So we’ve got to learn to be one unit, one cohesive machine in that kitchen.”

Harper, an alcoholic, could not function as part of that humming machine while in active addiction. “Alcohol battered and bruised me for years,” he said, leading him down a path of isolation, procrastination, and misery.

Michael Harper: “This is all about recovery, but it’s also a business that provides a service.” Below, the original DV8 Kitchen does a busy lunch service.

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An employee at DV8 Kitchen on South Broadway checks on a lunch order.

Tat, Perez said, is why the model of workplace recovery makes perfect sense: You have to be around people, and there’s constant real-time, real-world feedback. “In a job you see everything and it’s real … you take normal work events, opportunities to give feedback, and you try to turn it into a way of life.”

It’s a life that ofers rewards for people more familiar with failures and punishments. “It’s nice to have these tasks that you can complete; small, focused tasks,” Harper said. “You can count those up as a win.”

Te frst DV8 — the name suggests that people will “deviate” from their former lifestyles — opened in 2017 in a former restaurant on South Broadway.

Te Perezes developed partnerships with several residential recovery programs and reach out to them when they need to hire. One of them, Shepherd’s House, has been part of the program, “since the day he opened,” said director Jerod Tomas. About half of the people in his residential programs will work at DV8, he said, ofen for as long as two years. Te combination of working at DV8 and participating in a residential recovery program means “we’ve got you covered up with support,” Tomas said. At Shepherd’s House “we spend our time on daily living skills,” and at DV8 “what Rob’s teaching them is how to keep a job.”

It also means that people in recovery don’t have the stress of hiding their struggles or their pasts. “It’s easier for everybody not to have to wear a mask,” Tomas said. “You get to walk into work

at DV8 and take your mask of.” Tat transparency sustains not just the employees but also many diners who, like most other people, have seen the devastation of addictions up close. “When I train new team members, I tell them you are a poster child for people in recovery in the workplace,” Harper said. “People share intimate stories about a cousin, a son, a brother, a daughter,” he said. “And then they thank ‘ ‘‘ ‘ WE HAVE THREE GOALS: HIGH STANDARDS, us for what we’re doing … Tey’re reassured there are people out there who work hard at changing their lives every day.” Te trouble, Perez says, is that, despite their hard work and success, many of his employees still fnd it hard to move on to better paying, higher-skilled jobs. Among his workforce, 95 percent have been in prison,

HIGH EFFORT, 75 percent for felony convictions, and those histories ofen rule them out, even from an interview.

BUILD BETTER Tis, he thinks, is a waste, both for individuals and

RELATION- for the economy although he understands the hesitations and concerns businesses have. “Our people who

SHIPS.” are so gifed and smart and wonderful, they wouldn’t even have a chance, and, literally, fve years ago I didn’t —Rob Perez want to give them a chance.” Tis is particularly true, he said, for the 45 percent of his employees who come from generational poverty, many the children of addicts themselves. People, he said, who “don’t have an uncle that can give them a reference and didn’t make it to the school that the hiring manager went to.” So, about a year afer the frst DV8 opened, the Perezes created a

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Cinnamon rolls are a DV8 Kitchen signature item.

Bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich

foundation they called Soulfull Enterprise (a play on the term social enterprise) to take some of the fear out of hiring people with addictions by teaching businesses how to mitigate the risks involved.

To fund the foundation, the Perezes carved out the commercial baking operations into a separate business, now located at the East End location. It provides all the breakfast rolls and breads for the restaurants but also has other customers. All of the income — net of the expenses, including pay for the employees — goes into the foundation.

Te foundation helps employers sort through questions such as, “where do you get into the second-chance opportunity, what are you willing to do, what are you not willing to do,” Perez said, and connects them to resources. Pre-pandemic, Perez said, they’d worked with about 90 businesses, in Kentucky and nationally.

Curry veggie tacos

The DV Ocho

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One of them is Taylor Made Farm in Jessamine County, a leading Toroughbred breeding and sales operation. With the help of Perez and the foundation, Frank Taylor, a vice president at the family-run operation, developed the Taylor Made School of Horsemanship to train people with addiction histories in the basics of horsemanship.

“Naturally, you have some concerns” hiring people with addiction histories and criminal records, he said, but Perez “coached me along and gave me a lot of direction and good advice.” Te 90-day program teaches people the basics and then, if hired on, they are paired with a more experienced employee at Taylor Made to develop their skills. Of the 17 who have gone through the program so far, 10 work at Taylor Made while some have gone to other farms or other jobs. “Tey’re just really good, honest, grateful, loyal, hardworking people,” Taylor said. “It’s been very benefcial for our business, very benefcial for our culture, and it’s just good for society.”

For DV8, as for every other restaurant business, the past two years have been challenging. In early 2020 the Perezes agreed to a lease to open the East End location and decided to fund it by selling their Saul Good build-

Perez shows an employee details of the job.

GRAFFITI AND PAINTED TABLES BRIGHTEN DV8 EAST END

On a bright spring day people lunching at DV8’s East End location sit bathed in light and surrounded by color. Graffti paintings on the walls glowed with messages of hope and rebirth while brightly painted tables tell diners about nonprofts helping people in recovery.

At frst glance the look might seem out of step with the trauma that’s brought many employees to DV8: struggles with addiction, incarceration, and, often, poverty. But Diane Perez sees it differently. “Working and not doing drugs is happy and joyful,” she said. Garrett Rea, the graffti artist responsible for the interior and exterior wall paintings, agreed. “Recovery is not death; it’s about life and living and growing.”

Five years ago when Perez and her husband, Rob, were developing the frst DV8 on Broadway, Father Norman Fischer introduced them to Rea, then a high school junior. Rea had evolved from an “awful” frst attempt at graffti in his family’s unfnished basement to completing commissions for family and friends, and painting scenery for local theaters. But DV8 on Broadway was his “frst real big gig.”

Graffti can be a dark, grungy form, but the Perezes “wanted something legible with just enough edge that it didn’t get too super soft,” Rea said.

He began sketching. Soon an arrow pointing up became part of the theme as well as halos that appear frequently in the artwork; bright colors such as yellow, red, and green outweighed darker hues. He even created an image of DV8’s signature cinnamon roll with angel wings and its own halo. When people came to the restaurant to work or eat, “they were blown away that it’s as pretty as it is,” Diane Perez said.

In 2020 when the Perezes began planning

Artist Garrett Rea created the interior and exterior wall paintings.

DV8 East End now produces all of the company’s baked goods. Right, Diane Perez says DV8 Kitchen has changed Rob’s life.

Customers such as Madison Schoenbachler are encouraged to write on a wall at DV8 East End.

ing in Hamburg. Tat transaction closed on the last day of February and three weeks later the world shut down.

“Tere were some white-knuckle moments,” Diane Perez said, as they maneuvered through the pandemic. Tey built out the interior of DV8 East End — and waited.

Without the sale of the Hamburg building, banking the $900,000, “there’s no way we would have made it, at all, not even possible.” Finally, in September 2021 the second DV8 opened.

Te motto of DV8 Kitchen is “life changing food,” and one of the people whose life has been changed is Rob Perez himself, says his wife. An alcoholic, Rob went through treatment years ago and has never relapsed, she said. “He was great, and he didn’t drink,” but “he was kind of done with it; he didn’t embrace recovery like we want our people to.” When she proposed something like DV8, “he didn’t want to do it, not at all,” and even when he agreed, he thought it would be “my project on the side.”

But as DV8 took shape, Rob became more and more involved, in both the business and the mission. “He’s more into his recovery now than he ever has been in 30 years of sobriety,” Diane Perez said. “It totally changed his life.” KM

their second location they reached out to Rea again. He sketched and painted, coming back time and again. As the interior was built out, Rea would get a call saying, “OK, we have a new wall,” and another bright image would take shape.

The painted tables also morphed from the frst location, where Fischer, the pastor of St. Peter Claver Church downtown, and other community members were invited to paint the large, communal tables. For East End the Perezes reached out to 14 nonprofits working with people in recovery and paired them with a local artist to paint a table expressing their mission. Some $1,500 from DV8 grew into $7,000 for expenses and prize money. Small vignettes of the tables and artists went up on DV8’s Facebook page, with winners selected by the number of “likes” they got. There was also a live online event where experts weighed in on the tables.

As DV8 East End got closer to opening, Rea and the Perezes worked on a concept for the outdoor mural that faces Midland Avenue. They wanted to incorporate downtown and specifcally the East End neighborhood. When members of the community were invited in to look at a sketch, they loved the colors and the dandelion growing out of a brick wall but thought something was missing: shotgun homes.

After many drafts (“it’s 80 percent working it out, 20 percent execution,” Rea said) he was ready to go. So, in May 2021 he worked “sunup to sundown” painting the mural. “I’m proud of it all, but I’m really proud of that,” he said. Rea uses “Mercy” as his signature but the mural is the only piece of all his work at DV8 East End he signed. For the rest, he fgured, the message was more important than taking credit. “We’re all working for something bigger than us.”