Having faith in the process

Kate Elia (MBA ’23) never thought she would open a restaurant.

Her goal was to improve operations and scale the small, Italian wine importing company she managed while earning her MBA. UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School gave her the skills to identify and evaluate opportunities, and the confidence to strike out on her own.

She launched Jean’s “By the Sea,” a seafood shack, in Durham in February 2026 and, as planned, it has attracted a diverse group of loyal customers.

What she could never anticipate was winning “Best New Restaurant” for Durham County in the INDY four months after opening. She’s also earned kudos from The News & Observer’s readers for the Triangle’s best hushpuppies in June.

The restaurant is the result of the business plan she began developing as part of her entrepreneurship concentration in the Weekend Executive MBA Program at UNC Kenan-Flagler. After thoroughly iterating her plan post-graduation, she needed to bring the vision into reality by finding a location and evaluating its feasibility.

The building she found is the former Wimpy’s Grill, which had been abandoned for years and had to be gutted, but its location on Hillsborough Road was worth the effort. It sits in a residential neighborhood between Durham’s booming downtown district, Duke University and Duke University Hospital.

“This space is an incredible location from a business perspective, and it’s the space that completely aligns with my business model,” Elia says.

A lot of people live and work nearby, but there are few eateries. The restaurant welcomes families with kids who like the outdoor seating, older folks who enjoy traditional North Carolina seafood baskets, and seafood lovers who appreciate quality in a casual setting.

Elia worked with a branding team to come up with a name for the restaurant that is meaningful to her and suits the business.

“Jean is not just my mom, it’s my great aunt, it’s my grandmother-in-law, it’s my mother-in-law’s middle name, it’s my daughter’s middle name, and I loved this idea of Jean representing so many women and also representing a comforting, maternal, familiar, not fancy, easygoing feeling that I associate with that name,” she says.

Members of her MBA cohort have come to support her new venture. One participated in orientation so she could help during staff shortages, and some traveled from out of state. Elia loves being able to rely on the friends she made at UNC Kenan-Flagler to ask questions and get advice.

A Chapel Hill native, Elia followed a winding path to get to this point. During her undergraduate years she played soccer and studied sociology at Vanderbilt University. After she graduated in 2001, she moved to California where she began her career in food and wine.

She then moved to New York to produce videos for Wine Spectator magazine and finally to Durham where she worked for wine and food businesses, largely as a general manager.

As Elia managed these small businesses, she saw how they struggled even though their products and services were in demand. To solve those challenges, she realized she needed to learn more about how to run a business than her experience had taught her.

That’s when she enrolled in Weekend Executive MBA Program in 2021. Every month she spent a weekend on campus taking classes with her cohort and continuing to work full-time as director of finance and operations at Piedmont Wine Imports in Durham.

Elia used the skills she was learning in class in real time at her job. She learned technical skills that she immediately applied, such as inventory management, but the classes that she found surprisingly useful helped her identify and capitalize on her strengths as a business leader.

“I hadn’t had any formal management training,” she says. “That really was a special part of the program and really helped me personally, teaching me how to manage effectively and helping me identify leadership styles that I could leverage in different scenarios. My self-awareness grew and I became a better resource for my team.”

Another benefit of her time at UNC Kenan-Flagler was a network of mentors and peers who gave her advice and encouragement as she explored the possibility of opening a restaurant. Elia has stayed in touch with a few coaches from the entrepreneurship classes. Being able to tap them as sounding boards kept her moving forward over the couple years it took to open the restaurant.

Elia’s classmates from the Weekend Executive MBA Program have come to support her new venture.

“I would take a step, start to overthink, I would have someone to reach out to who would talk me over the hump, and then it would be the next big decision and the next big decision,” she says.

“It really is like a muscle. You’re training and you’re getting familiar with the pressure of big decisions, and you’re learning how to make good decisions and how to mitigate risk and accepting that you can’t map out everything. You just have to keep moving forward and reflect on the incremental progress.”

Since Jean’s “By the Sea” opened, Elia has been tracking quarterly performance and once the business becomes more stable, she will think about growth strategy for the years to come. She would like to winterize the outdoor seating area so diners can continue to relax in that space during cold weather, and she recently added an outdoor bar to give guests another option for ordering on busy nights. Farther down the road she dreams about opening additional locations around the area, maybe even at the coast.

Regardless of how the business evolves, she will continue to focus on building spaces that prioritize community.

“It’s all about building solid relationships with the people who come in the restaurant, the vendors, our investors, employees and guests,” she says. “Jean’s “By the Sea” will only grow if those relationships are strong, so I feel like my whole focus is very values-based in that way. How do our values make us stronger people, so we can build a stronger business and serve our community for a long time?”

Photo of Kate Elia is by Kate Medley.