Gocha Hawkins: A Daring Entrepreneur and Enduring Spirit

Gocha Hawkins is somewhat of an anomaly; she is both enigmatic and relatively guarded at the same time. The gourmet restaurateur and winner of the 2024 Golden Spatula Award wasn’t born with a silver spoon. Her refined tastes for high-end, but down-home culinary dishes however, is attracting Atlanta foodies in droves.

The accomplished beautician and reality show star is now a thriving restaurant owner, making a mark in Atlanta’s highly competitive dining space. The plain-spoken star of WE tv’s “Bold and the Bougie” makes it clear that a number of factors contribute to her trials and triumphs, including a challenging upbringing in Detroit and her early experiences in Montgomery, Alabama – all of which fueled her capacity for resilience and her dedication to distinction.

“I think the entrepreneurial started pretty much, you know, just as growing up, I saw my dad, he worked. He had nearly five or six jobs at one time, “explains Hawkins. “Yeah, so he constantly worked. And I think I took a lot of that from him, and then, just my upbringing. I had really kind of rough upbringing,’ Hawkins says stoically adding, “I was abused as a kid … got shipped from home to home to home. I think just finally, once I got out of that hustle and bustle of being shipped around … it was just survival at that point, just trying to figure out.”

Since the elite stylist’s move from her salon in Orlando to making her mark on Atlanta’s diverse dining landscape, Hawkins, a natural-born entrepreneur has expanded her business from a single restaurant to include a second bricks-and-mortar location in southwest Atlanta along with a mobile diner and thriving catering business.

But the savvy celeb and former star of “L.A. Hair,” readily admits that along with inheriting the grit to become a business owner, much of her endurance stems from surviving early years of physical and sexual abuse which would ultimately influence relationships later in her life.

“I was taken away from my mom in like the fourth grade,” she says. ‘starting when I was about sixth grade, I went back and forth to Alabama to live with my grandmother and go to school. I’d get out of school in June in Detroit, and then go to Alabama and stay there for the next school year. Then I’d go back to Detroit for the following summer and stay there for the next school year. I just kept floating around, back and forth, and with all the transporting around, I didn’t really have a stable child life,” Hawkins explains.

Later Hawkins would find herself pregnant at 17 and married at 18 to a man ten years her senior. After extricating herself from that unbalanced relationship she admits she continued to look for love in all the wrong places and in the course of that search, things would go from bad to worse, and she would eventually find herself incarceration in an Alabama prison.

Once the troubled-teen-turned-remorseful 20-year-old was paroled in 1993 after participating in a two-year work release program, Hawkins vowed not to be a victim of her circumstances and set on a path to adopting a more positive lifestyle and leading a more productive life. But the need to be loved would overrule again and Hawkins would eventually become involved in what would devolve into another unsuccessful and abusive entanglement.

“I was in a relationship with a football player in Detroit and he coerced me into leaving my business at the time, I had a salon back in Orlando, and he was like, ‘You know, I want you to come to Detroit so we can get married.’ Blah, blah, and I fell for the okey doke. I knew better because my dad always told me, you know, always have a job. Don’t ever depend on the man. And I guess it was the whole football life that kind of just swindled me and I got up there, and he became a whole different person. He was very abusive, and it was really rough,” Hawkins laments. “During that time he had taken over all my bills and everything. So at that time, I had like $30,000 worth of bills. He had taken over all my expenses, and with all the abuse and everything, I just couldn’t take it anymore. It lasted less than a year. I went back to Miami and I literally lost everything I had. … My credit was shot because I didn’t have a job, and he was paying all my bills. And so once he stopped paying my bills, I didn’t have any income, so I lost everything,” she recounts.

Despite her difficult past, she expresses gratitude for her current success and community impact, highlighting her restaurant as a fulfilling venture. Hawkins is no less determined than she is a defiant exception to the rule. “I started over in 2010. I moved to Atlanta with just a mattress and a dresser. Wow, wow,” she says seeming surprised by her own daring nature and durability.

After opening a salon in Atlanta in 2010, Hawkins was compelled to expand her interests and add value to the community that provided the footing for her reclamation. After realizing that local dining experiences in the business community were limited she opened Gocha’s Breakfast Bar in 2018, and later in 2022 stationed a food truck at the location to take care of the heavy customer overflow.

The venture would prove to be a smart business move as well as a good community investment. “In 2007 the market was slowly changing, and it was on the way to a recession … and after the recession is when the hair industry started changing, because through social media people had access to so many stylists, and you know, they were like, “Well, I’ll post you if you do my hair for free.” And that just wasn’t something that I was interested in. At the time, I was working with Kandii [Burruss], I was working with Beyonce and I had a lot of high-profile celebrities, I just felt like I couldn’t take a post to Georgia Power,” Hawkins quipped.

“Once I moved to the southwest side of town in 2014 there were no restaurants here outside of chains. I said, ‘I just cannot believe that these communities are at such a disadvantage.’ So I said, now would be the perfect time to open a restaurant.”

The newly minted, but irascible restaurateur put down her scissors and dissed the blow dryer to parlay the success of the first location into opening a mobile unit and now a third location, Gocha’s Tapas in a thriving retail center.

“I lost it all, I started over and now I’ve gained it back, and I’m happy about how it happened. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. A lot of times when you are in relationships and other people do things for you, it doesn’t really mean as much to you. But when you do these things for yourself, it matters more to you.”