All Star Catering has roots in Louis DeAngelo’s very first restaurant, in Hammond Aire Plaza. As Business Report details in its new Entrepreneur feature on All Star Catering owner and chef Brian Medlin, it was in the mid-1990s that he worked side by side with DeAngelo as the latter built his restaurant brand.
“I got to see everything he did from the very beginning,” says Medlin, who was still in high school at the time. “That was priceless over the years.”
Medlin rose through the ranks from cook to kitchen manager, eventually training DeAngelo’s franchisees. Meanwhile, the Greenwell Springs native worked his way through Baton Rouge Community College and LSU, earning degrees in marketing and business administration. He opened Opie’s Cajun Café a year after graduating, calling the move inevitable: “For 10 years I’d saved up that money and prepared to take that leap.”
Medlin sold Opie’s in 2009 to launch All Star Catering. And from the start he’s set his sights on big fish.
“I’ve focused 100% on contract meals and meal plans,” he says. “That’s college meal plans, disaster relief, police and emergency response meals, National Guard, and corporate meals.”Read the full feature. Send your comments to editors@businessreport.com.
