 All right. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Ryan Coleman. I'm the director of economic development for the city of Columbia, and I'm very excited that you all have joined us here today to welcome Mr. Kevin Kelly and his new business, the strudel shop down here to the Main Street District of Columbia, South Carolina. With that, I'd like to turn the microphone over to the honorable Daniel Rickman, our mayor, for some opening remarks. Thank you. You know, it's another day that businesses are opening Columbia as you know, we've talked a lot about open Columbia. And here we're excited to be here. Kevin and four generations of his family are here helping open up this store today. And we had the great opportunity of having Kevin part of the swearing in. And I have to tell you, your taste buds are gonna be chasing you all day long after you've had a taste of the beautiful products that Kevin and his family are producing. We're so excited to have another new business here in Columbia. This is second opening that I've been to today and ribbon cutting. So as we say, Columbia is open. We're excited. I'm excited to see all the support here from folks in five points in the Main Street and other areas of Vista and from downtown and all the businesses. Thank you for being here. This is what we need to do, support, lift and continue to support each other through promotion and excitement. Use your social media, folks. Use everything you can to support these small businesses who are investing in our community with that. I like to take lean. Take this over to Kevin, the owner to come say a few words. Um, and thank you, Kevin. Well, thank you very much. I just want to say Columbia is a beautiful city and you guys are so welcoming. And I haven't had this much welcome and I've been all around. And I just want to say that that this idea came 20 years ago. My grandmother, her grandmother was from Austria and she was a magnificent chef and her mother was a chef to a doctor and so on so forth. And my aunt's a chef and my other grandparents had a restaurant. My uncle had restaurants. It's been for generations and generations, not just for for like hundreds and hundreds of years. They've been chefs. So anyways, I just want to say that I think that strudel is something that Americans, unless you have been in Europe may not know about it. Philo dough like baklava and stuff. It stretches from North Africa to Asia to Eastern Europe all the way. It's not just Austria and Germany actually. So I thought it would be a nice dough to implement. Whereas unless you're in an international bakery, you might have had some things like that. So that's why I came up with the idea of the strudel shop. And it's very nice to have it manifest itself. It started in Charlotte and actually a friend of mine, Scott Adams here, a friend of ours, his good friend in Charlotte gave me a chance and I opened a little shop. And then we moved down here and said come down here. And I came down here. And coming down here, I met this wonderful community, a woman to Zima, you may have heard of her. She was very sweet and befriended me and told me I should talk to the Small Business Administration. And I talked to Miss Dunbar and then I talked to Erica and Margaret. And then they were like looking at things that they could help me with. And because I was, you know, Kim kind of came at roadblocks. And then they pointed me to Sergio. And I tell you what, Sergio helped me along this thing. Give that man a hand. And Ryan for coming over here. Just their thing in every single avenue of government I've come here has just been so helping me make it work and everything. And I'm a small business person. And I worked for some extraordinary chefs. One being that he cooked for two presidents, actually. And he was going to be here, but he had COVID. So I have to forget you have to forgive me. I'm doing the best I can. Short notice had a crew coming. I'm going to do what I can to try and make you guys happy and cook for you some wonderful food. And if you could bear with me on that because we're a little behind schedule. But anyhow, I just want to say I'm so grateful for all of you. And my family here, my wife, my son here, Liam. And this is my grandma. She's an amazing chef. If you have questions about cooking, even though I work for Michelin and master chefs, this is the one you ask questions to. All right. Thank you. And I want to say thank you to the mayor recommend here because he just lit up some stuff. It's pretty nice when you got the guy just says do that and it happens. I'll tell you a quick story about that. My chef was in a hospital cooking in the military, right? And this, this General Patton's son came over and said, why are the pastries so good in this hospital in Europe? And then he came over to him and said, he wanted to find out who did it. And he goes, Well, I learned culinary when I was in grade school in New York, New Jersey and bakeries instead of going to high school regular. Anyhow, the next day, he changed his assignment and he was in charge of pastries for the entire military. Hence, therefore, he cooked for presidents, Bob Hope, blah, blah, blah, etc. He kind of was like Bruce Lee for pastries and taught me so much. But when you got people that can just click a switch and it happens. It's pretty cool. Thank you. Jeff Michael Ostrander. Yes. Kevin, I'd just like to thank you for opening this business. I'm Matt kennel. Cool. You want to say something? Oh, no, no, no, I thought it was Oh, no, come on up. I just want thank you on behalf of the Main Street District for locating your new restaurant here. It's so exciting to see these local, small, unique businesses open up in our city. And it's so good to hear with the support of our mayor, our city council, the city economic development staff to make this happen. We are here for you. The Main Street District is here to support you. We are here to serve you. We're here to promote you. And our yellow shirt ambassadors are here to help you with any problems you have or just anything you might need. We want this to be very successful to you. We're also really happy that you're located here. We all hear about Main Street, but you're in the Main Street District. To be here on Washington Street to see this district expand. We've seen two other businesses open up around the corner on Sumter Street. This hotel opened up about a year ago. The district is expanding and the city is expanding as we connect to these other districts to five points to the Vista to North Main Street to South Main Street. And it's just a really exciting time to be in Colombia. And I'm really glad you're here. So welcome to the Main Street District. We're just thrilled that you're here. Thank you. Thank you. I want to I want to say one quick word to what he said. And I'm sorry, my brain scatter. I got bread in the oven right now and I'm thinking do I need to pull it right now? Anyways, I want to say thank you. Chase has been very helpful to me. Mr. Canty gave me a shot here. This play this building is is not it's not been here and they gave me a shot. A little guy who has, you know, basically nothing except for my credit is my skills of what I do. So I need every one of you to help me and support us to do it. And I just want to say thank you for everything and giving a shot to small business. And thank you for guiding. And I just want to say thank you for that. Thank you. Not only is this a great blog, but it is exciting to know that the screwed up strudel shop is in District two. I want to thank our mayor, Mayor Rickerman, our fellow council person, Councilman Joe Taylor. Isn't this a good time? I've been inside the shop and I've heard I've smelled the air, the aroma. So the thing that I really want to say is let's eat. It's an exciting time when small businesses continue to drive the economy of municipalities. It is amazingly wonderful to have this shop in our district and of course in our city. Small businesses continue to grow and become the economic drivers for our city. It's wonderful. So with all of that being said, let's taste some of Kevin's delight. Thank you all for being here. So we're going to get together and we're going to cut the ribbon, but I'll be remissed if I didn't remind everybody unique businesses like this is what brings people back downtown. So keep supporting them, keep inviting them and let's keep going forward, folks.