Chad Dillon, a 33-year-old entrepreneur and restauranteur, is the young owner of The Boiler Seafood and Crab Boil, an Atlanta-based Black-owned restaurant that provides fried lobster tails, fried king crab, fried catfish, hushpuppies, and more. His eatery has already made $8 million in revenue after only one year in business.
Chad, who was born in Brooklyn, New York to Jamaican parents, has always had an entrepreneurial spirit. When he noticed a gap in the market, he jumped at the chance to offer an upmarket seafood boil experience to Atlanta. He attempted to become a franchisee of The Juicy Crab but was turned down. That’s when he decided to take a chance and launch his own idea.
Chad began planning for The Boiler Seafood in January 2019 and got a building lease in Atlanta’s prestigious Buckhead district in August 2019. Despite the fact that the global pandemic posed tremendous hurdles at the time, Chad remained resilient and motivated to bring his idea to fruition. The Boiler Seafood opened its doors on December 4, 2020, swiftly garnering popularity and becoming Buckhead’s number one seafood and crab boil restaurant.
“I am a thinker and innovator, so even without a culinary background, I enjoy finding voids in the business market and creating solutions; creating restaurant concepts from ideation to execution, coming up with new menu items, and creating amazing customer experiences. I’m also very hands-on. I spend about 10+ hours a day being in the restaurant, running errands, and handling needed logistics for the restaurant,” he told Travel Noire.
The menu of The Boiler Seafood includes a variety of seafood options such as snow crab legs, blue crabs, mussels, and crawfish. Customers have raved about the restaurant’s famous seafood boil bags, which combine fish with potatoes, corn, and a special sauce. Furthermore, the restaurant provides intriguing alternatives such as seafood egg rolls and a variety of fried selections.
