Kaelyn Cervero
Owner
Noble Catering & Events, 41Fork Hospitality Management
After just two years in business, Noble Catering & Events has hit its stride, recently announcing plans to open a new large-scale event space, called Brixton’s Turn, in Milwaukee’s Bay View neighborhood next spring. Noble plans to spend more than $2 million to transform a vacant 1917 building into a two-room venue with capacity for 400 people. The project will allow Noble to scale operations with a new culinary headquarters and event production hub, featuring a custom-designed catering kitchen, warehouse and office space. Kaelyn Cervero, who originally launched Noble while running F Street Hospitality and then acquired the brand in 2023, shared more details about this latest milestone in a recent interview with associate editor Maredithe Meyer.
The right opportunity
“We are the Milwaukee Public Museum’s exclusive caterer, so we are housed out of there right now – warehouse is there, kitchen’s there, some of our offices are there – and (MPM is) moving, so that created a dilemma. We’ve been on the hunt (for a location) for about a year. We originally were looking for (spaces) that would just be the commissary kitchen and the warehouse and some offices. I’ve got another office right now next to the Pfister at the Curry Pierce Building, so we’re kind of spread out. And honestly, that was goal number one: get everybody together in one building. We had looked at a handful and there wasn’t a lot on the market, and I was referred to this particular building and I was like, ‘I can do an event venue. Bingo, there we go.’ …
“There are not a lot of independent venues (those not located inside hotels) in Milwaukee that can hold over 400 people. It was a very conscious decision that if I’m going to do an event venue, there needs to be a reason for it, right? I’m not going to add another 150-person event venue to the city of Milwaukee. There’s already a lot.”
Designing for efficiency
“It’s a lot of moving pieces and this particular setup is getting us a chance to essentially double our capability of what we can do now, which is another reason why we wanted to go into that space. We’re building a catering kitchen; we’re not building a restaurant kitchen. When you can build something and design it specifically for your business, you automatically get more efficient. We looked at a lot of older restaurants and that sort of thing, and we would’ve had to retrofit and we could have made some of them work, but because we’re starting with a totally blank canvas, we can build this exactly the way that our culinary team needs to.”
Sustaining Noble’s growth
“We’ve probably grown the staff by at least 25 to 30%. We have well over a hundred employees right now, and we’re probably looking to add another 20 to 25 people once we get into the new space.
“… I am most excited about starting to stabilize the team, stabilize the location and really just set ourselves up for strategic growth. We all lived through the pandemic, and I don’t want to grow faster than I can manage, and so this really puts a good anchor in for us so that we can then make decisions that are best for the team and best for our clients and be able to continue to do what we do well, which is being a little bit more of a bolder caterer. We are very ingredient centric. We are very willing to get out of the box, which makes us a little bit different. This gets us set up where we can continue with that mission.”
