Mother and Daughter team

A hospitality endeavour brings new challenges and rewards for one mother-daughter team.

By Stephanie Pollard

Rozz Entertainment Complex Centre has a restaurant, a banquet hall and a performance venue all under one roof. The brand new business on 200 Advance Blvd. in Brampton, Ontario is the brainchild of mother-daughter team Rosalind Blake-Sutherland and Tanika Blake.

And with the help of partners Lloyd Blake and Leo Sinclair, the pair aims to make its dream of offering affordable luxury a long-lasting reality. “For a long time, I wanted to get into the entertainment field,” says Blake-Sutherland. “I was always having little things going on like fashion shows or dinners.

I had this dream that I would have a place that offers up nice Caribbean fusion in an entertainment complex where we could have R&B, reggae and jazz artists.” With her business partners, Blake-Sutherland created the concept for Rozz in 2008, but it didn’t materialize until this past summer, when the doors finally swung open.

A versatile concept isn’t the only part of this hospitality equation. As Blake-Sutherland and Blake work to balance the mother-daughter and employer-employee bond, both are finding that their relationship has become deeper as well as more complicated. “I find it really hard separating employer from mother,” Blake says of the arrangement.

“Sometimes it doesn’t matter what she’s telling me, even when I’m in the workplace and it’s related to work, it’s almost like, ‘Mom is not happy with what I’ve done.’” For her part, Blake-Sutherland admits that because she depends on Blake for so much, her expectations tend to be extremely high.

“Sometimes I think she tries too hard to please me, I really do,” she says. Grievances aside, this mother-daughter team is constantly working to ensure that Rozz upholds its reputation of providing quality entertainment while giving back to the community through scholarships and other endeavours.

With business starting to boom, Blake-Sutherland and her daughter are confident this entertainment haven will be offering the royal treatment for years to come. “I see Rozz having about 10 different locations,” Blake-Sutherland says. Blake finishes her mom’s thoughts: “Also, what we have here are different components of business in one area so it would be great to see a Rozz banquet hall by itself or a Rozz restaurant by itself. That would be really great.”

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