Skye McDaniel, an Oak Cliff native, opened La Bodega, a grab-and-go restaurant after she left the restaurant industry when the pandemic began, according to a DMagazine article which observes

“Owner Skye McDaniel is an Oak Cliff native who’s cooked at some of the neighborhood’s favorite restaurants, including Bolsa and Boulevardier. She left the restaurant industry when the coronavirus pandemic began, but the pull of hospitality brought her right back. To open La Bodega, she renovated a century-old shotgun house in her free time, around the schedule of a day job.”

McDaniel knew going back to the restaurant industry and opening her own business was the right thing to do as she stood in her newly opened restaurant according to a Dallas Morning News article July 27. They say,

“Skye McDaniel stood in the kitchen of her newly opened restaurant in a tiny 100-year-old building in the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas and had an existential moment. It was the first week of July 2022, the restaurant’s opening week, and she was working 14-hour days to get her business going. Her body ached, and the heat from the rotisserie ovens was suffocating.

 “This is my favorite thing,” she thought.

It was then she knew she had made the right choice to get back into the restaurant industry and open her own business in the neighborhood where she spent her childhood and worked her way up in kitchens like Bolsa and Boulevardier. The grind was just as fun as she remembered it, if not more so now that she could craft the menu of her dreams and feed neighbors and friends.”

It was the pandemic that pushed Skye McDaniel to open her own restaurant according to a NBC-DFW news article which reports, 

“2020 was just a really scary year for all of us,” McDaniel said. “How should you come out on the other side of this? Like, you shouldn’t be the same person.” 

“McDaniel was working at a Deep Ellum coffee shop when the pandemic hit and she was without a job. She had a little success day trading, which reframed her thinking about risk and reward.

So for me, that space is what pushed me to do this because I had time to evaluate how important it was, whether or not I should take a risk,” McDaniel said she started thinking during her pandemic downtime. “Like a do-over. If I wanted to go back in, what would it look like? And of course, it would look like working for myself.”

McDaniel hopes her customers notice and feel how much love and care has been put into her healthy comfort food.