Jackson Free Press

Don't put me in the office," Elise Grenley, says, smiling. "I like being here when we're open and running around and crazy," she says. As general manager of CAET in Fondren, her job description includes busy evenings, large private parties and sometimes, if necessary, kicking out disturbing customers.

Grenley, who worked in restaurants throughout her college career, graduated with a bachelor's degree in hospitality management from the University of Mississippi in 2005. She moved to Jackson after college and worked at a financial firm for six years but says she didn't like it.

"I had to sit at a desk all day, and I am a hyperactive person," Grenley, 33, says.

At CAET, she prefers to be on the floor. She spends only a few hours in her office before the restaurant opens and is then on her feet interacting with her team and customers for the rest of the night.

Eventually, Grenley, a Greenwood native, left the financial firm in 2011 and worked at Parlor Market for a year and a half as the manager during the day while also running their catering operations. When she got an offer to be the assistant manager at John Currence's Snackbar in Oxford, she took it. Grenley had worked at one of his restaurants, City Grocery, during college. It was the same restaurant where her future husband, Dave Grenley, worked when she moved back to Oxford.

She met Dave in passing. He would come to Snackbar to get liquor or equipment that the restaurants shared. Eventually, the two started dating. They were engaged in June 2014 while still working in Oxford. She was excited to get back to Jackson, and when she and Dave got job offers from Derek and Jennifer Emerson to open CAET, they jumped at the challenge. Dave is now the wine director at CAET, Local 463 Urban Kitchen and Walker's Drive-In, and she manages CAET.

CAET opened in fall 2014, and Grenley says she enjoys figuring out the restaurant's rhythm. "We opened it thinking we were going to be a bar," she says. "But people wanted to eat dinner, so there's been a lot of transition and finding who we are as a restaurant."

The original idea behind CAET was as a wine bar, which was perfect for Grenley. She says that if she could only have one alcoholic drink, it would be a nice bottle of wine.

The only girl and a middle child in her family, Grenley says her siblings picked on her, which she says gave her the tough skin one needs to work in the hospitality industry.

"I have worked in a lot of restaurants (in the past), and there's a lot of yelling," Grenley says. "There are nights when it's just tense, and things don't go right, and no one wants to take the blame for it."

"As a woman, you have to be able to stand your ground," she adds.