Gratitude, empathy, and community changed chef Ryan Hidinger. Now those three pillars have saved his widow’s life.
In the late winter of 2019, a few months before the COVID-19 pandemic brought eateries to a halt, Jen Hidinger-Kendrick visited the home of Ryan Smith and Kara Hidinger. They were her family and business partners, and she was there that day to deliver some news she wasn’t sure they were ready to hear. Jen wanted — needed — to leave Staplehouse, the hugely successful Atlanta restaurant the three of them helmed.
Words by John Kessler | Photographs by Audra Melton
Staplehouse had been a sensation right out of the gate when it opened in late 2015. Bon Appétit called it the best new restaurant in America, the James Beard Foundation heralded it, the local press said it opened a new chapter in Atlanta dining. “Complete and utter inundation” is how Jen described the first two years in business as national media and guests packed into the century-old brick building in Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward. Diners snapped up reservations within minutes of their release online. Everyone loved Smith’s cooking — as homey and sexy and open-minded as Atlanta itself. But what really pushed this small restaurant into the spotlight was its inspiring origin story and its unusual symbiosis with a nonprofit formed to help food service workers in crisis called Giving Kitchen.
Yet as business began to soften, the relationship between the nonprofit Giving Kitchen and the for-profit restaurant Staplehouse had started to show some cracks. Jen, who kept the books, could see the flaws in the model. Staplehouse had to conduct yearly audits and account for every penny to stay in compliance with nonprofit laws. She also felt the family relationships straining and that her real calling wasn’t running a restaurant but something else. So on that February morning, Jen sat with Ryan Smith and Kara in their living room. Before announcing the reason for her visit, she pulled out a letter that Ryan Hidinger — Jen’s husband, Kara’s brother, and Smith’s best friend — had written shortly before he died.
During the final weeks of his yearlong ring match with cancer, Ryan had found his voice as a writer and poured words into his laptop: letters to friends, journal entries, elliptical snippets of thought.
Jen often turned to them for inspiration. “Welcome to the fold in the paper,” he wrote. “The place where words are trying to squeeze in before a new line can start. Trying to say all they mean to before they run out of breath. ... ”
Jen started to cry, and then Kara was crying, too. A separation would be good for the business, good for the family. Kara and Smith had two little kids, and they needed to take care of them. Jen, now remarried, wanted children, too, and she couldn’t see herself spending all her days doing the books and her nights on the restaurant floor. “I needed to remove myself, to give them the runway,” she recalled.
They drew up a plan. Jen would stay on for several more months before transitioning to full-time work at Giving Kitchen. Smith and Kara would continue running Staplehouse while working out a deal with the foundation’s board to eventually buy it. They even settled on a date in March 2020. But when that date came, their industry imploded. Both Staplehouse and Giving Kitchen responded in surprising ways.
Ryan Hidinger received the worst possible diagnosis in December 2012. At the time, he was 35 and chef at Muss & Turner’s in Smyrna, a suburb of Atlanta. After presenting at Emory University Hospital with stomach pain and fatigue, he found out that he had metastatic cancer of the gall bladder and six to 12 months to live. His family arrived from Indiana and packed into the bungalow he shared with Jen and their two dogs, the same house where the couple had hosted countless pop-up dinners.
The thing is, Staplehouse was supposed to be their restaurant. They had been planning it for years. They worked during the week to usher these dinners, called Prelude to Staplehouse, to life on the weekends. They brought strangers around their table to enjoy not only their food and wine, but also their charisma. Jen and Ryan had an easy back and forth, a kind of constant volley of words and gestures, a way of taking a dumb joke a beat too long until it became funny for everyone in the room. They invited you not only into their home but into their lives. Their goal was to raise enough money to make a brick-and-mortar restaurant a reality.
Now, it seemed the only thing to do was shelve the dream. Ryan stayed at home following his diagnosis. Despondent, Jen became the couple’s voice, running constant interference with all the people in the Atlanta restaurant community who wanted to help.
And help they did. Ryan’s boss at Muss & Turner’s organized an early-January fundraiser for which 800 restaurant folk poured into an event space to serve food and drink and raised more than $275,000. They called the event “Team Hidi,” an abridgement of their last name. It was more than enough money to get Ryan state-of-the-art chemotherapy.
Way more.
Ryan Hidinger awaiting results while undergoing treatment. Photo by Bob Andres, courtesy of Giving Kitchen.
In a turn of events that has become Atlanta lore, that was the beginning of a remarkable year. Those excess funds were the seed money for Giving Kitchen, established to help others in the Atlanta food service industry facing instability because of injury or illness. Giving Kitchen, in turn, would open Staplehouse, with Smith and Kara joining the team. Restaurant owners, nonprofit consultants, and Atlanta business people formed a board. Donations continued to pour in.
Ryan beat the odds. At six months, he was well enough to travel, eat, and go on expeditions with Jen. Apple picking in north Georgia. A birthday party with banh mi sandwiches on Buford Highway, Atlanta’s international food corridor.
They also became the fundraisers-in-chief. Jen had to overcome her terror of public speaking. “I always knew there was something I liked about storytelling, and when I realized you just get up there and tell your story, it became kind of therapeutic.”
As they raised money for Giving Kitchen, they also found the location for Staplehouse on Edgewood Avenue. An Atlanta design firm donated its services for the renovation.
Jen went into a kind of Type A overdrive, always clutching a binder holding information on everything from Ryan’s chemo regimen, to public speaking calendars, to lists of companies that would donate fixtures and furniture to Staplehouse.
She sent out weekly emails to family, friends, and others who found inspiration in their story. The letters were hopeful until they weren’t. Stage four metastatic cancer is a bitch. Giving Kitchen had planned for Team Hidi 2 to take place in February 2014, but Ryan just missed it.
Jen laughs now when she remembers Ryan’s celebration of life, soon after his passing. “He wanted his brother, Scott, to read this letter he wrote. And if he didn’t read it, he’d have to recite the monologue in the introduction to ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ by Prince!”
Jen Hidinger-Kendrick, Giving Kitchen Co-founder and Senior Director of Community Engagement
With nearly 1,000 people packed into the Wrecking Bar Brewpub, Scott Hidinger read Ryan’s letter. It began: “Family and friends, I love you all so very much. This last year was the greatest gift of my life. I’ve learned so much and I’m so thankful for the time I’ve had with you. I’ve been able to reach layers inside of me that I didn’t know I could, and connect with a level of honesty and truth that have truly shown me why I was supposed to be here. It’s all because of you! It’s relationships. It’s heart, soul, and love. My only hope for you is that you walk away from today knowing that you made all the difference in my life being a complete one. I wouldn't have changed a thing, because it takes everything to complete the work.”
“He wanted a party,” Jen remembered of that day. “He wanted chicken wings and beer, and he wanted everyone to celebrate the beauty that this life is. And, sure, he knew that tears would be shed. It’s OK to cry.”
After Ryan’s death, Jen found herself alone in the home that always used to have so much company. “There were plenty of days I lived in this house by myself and didn’t want to wake up. My dogs, Camper and Vida, would come and lick my face to get me up.” She forced herself up and out and continued to speak. At Team Hidi 2, she got onstage in front of 1,000 people and began, “I’m 31 years old, and I’m a widow.”
Jen cries easily. Her eyes, big and brown, well up readily, often accompanied by an incongruous smile turning up the corners of her mouth. People around her tend to think about things that make them want to cry, and that’s OK. She’s quick with a hug, too. Grief doesn’t mean you can’t have fun, that you can’t be present in the moment, that you can’t feel gratitude for the people standing in front of you.
The year 2019 was eventful for Jen. Soon after her talk with Kara and Smith, she learned that the James Beard Foundation had decided to honor Giving Kitchen with its prestigious Humanitarian of the Year award. She and her second husband, John Wayne Kendrick, flew to Chicago with all the organization’s core staffers to accept the award, and there, after years of infertility treatment, they were finally able to conceive. “The baby’s due date was January 26, 2020, the same date as Team Hidi 8,” she laughed. “You can’t make that shit up.”
In November, her baby bump almost cartoonlike on her slight frame, she began working full time at Giving Kitchen as the senior director of community engagement. Now I get to live my life to its full purpose and do the things I’m good at, she thought.
Things were looking up until March 9, 2020, when so many of the board members had to bow out to save their businesses. The same day, John Wayne, a well-regarded bartender, was laid off.
When the pandemic shut down all food service in March of 2020, Bryan Schroeder lay awake in bed at night panicking. As the executive director of Giving Kitchen, he had grown the organization from a small nonprofit with a couple of employees, coasting by but not growing, to a fundraising dynamo with a staff of 12. He had expanded it beyond Atlanta into other cities in Georgia, and had his sights set on major food towns in the Southeast, from Nashville to Charlotte.
Now the restaurant group owners on his board were in a panic after laying off hundreds of employees. There was no way Smith and Kara could come up with the agreed-upon price to buy Staplehouse. “It felt like we were on the blade of a knife,” he said. Topping it all off, laid-off food service workers had started to turn against Giving Kitchen. “They were frustrated and hurt that they were turned down [for funds] because of unemployment. People would email and say, ‘I’ve done so much for this organization. You guys suck,’” Bryan recalled.
In fact, Bryan could have handed out funds like Halloween candy. A wealthy Atlanta family had offered Giving Kitchen a $2 million gift to give away to out-of-work food service employees. He turned it down. Was that a huge mistake?
“It just felt like it would have been a disaster for us,” he said. “That’s not our core mission. It wouldn’t be fair to the guy who broke his leg just before the pandemic.” The next day, he posted a long explainer on the Giving Kitchen website. It began:
“This time last week, I looked into the eyes of every teammate at Giving Kitchen with a simple message: As the world changes around us, we will move forward with a clear understanding of how Giving Kitchen will be a part of this community response to a global pandemic. What we will do. What we won’t do. Where we can make an impact. Where we can’t. An understanding that we will serve our community with clarity and purpose. After seven days of heartbreak, anxiety, fear, hope, compassion, and generosity, we want to make sure every one of our supporters understands this, as well.”
Bryan restated the core mission, that Giving Kitchen was there to provide assistance to workers in crisis because of injury, illness, death in the family, or a housing disaster. “For many of our clients, this is the one time in their lives they need help. The whole point is to keep a roof over their heads, lights on, and water running.” He set up a page to explain to laid-off workers how to get federal unemployment, and in the weeks following the shutdown, more than 800,000 people visited the site.
Bryan Schroeder, Executive Director of Giving Kitchen
He also had a plea to donors: “Overnight, we’ve been transformed from an organization that is primarily funded by the food service industry to an organization that is funded by our community at large. We won’t seek a dollar from restaurants for the rest of 2020. If the life-changing services we provide are to continue, it will be through the generosity of individuals, corporations, and foundations stepping up to serve the people who serve us every day.”
More than 5,000 people answered the plea and gave their first gift. “It was unbelievable,” Bryan mused. “Fundraising was better than it had ever been.” Giving Kitchen was suddenly flush with cash.
Bryan Schroeder grew up in the restaurant business. His parents ran a popular bar and deli in downtown Rome, Georgia, where folks came to drink Lowenbrau beer and eat sandwiches with punny names. (The “Pita Tosh” was popular.) Bryan worked every station in the restaurant, from fry cook to dishwasher.
An Episcopal church youth group introduced him to the idea of service, and for a while, he considered becoming a priest. Things changed when he went to Piedmont University in north Georgia and studied with Barbara Brown Taylor, a well-known theologian whose particular insights involved being close to the land and studying other faith traditions to better understand the act of worship. Bryan worked at her farm during the year, and during the summer, he volunteered in youth organizations in Peoplestown, a low-income, predominantly Black neighborhood in Atlanta. He became a huge fan of the hip-hop group Goodie Mob, who he said “helped me to understand we were all going through the same shit.” An avid backpacker and camper, Bryan took kids on wilderness trips for outdoor therapy programs. His various interests eventually led him to a job as membership coordinator for the Georgia Conservancy, with a focus on doing outreach in the Black community.
When the Giving Kitchen job came up, his first thought was, “Cool, I get to put dishwasher back on my resume.” His second thought was, “This is service. This is what I want to do. It’s the coolest job in the world.” Ryan Turner, the Muss & Turner’s owner who founded Giving Kitchen with the Hidingers and serves on its board, was impressed with Bryan. “You’ve leveraged so many relationships in your life,” Ryan Turner told Bryan, “I can see you’re not going to screw this up.”
From left: Katie Deleon, a Giving Kitchen caseworker, and Andre Castenell Jr., Director of the Giving Kitchen Call Center. Read their stories here.
Bryan also had a sense for how to leverage the pandemic windfall. Giving Kitchen spent $200,000 on internal system infrastructure — hiring more caseworkers (Spanish-speaking ones critically among them), upgrading computer systems, and moving into a new office that would allow room for further expansion.
Clients who call are routed in one of two directions. Those eligible for financial assistance due to injury, illness, death in the family, or home insecurity, will get a caseworker who draws up a plan to pay the bills for as long as it takes, up to four months, to get back on their feet without spiraling into debt. Those who need help for other reasons are routed to stability network caseworkers who can help them apply for unemployment or find a pro bono doctor, lawyer, or therapist.
During 2021, Giving Kitchen expanded into Tennessee, including hiring staff in Nashville. This year, Giving Kitchen expanded its operations in the Southeast and recently hired an additional staff member in Charlotte to manage partnerships and outreach. About two dozen currently work in the Atlanta office. To date, it has awarded more than $6 million and served more than 9,400 clients, a figure that does not include the many thousands helped through its security network.
From left: Bryan Schroeder, Katie Deleon, Jen Hidinger-Kendrick, and Andre Castenell Jr.
Jen and John Wayne live in the same little bungalow Jen and Ryan once shared. John Wayne, who now works in carpentry, has built a fence around the yard, which is strewn with toys. At 4:30 they leave the house to walk up a steep hill to the day care center nearby to pick up their 2-year-old son, Blue. A car whooshes past.
“You know, that’s fucking life. We could walk to Blue’s school and get hit by a car,” Jen said. “Hidi, he just accepted his path and allowed it to be the basis of compassion. It wasn’t about what he needed, but what other people needed.”
Jen said she always tries to keep that in mind when she gives talks to various groups, which happens with increasing frequency. For her, there are three pillars: gratitude, empathy, and community.
“This is what changed Ryan’s life and saved mine.”
John Kessler spent 18 years at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he wrote about food and served as the newspaper’s dining critic. He graduated from Williams College, lived in Japan for two years, and attended L’Academie de Cuisine culinary school near Washington, D.C. He worked for several years as a restaurant cook and chef in Washington and Denver, where he got his start as a food writer at the alternative newsweekly Westword. His writing has received many awards, including a National Headliner Award and a James Beard award. His essays, columns and food features have been anthologized 11 times in Best Food Writing.
Audra Melton is a commercial and editorial photographer based in Atlanta. Her work features a combination of storytelling and portraiture, often with a focus on social issues.
Header Image: Kitchen prep at chef Shay Lavi's Atlanta restaurant, Nur Kitchen.
Editor’s Note: This story was updated on April 29, 2022.