A few weeks before the doors open at Hunters Station—a restaurant hub set to open inside a former auto body shop in the heart of Five Points—Laura Wilson is giddy as she moves through the space.
Jen McDonald
Her company, Citizen Kitchens, is expanding into the basement level of Hunters, taking up 8,000 square feet to install a communal kitchen and cooking space. This second location of the incubation kitchen will be able to host as many as 250 small food business owners who can use the space to prep, cook, and operate their businesses. As Wilson walks between the kitchen and dry storage areas, her face lights up. One storage unit is packed with boxes. “Those are all brand new sheet pans,” she beams, her eyes wide at the possibilities.
Citizen Kitchens’ original location is still operating in a space off of Charlotte Avenue—Wilson worked with two other partners, Jenny Vaughn and Brent Ling, to launch the concept in 2015. At 2,500 square feet, it quickly filled up with food truck owners, wedding cake bakers, bread bakers, and caterers who came to cook in a licensed kitchen for monthly or hourly fees. The idea is help offset the costs of a commercial cooking space: By sharing equipment, health and agriculture requirements, and utilities, as well as cooktops, cookware, cold storage, shelving, and tools, the kitchen (open 24 hours a day) allows up to 90 business owners to run their own operations.
Jen McDonald
But Wilson, who bought out her partners a few years ago, quickly learned there was a much bigger need—her waiting list had grown to 200 businesses. So, where could they find the space to support more? Wilson was introduced to the team behind Fresh Hospitality, including Michael Bodnar, who was in the process of developing the Hunters Station property into a food hub of fast casual restaurants. Wilson would take over the space at the base of the building.
Knowing how to provide the right services for fledgling food businesses comes from decades of work in the food world. Wilson started cooking in her early 20s in her hometown of Chattanooga and later moved to New Orleans, where she worked her way up to executive chef of one of the city’s largest restaurants, Red Fish Grill. She moved to Nashville in 2002 and befriended chef Kim Totzke, who recruited her to become a chef at Wild Iris. Later, they ran the restaurant Ombi together, by which point, Wilson was married and had a son.
“I just realized that that kind of restaurant life was not for me anymore. I was 38 and had done it for 20 years,” she says.
She took a job as the executive chef of the Turnip Truck and helped open the Gulch location.
A new opportunity came up shortly after Nashville flooded in 2010. She was asked to cook at the Generous Helpings dinner, a fundraiser for Second Harvest Food Bank of Middle Tennessee, which took place at the Nashville Farmers’ Market days after the flood waters had destroyed the interior of the market house.
Jen McDonald
There, Wilson met Jolie Yockey, who was working at the Market at the time, who explained that they would rebuild everything inside the market, including a new kitchen space called Grow Local Kitchen. Wilson joined the market team and helped turn the kitchen space into a food business incubator, where she realized the demand for a communal space was accelerating. A few years later, she left to open Citizen Kitchens.
The partnership with Fresh Hospitality was fortuitous for many reasons, Wilson says.
For one, she says, “our clients are all up-and-coming food businesses and partnering with Fresh gives them more eyes and more opportunity.”
Plus, she sees her role as both business owner and mentor.
“[Michael Bodnar] is a natural mentor and that’s a sensibility I want to have as well. At the tail end of a culinary career, you go through this natural progression of fighting for yourself and climbing the ladder, and then there’s this turn and you start looking at your staff and you want to bring them up, too. And that’s what [Citizen Kitchens] is,” she adds.
In this new space, she can accommodate a wide range of clients in the main kitchen, plus there are two baking rooms, one of which is a fully contained gluten-free facility. There’s also a manufacturing room, licensed by the Department of Agriculture for the production of dairy products. The kitchen will be home to food trucks, caterers, bakers, a cheesemonger, an ice cream maker, and meal kit makers. Upstairs, set amongst fast casual concepts like The Grilled Cheeserie, Hugh Baby’s, and Vui’s Kitchen, Citizen Kitchens is branching out to have its own retail market. There, you’ll find freshly baked breads, meal kits to go, and even wine and canned mixed cocktails, which can be carried throughout the entire space.
All of it, Wilson says, only adds more opportunities for her clients. With a collaborative spirit, there’s collective success, one that constantly breeds new ideas and new ways to lift each other up.
“It’s just the most rewarding thing,” Wilson says. “It connects what I wanted to be as a chef, to what I am now as a business person. I get so much joy watching the success of other people.”
Citizen Kitchens, Hunters Station, 969 Main St.; citizenkitchens.com