Carla Hall plans Kickstarter-funded restaurantCarla Hall plans Kickstarter-funded restaurant

Celebrity chef Carla Hall has launched a campaign on the fundraising website Kickstarter to open a restaurant in New York City that features the food of her hometown, Nashville, Tenn.

The co-host of ABC’s “The Chew” and former contestant on Bravo TV’s “Top Chef” hopes to open Carla Hall’s Southern Kitchen in March or the second quarter of 2015. She is working with restaurant and design company AvroKO on the project, which will be a Southern-style “meat and three” restaurant, designed as a fast-casual concept serving chicken as its main protein.

“It’s kind of a love letter to Nashville,” said Hall, a professional caterer.

Carla Hall

Although she said she was not interested in opening a restaurant, she realized with a meat-and-three — a Southern-style restaurant that features a choice of protein and multiple side dishes served buffet-style — she could make food that was cooked slowly but served fast.

“I realized I had backed myself into a corner in terms of what I thought a restaurant could be, which was fine dining, which I absolutely didn’t want to do,” she said.

Hall selected to launch a Kickstarter page Wednesday for multiple reasons besides attracting investors.

“It’s marketing, but it’s also a restaurant of the people, and one of the most exciting rewards is our Founders Wall,” she said. “For $25 or more, your name gets to go on the wall for every restaurant we open. I think a lot of people would have that wall be $1,000, but that’s unobtainable for a lot of people.”

Kickstarter rewards for the project start at $1, which gets contributors the recipe for her hot chicken. Those who give $10 receive a free whoopie pie of the month for 12 months. Recipe card sets, T-shirts, cookbooks, invitations to restaurant openings, catered meals and other rewards are available at higher levels. A pledge of $10,000 or more gets backers a full day of cooking with Hall, followed by dinner with 10 friends and an autographed chef jacket.

The menu will include collards and cornbread, along with other sides, roasted whole and half chickens, and “hot chicken,” a Nashville specialty of spicy fried chicken.

All of the side dishes will be vegetarian, she said, which would not only make them accessible to most customers, but also help dispel myths about Southern food.

“There’s this myth not [just] that it’s not healthy, but that it’s going to kill you,” Hall said. “As an African American and someone who wants to preserve my culture, I want people to know this is how [the food] used to be, with pork and fat to stretch the protein in a meal,” not dominate it.

Hall has not selected a location for the restaurant yet, but she has found a test kitchen of sorts. Drexel University students in a class on opening restaurants, which Hall consults on, will do further testing, she said.

The class has been outfitted with the same fryers Hall plans to use in her restaurant.

“They start with my recipes and they’ll scale them,” she said.

Eventually, Hall plans to open more units of the concept.

Contact Bret Thorn at [email protected].
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