Serving for good
November 29, 2024
Food businesses find their mission in working with challenged populations.
by Kathleen Purvis
It’s in your cupcake from Cakeable Charlotte’s bakery, spread on your turkey and ham on rye at Community Matters Café, and chopped into your pecan chicken salad at Cherubs Café in downtown Belmont. It’s even stirred into the soup of the day at the Community Culinary School of Charlotte.
All of these places serve food that tastes good. But they’re also places that serve food that does good. As the Charlotte-area restaurant scene continues to explode with local flavor and talent, one success story is in what food businesses can do for people who have barriers to employment, from histories of addiction or felony convictions to birth defects that make it next to impossible to find work.
“They’re still seen as unemployable, unfortunately,” says Kerri Massey, CEO of Holy Angels in Belmont, a residential program for people born with issues from Down’s Syndrome to intellectual and physical disabilities. Holy Angels now has five businesses, including two restaurants and a candy shop, that employ people who’ve grown up with them.
“There’s not much meaningful work out there.”
Choosing charity
Being the executive chef of a nonprofit restaurant and coffeehouse that doubles as an addiction-recovery training program isn’t exactly what Chayil (pronounced Kyle) Johnson was planning to do when he came to Charlotte to study food entrepreneurship at Johnson & Wales University.
A native of New Orleans and LaPlace, Louisiana, Johnson, 27, was raised doing volunteer work, though. His parents both worked in financial fields, and his mother homeschooled Chayil and his five siblings, always making sure they gave time to nonprofit programs.
Growing up in New Orleans, Johnson fell in love with the culinary arts. In Charlotte, however, he was drawn to do something more than just cook.
“I realized my passion was being with and helping people.”
Johnson’s grandfather, who had suffered trauma serving in Germany during World War II, was an alcoholic: “He died in a casino with a glass of bourbon in his hand,” he says.
In 2019, when Johnson heard Charlotte Rescue Mission, a recovery program for those with alcohol or drug addictions, was opening a nonprofit restaurant, Community Matters Cafe, he was struck by the possibilities.
Chayil Johnson, executive chef at Community Matters Cafe. Photographs by Peter Taylor
“‘What if something like this was around for my grandfather?’,” he thought.
He was working at The Asbury at the Dunhill Hotel when he heard Community Matters needed a line cook to work with former addicts in a six-month program of culinary training and restaurant service.
It meant a big pay cut, though. Johnson talked to his father, a financial planner, who told him his professional advice was not to do it. But as his father, he said, he was proud of Johnson for wanting to try.
Within a year, after the pandemic shut down restaurants and Community Matters stayed in business by taking on catering and delivering prepared meals, Johnson was running the kitchen as the executive chef.
Working with people who are in recovery is different from working in high-end kitchens, where being under pressure is a part of breaking people down to build them up, he says. His attitude: “Let’s just build them.”
“Anything I teach, I have to hold myself to,” he says. That means keeping his temper in check and not letting pressure get to him. He allows no cussing in the kitchen, focusing on teaching students how to control their stress even when things go wrong.
“I have to be more mindful of how I lead them than of the food itself. My background is fine dining, but a lot of my students were homeless or haven’t ever even boiled water. It’s holding on to the mission of this place, which is helping them build life skills.”
After six months in the restaurant program, students leave to go out into the world, either returning to their old jobs or using their training to find new jobs. If they want to come back to Community Matters — and some have — they have to wait 2 1/2 years. That’s deliberate, to help students transition from thinking of themselves as being in recovery to being a skilled person out in the world.
Community Matters, for both its mission and its food, has built a devoted following. On weekdays, there’s often a wait for a table. There are regulars who eat there so often, Johnson points them out by reciting their orders. Former Charlotte mayor Harvey Gantt turns up often, and Johnson has spotted the CEOs of Charlotte’s five biggest nonprofits, who come by all the time.
Johnson’s favorite moment: when one customer left a $10,000 check as a tip.
“It gives (the students) a sense of self-worth,” he says of the customer support. “You can’t fabricate that.”
Exceeding expectations
The story of Holy Angels is well-known in this area: Started by an Irish Catholic order, the Sisters of Mercy, who came to Belmont in 1892, it originally had a day care for the children of textile workers. In 1955, a woman who worked in a local mill came to the sisters with her daughter, born with spina bifida and hydrocephalus. The sisters took in the child, named Maria, and raised her.
Word spread and soon, more families arrived with children born with severe defects. The sisters started a home for them, Holy Angels, and date its anniversary as Dec. 20, 1955 – Maria’s birthday. Maria lived there until she died in 2010 at the age of 54.
In the 1950s, it was common for families to be told to institutionalize disabled babies at places like Holy Angels, where they weren’t expected to live to adulthood. But by the 1990s, the treatment of birth defects was changing, and children who’d been given no expectations were exceeding them, living into adulthood.
In 1996, with a population of young adults, Holy Angels opened Cherubs Café to give them meaningful work. For the first 10 years, Kerri Massey says, it didn’t make any money, breaking even and getting by with support from the Holy Angels Foundation.
Cakeable Cafe Charlotte. Photographs courtesy Cakeable Cafe
But as Belmont became a popular local destination, it caught on. They added the Cotton Candy Factory next door, making custom creations (for the June opening of the Sullenberger Aviation Museum, the factory made 1,000 bags of cotton candy clouds with little airplanes, as favors for visitors). Now there’s a second café, Spruced Goose Station in McAdenville; an art gallery, Bliss Gallery; and a home-goods boutique, Market on Main, with decorative items made by Holy Angels residents.
It’s not always easy to manage their population’s unique needs, Massey says: Their alumni can’t work eight-hour days, or they’d lose some of their federal aid, like Medicaid, so scheduling can be tricky. They also have to have twice as many regular workers, so the Holy Angels workers get plenty of coaching.
And now, many people who came to Holy Angels as babies are living long enough to reach retirement.
“What does life look like for them?” Massey muses. “Our model started with children. We’re learning to pivot and shift.” For instance, a woman named Lorraine, whose family brought her to Belmont from New York as an infant, is now in her 60s. She was a staple as a cook at Cherubs for years, but now does easier work at Spruced Goose, “doing whatever Lorraine wants to do,” Massey says. (She loves chopping broccoli for the popular broccoli salad.)
Almost all of the culinary programs around Charlotte focus on training and life-skills development, from Community Culinary School, which trains people who have all kinds of barriers to employment, to Cakeable, which offers 3- to 6-month bakery and café internships. The simple act of selling food to the public is about more than profit.
“I found my success doing that,” says Chayil Johnson. “I’d love to win a James Beard [Award], but when I see them, still sober and living life stronger? There’s no award like that.” SP
Left: Manolo Becantur, pictured at his Central Avenue bakery, focuses on hiring people with employment barriers at his new coffee shop, Higher Grounds by Manolo’s. Photograph by Poprock photography. Center and right: Bitty & Beau’s. Photographs courtesy Bitty & Beau’s
Purpose over profit
Local programs where your food dollars get put to a purpose.
Community Culinary School of Charlotte, 9315 Monroe Road in the Greylyn Business Park
After starting in a single room in 1997, CCS now operates a culinary school for 20 students at a time, providing culinary training and job placement, and operates a café, bakery and catering with boxed lunches. The program now has 1,140 graduates, many working in kitchens all over Charlotte. Hours: 9 a.m.-2 p.m. weekdays.
Higher Grounds by Manolo’s, 1501 Queens Road
The coffee shop with baked goods, gelatos and a few Latin American savory dishes like empanadas is operated by Manolo Betancur of Manolo’s Bakery on Central Avenue. It’s a quiet spot to work or meet friends on the grounds of Myers Park United Methodist Church. Betancur focuses on hiring people who have employment barriers, including immigrants, histories of incarceration, minorities and people with disabilities. Profits are used for community efforts on affordable housing and food insecurity. Hours: 7 a.m.-1 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday; closed Mondays.
Cakeable Charlotte Café, 401 N. Tryon St.
Cakeable operates a bakery that makes wholesale and some special orders as part of a workplace development program for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. The uptown café offers baked goods, merchandise and coffee drinks. Hours: 7 a.m.-2:30 p.m. weekdays.
Community Matters Café, 821 W. 1st St.
Operated by the Charlotte Rescue Mission as a job and life-skills training program for people in recovery, Community Matters has a coffee bar and bakery counter, as well as a full menu for breakfast and lunch. Hours: 7 a.m.-2 p.m. weekdays.
Cherubs Café, 23 N. Main St., Belmont
The counter-service café offers a full breakfast and lunch menu, plus desserts and ice cream. In addition, Holy Angels also operates the Spruced Goose, a café and coffee house at 118 Wesleyan Drive in McAdenville, the Cotton Candy Factory at 21 N. Main St., and the Market on Main at 124 N. Main St. in Belmont. Hours: 7:30 a.m.-3 p.m. Monday-Saturday.
Bitty & Beau’s, 1930 Camden Road
The national chain of coffee roasters and coffee shops employs people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. It also has North Carolina locations in Winston-Salem and Wilmington. Hours: 7 a.m.-5 p.m. weekdays, 8 a.m.-7 p.m. Saturdays and 8 a.m.-6 p.m. Sundays.
Featured image of Community Matters Cafe by Peter Taylor
