Chef Michael Bowling of The Hot Box. Photo by Peter Taylor

Chef Michael Bowling doesn’t run specials every weekend, but he did last weekend. When I spoke to him in late August, he was on the way to the grocery store to pick up vegetables for black-eyed pea cakes and “anything else I forgot to order.” Bowling, whose home base is Hot Box Next Level Kitchen in Concord, also takes his menu on the road, though his food truck business has fallen off since his most important helpers — his sons — have lately headed back to college.

Now, the Virginia native focuses on the restaurant, located inside Southern Strain Brewing Company, where he and his team serve up globally inspired bar food. On top of operating a business hit hard by the pandemic, Bowling also lives with kidney disease. During the height of the Covid crisis, he managed his dialysis at home himself. These days, he’s back to overnight dialysis in a clinic — seven or eight hours, three nights a week. He may not get much sleep, but he’s still dreaming big: He has plans to expand his business in breweries across the state.

Here’s what a day in his life looks like.

7 a.m. The first thing Bowling does is check his phone. Eyes barely open, and he’s already in his inbox to check sales numbers and keep tabs on issues that arose overnight. He has the luxury of working from bed for a little while because his five sons no longer live at home. “They’re in college or they’re out living their life, so I don’t have to worry about getting kids up and going to school, which is a blessing,” he says. In the quiet interlude between sleep and work, Bowling lays out a game plan for the day.

8 a.m. But once he’s up, he’s up. “Normally, I get out of the bed, I brush my teeth, I comb my hair, my beard, and do whatever else I have to do, and when I go down the steps I’m normally putting on my shoes and walking out the door.” Lately, he says, “I’m trying to be a breakfast person, but I’m not very successful.”

9 a.m. Bowling’s commute is studded with stops: Sysco or Food Lion, if he needs last-minute ingredients, and Groundwork Common, a coffee shop near his home in Concord. “It’s some of the best coffee I’ve ever had in my life.” (His go-to order? A cappuccino with oat milk and a splash of caramel.) Then he’s off to his restaurant.

He does an impromptu kitchen walkthrough, checks the prep list, chats with staff, and has a quick check-in with the brewery owners. Then he tries to do some prep work himself. “And when I say try, I seriously mean try. I want to be in the kitchen, I want to help out … but I usually end up fielding phone calls, answering emails, working on some sort of paperwork, whether it’s QuickBooks or workers’ comp audits. It’s always something when you own a business.” While he’s on the computer, he checks Indeed: “You know what it’s like out there right now.”

3 p.m. The evening cooks come in, and the kitchen wraps up prep work for service, which starts at 4. Bowling cooks for the first couple of hours, but the chef often ends up cashiering: “My cashiers, God bless them, they’re always dragging — I was going to say draggin’ ass — they’re always dragging in. I want them there at 4, but I’ve got some teenagers that can’t get in ’til 5, ’til their parents can bring them in. That’s one of the positions we’re hiring for: an adult cashier.” In the meantime, kitchen staffers take turns at the register.

 7 p.m. In the early evening, Bowling leaves work and treks to Huntersville for nocturnal dialysis. He was diagnosed with kidney disease in 2006, the year after his mother died from the same disease. He went into shock. He closed and sold his Roanoke, Virginia restaurant, The Bistro at Campbell. Even though it wasn’t long before he got back to work — he moved to Charlotte around 2010 for an executive chef position at now-closed 15 North — he believes his illness has put his career eight or nine years behind schedule: “I’ve had opportunities to open restaurants and then of course I give people full disclosure, and when they find out I’ve got a major medical problem, they back away.”

Bowling received a kidney transplant in 2008, but the transplant failed. After his best friend had asked for years, Bowling relented and let him get tested to find out if he could be a donor for a new transplant: “He called me literally two days ago and told me that, so far, he’s a match. He’s gotten further in the testing process than anybody else has ever gotten. If all goes well with his last set of tests, we’ll do a transplant over Christmas break.” Bowling is careful to qualify the good news—“the transplant doctors are very particular, and if they find one little thing wrong with you, it’s over”—but a successful operation would be a marked improvement over last Christmas, when he was in the hospital with Covid and couldn’t have visitors.

For now, he attends overnight dialysis three nights a week and carefully moderates his diet. “I love collard greens and stuff like that, but dark leafy greens aren’t good for you as a kidney patient.” He keeps his salt levels in check, and his attention to food and habit of shopping on the perimeter of the grocery store have earned him a perfect report card from his nutritionist. “I don’t have to take some of the medications that other dialysis patients take, because I know what’s in my food.”

4 a.m. Dialysis doesn’t make for quality rest: machines are running, staff are coming in and out, lights are blinking. “The most I’ll get in there is four hours of sleep,” Bowling says. He can usually catch a bit more in the predawn hours after he gets home, but, he says, “Some mornings, my phone starts ringing at 8:30, and then that four hours of sleep goes out the window.” Bowling’s illness and demanding schedule give new meaning to the term “work-life balance,” and the chef is a pro at managing both. In the morning, he may feel a touch sluggish, but he’s still ready to sling the fish, wings, and risotto fritters that have made him a Concord favorite. “It’s definitely slowed me down,” he says. “But it hasn’t stopped me.”

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