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July 23, 2024
Day in the Life: Chris Coleman
Co-founder of Built-on-Hospitality manages three restaurants with two new cocktail bars on the way
by Jacqueline Pennington
After culinary school, Chris Coleman quickly started making a name for himself in Charlotte’s culinary scene and has left a lasting impact in some of the most renowned kitchens in our city. He started out as executive chef at respected Uptown fine dining restaurant McNinch House and ran the restaurant for nine years.
He then moved on to be culinary director at the Dunhill Hotel, tasked with opening The Asbury and later helped open Stoke in the Marriott City Center as executive chef. It was there that Coleman met his now business partner and began laying the groundwork for his vision of opening a restaurant in a 1900s mill home in NoDa. The Goodyear House would open its doors 48 days before the pandemic.
Coleman spent much of the lockdown expanding the outdoor space at The Goodyear House to welcome customers back once restaurants reopened. “Now, it’s kind of a calling card of The Goodyear House with the massive patio,” he says. “So, it was kind of a blessing in disguise.”
With the success of The Goodyear House, the restaurant group Built on Hospitality was born, and Coleman has since added Old Town Kitchen & Cocktails and Haymaker to its portfolio. Coleman and his team have also hired Bob Peters as beverage director to help revamp their current cocktail programs and open cocktail bars, such as Chief’s in NoDa and Folia in South End.
It’s safe to say Coleman has a lot on his plate. Here’s what a day in his life looks like.
6:00 a.m. Coleman’s role has changed quite a bit since his days working in a kitchen. He now works Monday through Friday and spends the weekends with his family. During the school year, he’s up early to get the kids moving. In the summer months, he gets an extra hour of sleep. “My morning routine is probably not different from a lot of folks: I wake up, let the dog out, and make some coffee for my wife, Ashley, and myself. I get the kids up and get them started on their day. Then, I’m off to work.”
8:20 a.m. Coleman arrives at his office just in time for a weekly meeting with his team. “It’s myself, my two business partners, our director of operations, our executive sous chef, and Bob Peters as our beverage director. The six of us get around the table and talk about what has happened over the last week, what we have coming up in the week ahead and then we go through an ongoing issues list. Then we’re looking at what’s coming down the pipeline and talking about all the projects that we’re working on.”
10:00 a.m. Coleman no longer manages the day-to-day operations at The Goodyear House, so he has a weekly check-in with executive sous chef Tyler Long to get updates. “He really handles a lot. He has all the day-to-day operations at Goodyear House from a back-of-house perspective, but he also works closely with the culinary staff at Haymaker and at Old Town so that I can be more focused on developing the new stuff that we’ve got coming. He keeps me abreast of what’s going on and what issues we need to solve from a kitchen perspective at all of the existing restaurants.”
12:00 p.m. “Around noon we’ll go check in at either Haymaker or Goodyear House to talk with the chefs about any private events or parties that are coming up, food costs, labor costs…all that kind of stuff.”
For lunch Coleman will bring a salad from home if he’s in the office or he’ll whip up something in the kitchen at the restaurant if he’s onsite. “If I’m at Haymaker, I’m probably grabbing a burger because it’s a delicious burger. If I’m at Goodyear House, I’m going down the line and making myself what I call a trash salad, which is a lot of different ingredients from different dishes all thrown together in a bowl. It’s usually got chopped iceberg from the wedge, our mixed local lettuces that we use on the good salad, some of the buttermilk ranch dressing, some of the verde dressing, some chili crisp, some pickles, whatever kind of seared vegetables we’ve got on the menu at the time, and then a lot of crunchy stuff from the pantry. So, it’s delicious. It’s salty, crunchy, fulfilling and refreshing.”
2:30 p.m. From there, Coleman keeps his chef hat on and will do a little bit of prep, menu development and R&D before spending the rest of the afternoon cleaning up his email or meeting with their social media manager.
“A lot of my role now is more of a restaurant operator and less of a chef. I do have days that are outliers where we’ve got special event dinners coming up or festivals that I need to plan for and that’s a little more exciting but this kind of day is typical.”
5:30 p.m. Coleman heads home and makes his family dinner. “A lot of times I’m grabbing cauliflower rice because it’s a good grain substitute and I can make delicious risotto with it. I’m a big one pot cooking guy. I love braises and stews.” After dinner, the kids hop in the “night time taxi” and Coleman takes his son, Luke, and daughter, Ellie, to whatever practices or rehearsals that they have on the schedule. During the summer, they may take a dip in the neighborhood pool across the street.
9:30 p.m. Coleman gets the kids into bed around 9, takes the dog out, and sits down with a book. “I try to read for about 30 minutes every night as a way to kind of decompress and let my brain wander away from hospitality for a minute. Then it’s usually lights out at 10:30 or 11 o’clock.”
