Chef Miguel Morales was having some preventative maintenance done in the kitchen at one of the five restaurants he owns in Chattanooga. The technician happened to mention he’d just been at the Bethlehem Center, a few blocks away, because its kitchen had been shut down.
And so began a beautiful romance.
After years as a managing partner at Carrabba’s Italian Grill, Morales opened Feed Table and Tavern, three 1885 Grill restaurants and Parkway Pourhouse in Chattanooga. But he never forgot his own roots in Columbia, South Carolina, where he grew up one of four children with a single mother who struggled to make ends meet.
The Bethlehem Center has served the marginalized community of St. Elmo since 1920 with programs that range from mentoring and tutoring children to adult literacy to easing the plight of food insecurity. On the day Morales walked into the center’s kitchen, it was the last category that was in crisis.
“When he came out we were in dire need in our kitchen,” recalls Debbie Boggs, the center’s development director. “We had several things that were broken.”
Several rather major things like a nonfunctioning grease trap and hoods that didn’t vent. It had been shut down as a commercial kitchen that serves regular meals to clients.
“I introduced myself and told them I was interested in getting their kitchen up and going,” Morales remembers. “We had contacts with kitchen stores. And we had them up and going in a week.”
In the process, the chef raised more than $2,000 for the repairs.
That could have been where it ended, but it didn’t as Morales and his wife, Leslie, tackled other projects at the center and continued to help other nonprofits and schools with whatever they needed. The Morales family have servants’ hearts and service to others is at the core of everything they do.
The fledgling chef
Columbia is where the chef’s journey began. His mother had a ninth-grade education and a determination to make her children’s lives better.
“My mom worked a bunch and she made ends meet,” Morales says. “But what we didn’t realize at the time was that there were certain organizations she relied on to make ends meet. We were provided a lot by the Boys and Girls Club and our church.”
His mother provided him with instruction that would become the core of his career as a chef. She brought her young son into the kitchen.
“I’ve always cooked,” he says. “My mom taught me how to cook so I could cook for my sisters. That was a big badge of honor. I always wanted to learn more.”
In the early days, Morales did not understand the concept of cooking for more than one person at a time, so he would make his sisters’ breakfasts à la minute, a culinary term that basically means made to order.
So Food by Miguel basically took a lot of time.
“My sisters would pick on me because I knew how to make breakfast but I didn’t know how to cook in bulk.” His mother also introduced him to the wonders of the oven bag. All of a sudden, cooking in bulk got a lot easier.
Those food memories stayed with him in a powerful way that translates in how he formulates the menus at his restaurants. He always asks his staff what food memories they have. The smoked pork rib tips, 20-hour brisket French dip and Sloppy Joe’s with an “extra sloppy” option all came from his colleagues’ memories and experiences.
Let’s talk turkeys
One of the unique features of the Feed Table and Tavern is a massive indoor smoker. When the owners of the building renovated it they hoped for a restaurant on the bottom floor and installed a huge vent basically the size of two elevators that allows Feed Table to vent their heating and air conditioning equipment, dishwashers, hoods and a giant smoker out of the building’s roof.
The smoker would come in handy at The Bethlehem Center’s Thanksgiving dinner pre-pandemic.
“We found out they do Thanksgiving dinner,” Morales says. “They would invite people to the community center and there could be 200 people. But there are also a lot of elderly who can’t get out, and they’d deliver food the next day. They had had to use their own budget and didn’t have a lot of support. I think they got roasted chicken from Sam’s.
“That year we said, ‘We’ll buy turkeys and we’ll smoke all the turkeys and pull them all and bring them and serve.”
This past year, the Morales pivoted.
“This year we raised enough money between two restaurants to buy turkeys for households, he says, “We offered to cook them, but they wanted to do it themselves at home.
“It just showed us a bunch of different ways to do things that we never had to think of before,” he observes. “That is what excites me about 2020. It showed you a lot of different ways to do things and it made you dig deep. I believe God puts obstacles in your path and if you trust Him you will come out stronger.”
Brand new bistro
Chef Morales has a soft spot for children, both at his restaurant and in the philanthropic work he does. At Feed, he provides young guests with gold coins that can only be used in the arcade games he operates at the restaurant. Not only does the activity keep children occupied and engaged, but they can take leftover coins with them. That way, the next time their parents ask them where they want to eat out, Feed is most probably at the top of the list.
The students at Brainerd High School also got a huge dose of fun from the chef.
The high school opened in 1960, and few updates or renovations had been made in the decades that followed. In 2019, the school launched the Brainerd Together campaign to involve the community in updating the campus. One of the areas that got attention was the building housing the culinary program, part of the school’s Institute of Entrepreneurship in the Future Ready Institutes.
The program includes a full-service bistro used to serve student-made lunches to staff and community members. It’s a sophisticated affair with menu offerings such as grilled tilapia on a bed of rice pilaf, marinated chicken breast with an Alfredo sauce and Italian cheesecake for dessert. It’s led by a professionally trained chef/instructor who works with the students on both the front-of-house details of running a restaurant and the back-of-house kitchen functions.
Chef Morales was part of Brainerd Together and took on updating the bistro, which had worn tile floors and furniture that had seen much better days.
“Miguel picked up on the culinary arts program and said what do you need?” recalls assistant principal Belinda Martin. “He came in with a team and he did some of the work himself.”
Among the improvements were the addition of hardwood floors, a new paint job that made the space look similar to Feed Table, and new partitions, tables and chairs.
Giving the bistro a major facelift had an immediate effect on the students, Martin says. “The project made our kids feel like they had a new building. We’ve learned that kids take better care of things that look like they need to be taken care of.”
Morales, who enjoyed playing soccer as a youth in Columbia, also found Howard School was about to rekindle its soccer program and raised money to buy both home and travel uniforms.
Leslie Morales joins her husband in many of the philanthropic pushes, particularly at the Bethlehem Center where she volunteers working with children. “She has donated supplies and arts and crafts and has been such a huge help,” Boggs says.
From hosting fundraisers such as Art from the Heart to restarting a morning preschool program after students at a bus stop were put in harm’s way by a drive-by shooting, there is barely an inch of the center’s operations that haven’t been touched by Morales family, including daughter Bria.
Chef Morales has never forgotten the help his family received when they needed it most.
“Fifty percent is what you can do in the community and 50% is who comes into your restaurants,” he says. “The nearest and dear to my heart are nonprofits that are kid related – great mentors and people being willing to put food on the table. I want to pay it forward.”