Imagine opening your dream restaurant to great acclaim — only to have to close it three months later. That’s what happened to Cole Jeanes, owner of Kinfolk restaurant in Harbor Town.
Kinfolk, which began as a pop-up in the old Puck Food Hall at 409 South Main and, later, Comeback Coffee, opened for breakfast and lunch in late March 2024 in a brick-and-mortar spot at 111 Harbor Town Square. “We took over a year to build,” says Jeanes, 36.
The restaurant was patterned after a diner. “It kind of was inspired by Waffle House and country-style diners,” says Jeanes. Natalie Lieberman of Collect + Curate Studio designed the interior. “More like a ’70s diner instead of really, really country.”
The menu items, which ranged from traditional breakfast plates to chicken sandwiches on brioche buns, were locally sourced from places like Home Place Pastures and Jones Orchard.
But biscuits were always “the star of the show.”
“Kinfolk is a snapshot of my childhood. How I was raised. Country roots. And biscuits were a big part of my life. I love them deeply.” Biscuits are among “the foundational items we ate throughout my childhood.”
Jeanes remembers his mother making biscuits on weekends. “I would eat six biscuits with jelly and sausage. It was stupid. She’d put them in a brown bag and leave them on the counter. I had to eat one walking by.”
When they’d go hunting together, Jeanes and his dad would get sausage, tenderloin, or other biscuit combinations at the old Gurkin’s Drive-In on Hwy. 64. “That’s why we call our food ‘gas station fancy.’ I have some nice restaurants I worked at, but my roots are really country. Gas station food.”
Those Gurkin’s biscuits were “cooked hot and then wrapped in plastic wrap. It actually is a really good technique, in a sense. It made all of it kind of meld together in a really weird way. A weird cool bite.”
His great aunt Nana also cooked biscuits, Jeanes says. Her husband, Carl, liked the “darkest” biscuits. “Cooked very, very well done. Not burnt. Super concentrated toasted buttery goodness.”
Jeanes began doing his own take on biscuits when he was in culinary school at the old L’Ecole Culinaire. He took the basic biscuit recipe he had and added Herbes de Provence — a blend of dried herbs that includes rosemary, thyme, and oregano.
They “really hit their stride” making biscuits before they closed Kinfolk, Jeanes says. They used White Lily Flour, made with a “red winter wheat.” The resulting biscuits are “very fluffy. Not cakey,” says Jeanes.
Menu items also included “hash,” which he describes as “the dinner version of biscuits and gravy.”
Kinfolk was a success, Jeanes says. “It was great. We were also in our honeymoon period. A lot of momentum from the pop-ups and the anticipation of us opening.” Their soft opening “wasn’t soft at all,” with 260 meals going out that day. The weekdays were “hit or miss,” but Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays were booked.
Then at about 11 one night at the end of June, 2024, a Kinfolk employee, Olivia Holford, who was prepping for the next day, noticed water pouring down from the ceiling. “I was asleep at the house,” says Jeanes, who lives in Harbor Town.
Holford alerted the restaurant’s manager, who drove to the house, beat on Jeanes’s door, woke him up, and then they headed to the restaurant. By the time Jeanes got to the restaurant, employees had moved paintings from the walls to a safe spot in the restaurant. The water was coming from a washing machine on the third floor, says Jeanes, who heard someone with Harbor Town “didn’t know the code to turn off the water for the whole building. So, it ran for another three hours.”
“We closed at the end of June and were back open in the end of September, 2024,” Jeanes says.
But, he says, “Someone started to notice mold showing up in two particular walls, the north and south wall. Peeping behind the wood paneling.” One of their music speakers had fallen out. “We went up there with moisture meters and checked those. Those two walls were soaked.” They still don’t know what caused those walls to be wet, Jeanes says.
Jeanes closed Kinfolk again on July 16th, 2025. “We have employees. We have customers. But they can’t come into that space if there was mold.” So, he decided, “We’re going to have to move. We’re going to have to relocate.”
Jeanes found jobs for his employees. “Luckily, we know a lot of people. We have a good network. I was able to get on the phone the day we closed or the day after, looking for people to find jobs.”
As to where he might relocate Kinfolk, Jeanes says, “We have a plan, but, unfortunately, I can’t move forward on it until I get over this hill.”
Jeanes is involved with other culinary businesses, including Hard Times Deli, Etowah Dinner Series, and The Secret Smash Society smash burgers. He’s also a partner with Seth Stowaway in Chicken Fried Palace, a restaurant in San Francisco, California.
He and the other owners of Hard Times Deli are about to open Gussied Up, which he describes as “a neighborhood joint.” Jeanes also created a line of individual inexpensive organizational tools for restaurant operators.
Looking towards the future, Jeanes would like to do a “nice dinner spot,” which would be something different from Kinfolk, which is kind of limiting because it only offers breakfast and lunch. “You can’t do too much crazy stuff.”
He’d also love to do a “classic burger joint,” which he’d call “Clyde” after his grandfather, and a “pizza joint” called “Baby Luca Pizza” after his son. And he’d like to do an “approachable fine dining restaurant” that he’d call “Fireman’s Son” after his father, who was a firefighter. Or he’d call it “Coal,” a take on his first name. “I have a million concepts. My antenna works well. I always have ideas.”
And, Jeanes adds, “I want to be financially stable, so I can create art freely. And my art is cooking.”