Kitchen Combine Puts a Spotlight on Chefs Who Want to Try Out Having a Restaurant

Down in South Arlington, right on the road that denotes the city line into Mansfield, the team at Kitchen Combine opened in January with a plan to do something that the nearby community can invest in.

Ray Pryor, his wife Jaida, and her parents Jerrod and Dee Lemmons leased a space to open a franchised restaurant in August 2023 — and no hard feelings, but it just didn’t work out. Rather than pulling out of the five-year lease, they decided to make it a collaborative kitchen that would host monthly DFW chef pop-ups. But they weren’t looking for big names. They wanted to create an incubator that would allow chefs working in catering, ghost kitchens, or hosting pop-ups and operating out of food trucks to experience running a restaurant for a month to see if a physical location is the right fit for them.

Sitting in the dining room at Kitchen Combine, Pryor tells Eater Dallas that the family is new to the hospitality industry, but has a real estate business, a home restoration company, and a security company. They have a lot of talent in the family that helped get things running. His cousin, Triniti Lemmons, manages the place and does a lot of number crunching from the point-of-sale system (POS) to help chefs understand profits, ordering needs, and customer buying patterns. The extended family lends a hand with marketing, from designing the Kitchen Combine logos and posting on social media.

Courtney E. Smith

“We learned quickly how hard and tight the margins [in food] are,” Pryor says. “We decided we could shut down the [franchise] but not just leave the space. During the interim time, we had a lot of people reach out and ask if they could use the kitchen — if they could use the restaurant space for events. That started getting the ball rolling.”

The family decided to open what Pryor refers to as a “kitchen in a box” — it has everything a chef could need, all setup and ready to go. All they have to bring is creativity and some clever marketing to pull customers in.

Courtney E. Smith

The first chef featured in January was Constance Pullam of Eatie’s Deelish, who has been a chef and caterer for seven years. After closing her restaurant in Denton when her parents died, she shifted to catering, personal cheffing, and meal prep. The family behind Kitchen Combine approached her to ask what might be needed in a prep kitchen, and through their conversations, the idea for an incubator came together. Pullam says her experience in the kitchen for January reminded her how much flexibility and room to create this kind of space offers. One of the things she says she’d rethink if she did it again is being open seven days a week — it was a lot for her and the support team at Kitchen Combine. Her biggest lesson came from using a POS system that offered a lot more feedback on what was selling and how to order.

That’s where Triniti Lemmons, who manages the site, comes in. She tells Eater Dallas that her Master’s in advanced data analytics from the University of North Texas (after majoring in mathematical finance at Trinity University in San Antonio) helps her analyze the data from the POS and helps chefs figure out what is selling down to the time of day; what the busiest days are; and how to maximize cost efficiency with ordering. Pullam ultimately decided to open a food truck, in which she is partnered with the owners of Kitchen Combine.

Ray Pryor

In February, Kitchen Combine is featuring two chefs: Carl Harris, whose Cravings catering company focuses on Southern-style brunch and breakfast foods, and Bruce Strain of Munchies Slider Bar. New chefs are selected monthly from nominations made on the restaurant’s website.

“We are trying to do everything we can,” Pryor says. “Everyone who comes here knows about the concept and knows they’re supporting someone who is trying to get their own restaurant, or has their own goals [in the food industry].”

To bolster support, Kitchen Combine offers a V.I.P. subscription membership, where $20 a month, paid monthly, earns a monthly gift card for $20 on the first of each month, discounts on select food items, invitations to private events and tastings, early access to reservations during peak hours, chef bonus content like recipes, and extra voting power in the monthly nomination process for new chefs. The first V.I.P. subscriber was Pullam, who has committed to supporting chefs at Kitchen Combine for the rest of 2024.