Kristin's Kitchen
“My mom always cooked,” says Kristin Tyler, chef-owner of Kristin’s Kitchen. “We never were a family that ate out ever. It would be like a special occasion if we ate out.”
New Jersey-raised, Tyler grew up in an Italian family home where cooking was a big part of their daily ritual. From her mother to her sister to even her daughter, who is a chef. “Everybody cooks in our family.”
Tyler moved to Lexington 22 years ago with her husband and kids. It was around 2017, 2018 when her sister started doing meal prep back in New Jersey and urged her to give it a try. What started as a few customers suddenly blossomed into dozens overnight, leading her to open Kristin’s Kitchen.
“I haven't gone to culinary school,” says Tyler. “I just have been cooking my whole life.”
Five years and one pandemic later, the business has become a staple in the Midlands area for comfort meals.
Going back to her Italian roots of family and home cooking, Kristin’s Kitchen is built on freshly prepared, home-cooked meals families can grab any time of the week and have ready right out of their fridge or freezer when needed.
“Everything is grab and go,” Tyler says. “We cook everything at the beginning of the week and portion out. So, you're getting like six ounces of meat and a couple of veggies and a carb. And we cook every single thing here. We don't buy anything premade, pre-cut or frozen, nothing like that. It's all fresh.”
Some of her most popular dishes include her chicken pot pie, which is filled with chicken and vegetables in a flaky crust, along with her salmon and beef tenderloin entrées. Her food also integrates local flavor throughout, sourcing seasonal produce from Midland’s farms like Clayton Rawls Farms in Lexington and Tom’s Creek Family Farms in Hopkins.
There are many personal family touches in the menu as well, including her parents’ zucchini muffins and peanut butter oat bars.
Though a different take on the mom-and-pop restaurants that Tyler grew up around in New Jersey, Kristin’s Kitchen still echoes many of the familiar characteristics of a family restaurant in the way her food is centered on taking care of family and friends in the best way possible. This can be seen in her senior program, which started after elder clients indicated they loved her food but found the portions too big. She created the senior program to help both cut costs for seniors and strike a portion size that better fit her customers.
“We get kids from high school that come in to pick out their lunches for the week to families to a lot of elderly people that were like widows or widowers.” Kristin even has a big college following from families sending meals to their students at the University of South Carolina.
“[We’re] just really listening to what people want,” Tyler says. “I guess that's how we like to transform what we're doing.”
Visit Kristin's Kitchen Monday through Friday at 5166 G Sunset Blvd. in Lexington
