No Regrets: Kristin Smith’s journey from Williamsburg to wanderlust to home in Wrigley’s Taproom
photos by Jon Cherry
Along Main Street in downtown Corbin, across the street from White Rabbit Records and bookended between the pinball museum and a local coffee shop called Folktales, Wrigley’s Taproom & Eatery celebrated its ninth birthday earlier this year. That party was, in some ways, the culmination of star chef Kristin Smith’s return to Eastern Kentucky more than 15 years ago.
The move home for Smith (she/they) wasn’t part of their plan: Smith was at seminary school in San Francisco back in 2008 when she got a call from her grandfather.
“I’ve got stomach cancer,” he told her. “I need to know what to do with the farm.”
The conversation spun Smith into nightmares for a week. She feared not only losing the sixth-generation homestead, but its legacy. She was close to her grandfather, spending summers working in the garden and preserving foods in the kitchen. While it surprised her to learn she cared so much, the clues were close by: her bedside table held two books that epitomized the early aughts locavore movement – The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver – and months earlier, she’d joined a community-supported agriculture (CSA) cropshare, connecting her more intimately with the farm that grew her veggies. She was curious if the movement had made it back to her region.
“I never thought I would go home. Because I was Appalachian, and if you want to make something of yourself, you leave. There was nothing here for us at the time that I was growing up. That was the narrative we all told ourselves,” said Smith from the upstairs office of her restaurant. They decided to try it for five years. If she ended up miserable, at least she’d given it a good go.
“There’s this innate part of me that I cannot live with any regret; it’s kind of how I’ve always made decisions,” Smith told me. “I didn’t want this to feel like this will be a core regret in my life.”
When they got there, the third of an acre garden had become a bit of a dump. A trio of parked cars rusted on top of it. She was tilling silverware and old rugs out of the soil. She started a CSA with about 25 members, but when that stalled, they quickly pivoted to managing the herd of her grandfather’s 100 lucrative beef cattle staring at her over the garden fence. She went with her cows to the local butcher and learned every part of the process; she bought heritage hogs no longer raised nearby. She met a group of local female farmers through the county extension agency, and together they started a farmer’s market. One of the local food boosters was a woman named Melissa, who eventually became Smith’s wife.
“I had in me this small business merchant DNA,” said Smith. She loved the community of people who visited her at the market. She started cooking the beef and pork so her customers could try the pricier meats, selling burgers and pork belly tacos. At Kroger, kids pointed at her and called her “the taco lady.” She sold out every weekend.
The attention caused two other food vendors to approach her and ask her to go in on a restaurant with them. Initially, she refused, but one day they pulled back the sheet rock hiding an old Wrigley’s Spearmint sign and convinced her to come check out the building. Across one half of the downtown room was the original eccentric marketing campaign from the chewing gum company founded in 1891; William Wrigley Jr., the company’s founder, had distributed promotional booklets that told the story of the Spearmen – small, elfin characters who wore monochromatic clothes and triangular hats. In Wrigley’s taproom, the titular character dons an orange cloke and cap, pointing towards a pack of gum near the front window.
It was bare bones, but Smith couldn’t say no. The historic sign, the high ceilings, the big open space for a long community table – it all felt right to her. She knew if she drove by later and saw someone else in charge, she’d regret it, and she couldn’t live with regrets.
“I walked in and I thought, oh, this is something special,” said Smith. It took a year to pull the restaurant together, and Smith had no formal training, but as they said, as an Appalachian agricultural family isolated in the hills, they’d been primed to learn to cook. Growing up, there were two restaurants in her hometown – The Ribeye, an old-school steakhouse with a glowing salad bar and steaks served sizzling in cast-iron skillets, and G&E Drive-In, a patio above the Cumberland River where burgers and fries were delivered by servers on roller-skates.
She said her family visited the establishments about once a month; all other farming, processing, canning, and cooking happened at home. She wanted her restaurant to embody the same aesthetic: local food, grown and harvested near the property. She buys meat from Whitley County, sources from five local farms, and grows her own garlic, peppers, tomatoes, and edible flowers for the taproom.
“Entertainment here is to make a big meal and sit around the table for hours telling stories,” said Smith. “That’s what I still try to create at the Wrigley.”
Today, she sees the space as a “table for all people.” A sign above the door says the Wrigley Taproom & Eatery “strives to CARE for and NURTURE our community in mind, body and spirit, one INSPIRED plate at a time.”
“No matter what, you are welcome here as long as you do not cause harm to anyone else,” said Smith. “I want to have a place of dialogue because I think that’s the only way we’re going to go forward. And it happens on a daily basis. We have totally different spectrums of people sitting right next to each other. And it’s beautiful.”
But it took a while for Smith to get to a place where she too could embody her full spectrum. When they left home initially for college, they didn’t go far, just across the state border to a small Christian university in East Tennessee. There, they majored in religious studies and after graduation, she moved to China for a three-year stint as a missionary under the Southern Baptist International Mission Board.
“Joining up as a missionary was probably part of me trying to save myself,” Smith reflected. She was eventually kicked out of the program because she confessed to having fallen in love with a fellow female-identifying missionary. The experience nearly destroyed her.. She moved out to San Francisco for seminary school, but she was conflicted about what came next. “I think I had more questions than I had answers,” she said.
The experience scarred her, and after she moved home, she was quiet about her relationship with Melissa. If they wanted to go on public dates, they’d head to bigger cities. In 2021, about six years after opening her restaurant, Smith put up a rainbow flag for the first time behind the bar during Pride month.
“I don’t know if I necessarily started this business out thinking we’d be a safety beacon,” said Smith. “But it became more and more clear to me, when my wife and I were going to Lexington or Knoxville or Louisville just to be on dates, that it was something I could foster in my own restaurant. If we need that, there might be a lot of others who might not have the access or ability to leave. So that became a lot more intentional.”
Still, she was nervous, and on July 1, she took the flag down and breathed a sigh of relief, thinking okay, they made it through. She and her team suffered no blowback. In 2022, she hung the Pride flag again and planned to remove it again, but her staff begged her to keep it up. She said part of her initial hesitation was mental, but she’s also lost friendships and experienced family strain due to her sexuality and her same-sex marriage.
But then, in 2023, legislation started changing, removing rights for transgender people in the LGBTQ+ community.
“It scared me,” said Smith. “I thought we were going backwards instead of forwards.”
For years, the restaurant had two single-use gender-neutral bathrooms, but Smith wanted to do more to make sure trans and nonbinary people knew they were welcome. So she changed the flag again, putting up an all-inclusive Rainbow flag that highlighted equality for the trans community and BIPOC folks that took up the brick wall behind the bar year-round.
“If I go down because I welcome trans men and women, I’m okay with it. I’ve also been here nine years, and I think I’ve proven a lot for myself and our community,” said Smith. “But the fear is there, everyday, that it could happen.”
Owning a restaurant and running a farm isn’t an easy combination. During the Covid-19 pandemic, as restaurants were forced to shutter their doors, Smith thought she’d lose Wrigley’s.
“It was like gasping for air everyday,” said Smith. “It was like someone had it out for us, the whole industry.”
Then, the 2021 floods hit, and tore down her fencing. She chose to sell most of her cattle instead of paying the $40,000 required to repair it. Then, the 2022 floods covered almost half her farm along the Cumberland River and washed away her four breedstock hogs: Dolly Porkton, Reba Bacontire, Hammy Wynette, and Porker Wagner (Though she’s not sure they’re all gone; half a year after the flood she was driving to Dollar General down the road from her house and saw Hammy Wynette in the cornfield chowing down).
Some days, she’s surprised the doors to Wrigely’s are still open, but she says she owes the success to her incredible staff, who she calls “salt of the earth people” and “the community that values us enough and our work and who we are that has kept us here.”
I don’t know how I caught lightning in a bottle, but I did.”
These days, Smith said she’s working on contentment, on settling into the life she’s built.
“Restaurateur and farmer, those are two very masochistic careers,” Smith told me. “The to-do list is forever.” But she wants to model a better work-life balance not only for herself but for her staff. She’s choosier on projects. She’s learning how to say no. She spends more of her days working for six to eight hours instead of sun up to sun down. More time with her wife. More board games. More weekends sitting on the porch over a two hour breakfast.
Wrigley’s is known not only for its inventive dishes – when we visited, they were celebrating Tiki Week over Corbin’s spring break, allowing parents who couldn’t travel to still experience an escape with rum-themed cocktails and mahi mahi on the menu – but also for its hospitality, for its community table, and for its tendency to lean into difficult conversations instead of gloss over them. Smith, a chatty, engaged listener, quick to laugh and grin, is perhaps the perfect host to bring that community to Corbin.
Across the bar from the rainbow flag, an American flag hangs above the gender-neutral bathrooms. Here, framing the fluorescent EXIT sign, Smith painted a phrase that perhaps embodies her take on a complex life: “Every EXIT is an entrance somewhere.”