As he prepares to celebrate 25 years of serving Birmingham diners in 2020, James Beard Award-winning chef Chris Hastings is more excited than ever about the future. For starters, Hastings and his wife Idie will celebrate a quarter century of culinary success with the new location of their iconic Birmingham restaurant, Hot and Hot Fish Club with an expansive new space in the city’s popular Lakeview / Pepper Place neighborhood.

As they prepare for the future, the duo is welcoming their son Zeb and daughter-in-law Molly into the family business. The young couple is working beside Hot and Hot’s founders to learn the business from the ground floor up.

Among the first lessons Hastings is imparting to the new generation of Hot and Hot Fish Club owner-operators — it truly takes a village to become a success. Back when the Hastings were poised to open Hot and Hot in the fall of 1995, the farm-to-table movement didn’t even have a name, and in the pre-internet era, building a network of local purveyors meant going business to business, one farm, one dairy at a time.

In addition to being named 'Best Chef: South' by the James Beard Foundation in 2012, Hastings notably beat celebrity chef Bobby Flay when he competed on Food Network’s “Iron Chef America” in 2012. With his wife Idie, Hastings published “The Hot and Hot Fish Club Cookbook: A Celebration of Food, Family and Traditions” via Running Press Publishers in 2009. Their culinary accomplishments, meanwhile, have been written about in the New York Times, USA Today, Garden & Gun, Southern Living, Food & Wine and more.

Hastings first honed his skills at the Johnson & Wales Culinary School in Providence, Rhode Island. After graduation, he moved to Birmingham — where he and Idie met — and worked for Frank Stitt as chef de cuisine of Highlands Bar & Grill. Later, he helped to open Stitt’s second restaurant Bottega. In 1989, the couple relocated to the Bay Area where Hastings worked under Bradley Ogden to open the Lark Creek Inn in Larkspur, California. In 1995, the couple returned home to Birmingham to display the culinary knowledge they had accrued with the debut of Hot and Hot Fish Club, the first farm-to-table restaurant east of the Mississippi.

The new, larger location of Hot and Hot Fish Club at Pepper Place is housed inside the old Martin Biscuit Building that is down the street from the Hastings’ other successful second restaurant Ovenbird, the live-fire, small plates-focused concept the couple opened in 2015 and a thriving catering and consulting business. Hastings says the key to success is building a talented team.

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