The kitchen at Southwood Kitchen has operated in the black since the day it opened, survived a pandemic on takeout meals and gift-card loyalty, and earned a visit from Guy Fieri’s television crew. The chef behind it, Jeremiah Matthews, got there by way of a ski town in Wyoming, a three-star Michelin kitchen in Paris, and a decade of cooking over campfires in the Wyoming backcountry.
The route matters, because nothing about Matthews’ career was planned. “This is the longest time I’ve spent in one place,” he says of the coastal Alabama home he finally settled in — and the restaurants it now holds.
Three Jobs at Rupert’s
Matthews was born in Augusta, Maine, moved to Fairhope at seven, left for the Destin area in the eighth grade, and came back after high school. In 1994, he worked at Rupert’s on Church Street in Fairhope alongside two other young men — one of whom he would later learn was the nephew of a Scenic 98 Coastal columnist. All three ended up in the restaurant business for good.
After a three-year run with Ruby Tuesday, Matthews tried boat rigging, landscaping and construction, disliked all three, and took his father’s advice: culinary school. He chose Paul Smith’s College in the Adirondacks of upstate New York — a campus of under a thousand students, half hospitality and half forestry — and capped his studies with a six-month external program in France, working in two three-star Michelin restaurants including L’Arpège in Paris, where chef Alain Passard had famously stripped all meat from a three-star menu in 1998 and kept the rating. “I would consider Alain Passard one of the top 10 to 15 chefs in the world,” Matthews says.
From the Hyatt to the Dude Ranch
Home again, Matthews ran kitchens at the Fairhope Pub (now Bone and Barrel) and The Colony Grill (now Tamara’s) with a small ownership stake. In 2005 he was recruited to the Riverview Plaza in Mobile with a plan to become executive chef at the renovated Battle House — but construction delays pushed him to Naman’s Catering and the Naman’s Midtown Market, which the recession then closed. So he went to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and spent three years as a backcountry cook for the Spotted Horse Dude Ranch on the Hoback River — no vehicles allowed on the national forest land, cooking breakfast, lunch and dinner for six to eight guests on overnight camping trips, then shifting to hunting groups each fall. “I loved it and still go back to visit occasionally.”
Jesse’s, Then Southwood
Back on the Gulf Coast, a judging invitation to the Oyster Cook-Off at The Hangout led to a consulting job resurrecting Jesse’s Restaurant in Magnolia Springs for owners Steve and Angie Coltharp. A few years later, Harry Johnson — the salvage king whose recovered windows and doors line the Eastern Shore’s best interiors — recruited Matthews to take over Rosie’s Grill in Daphne. He left Jesse’s on July 3, 2017, and opened Southwood Kitchen on August 25, 2017.
The restaurant, styled as casual fine dining on US 98, has never posted a losing month. When the pandemic hit, the kitchen pivoted to takeout meals that traveled well, and customers answered with gift-card purchases that kept the lights on. When restrictions lifted, business came back bigger — and Matthews solved the classic waitlist problem by opening southbar next door in the old Record Bar space. It opens at 3 p.m., when Southwood’s lunch ends, serving appetizers and burgers until the full dinner menu takes over at 5. The gutted interior features a shiplap wall milled from wood recovered from the old Fairhope High School gym. No reservations, no children, open until midnight.
What’s Next
Matthews bought the old Mexican restaurant building at Fly Creek in Fairhope in 2019 — then watched COVID and Hurricane Sally knock out every window before a nine-month wait for replacements — and envisions an upscale Latin concept there built on cilantro, lime, chilies, avocado and a classic mole. He is also a partner in the revival of Ben’s Jr.’s Bar-B-Que on Fairhope’s North Section Street, a project with Will Fusaiotti of Foosackley’s. Bar director Drew Burroughs, whom Matthews calls the area’s best mixologist, handles the cocktail programs at both Daphne spots.
Through it all, the kitchen has held together: many of his cooks and servers have stayed five years or more, and his oldest child, Noah, is a shift leader at Southwood. The stress test, he says, is the same as ever — housing costs that push half his staff to commute from Mobile, and growth that is good for business but hard on the small-town feel he grew up with. “We live in an area where people can afford to support local business,” he says. “I just hope we can maintain that small-town atmosphere that drew us all here in the first place.”