Jerry Slater was born in Buffalo, West Virginia and moved to Indiana when he was eight. After taking a year off after high school and working construction with his father, he attended Purdue University Northwest in Hammond, Indiana, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in literature with a minor in philosophy. After considering a PhD, he decided academia was not for him. He found joy working in restaurants in college, drawn to the focus on the aesthetic, the temporal, and the business of making people happy.
While working at a restaurant in Miller Beach, in Gary, Indiana, he told the chef/owner that he wanted to be the general manager, and the owner obliged. After managing the restaurant for a year, Jerry got his first and only manicure to interview at an upscale place called Charlie Trotter’s. He got the job. A year later, he moved to Louisville, KY with his partner at the time. After seven years in Kentucky, Jerry took an offer in Atlanta helping to open restaurants at Hartsfield-Jackson Airport — including One Flew South and Ludacris’ Chicken and Beer. In Atlanta, Jerry met his wife Krista (“the best thing about Atlanta”), and opened a bar and restaurant. After 10 years there, Jerry and Krista moved to Athens, where his parents had moved shortly after he left for college. He fell in love with Athens all over again.
Jerry and Krista opened The Expat, a neighborhood bistro, in 2018. Athens restaurateur Peter Dale once told him, “everything in Athens takes two years to establish itself.” And he was right. The Expat began to hit its stride in early 2020, around the same time that Jerry and Krista signed the lease on what would become The Lark Winespace, a wine bar and retail shop. Then, as Jerry says, “all hell broke loose.” During the height of COVID, the Slaters adapted, offering take-home meal kits at The Expat. “I do feel it endeared us to the neighborhood,” Jerry says.
In 2022, the couple opened Slater’s Steakhouse, and then Nighthawks Lounge in 2023. “People ask me what I’m going to do next, and Krista tells me it’s like my Air Jordan problem— if I want another pair, I need to get rid of one.”
Outside of his laundry list of hospitality ventures, Jerry writes a bi-monthly wine and spirits column with Krista in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The two live in Cobbham with their cats, Two Dubs and Chan.
What do you love most about the work that you do?
I definitely think it’s interacting with people. I have an uncontrollable urge to make people happy. I joked one time with my friend Todd on his podcast that I was a misanthrope with an unnecessary desire to make people happy. I heard a comedian the other day (maybe Marc Maron?) who was talking about how he loves individual people, but people as a whole are another story.
What do you like to do in and around Athens?
I like to cook at home a lot. Krista and I remodeled this old house on Hill street which we’ve been in for about a year now. And we kind of made our dream kitchen where we stand around the island and talk and cook and listen to music, and occasionally when we have time we’ll host friends. We both used to run a lot to kind of keep the brain calm, but now as I’ve gotten older my doctor recommended not running as much. Now I’m doing this thing called rucking, which feels weird to even say. Basically I do a lot of walking. I really love the Greenway and the trails around Athens. We like to hit the parks and get around that way. I’ve run the AthHalf four times, as well.
If you could travel anywhere in the world right now, where would you go and why?
Krista and I travel for food, but also art. And I haven’t been to Paris. People’s opinions are it’s overplayed, or, it’s underplayed, or, you should skip it and go to Spain. But if someone gave me a plane ticket to anywhere right now, I’d say Paris.
If you could see any band or musician, dead or alive, who would you see and where?
It would involve John Coltrane, somewhere in lower Manhattan in the late ’50s.
What advice would you give to your younger self?
I might’ve said to be a little more career-oriented and less seat-of-my-pants. I went through the world on a lot of instinct versus plan. But that would be the only thing… I like my life a lot.
Do you have a favorite book?
One of the things I really got into as a young person, and that got me into literature, was John Steinbeck. While I think it might seem old fashioned, there was a sort of moral compass to his writing that I think went out of vogue for a little bit, but might have a renaissance soon. I think my favorite book is East of Eden. I even have the timshel tattoo from that book — It sort of means, “we make our own choices, so we must make them wisely.”
The most recent book that really struck me, because I grew up around Chicago and stuff, is the book The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai, about the AIDS epidemic and art and the lovely city of Chicago.
Do you have a favorite movie?
I have two that stick in my head a lot. I really like Léon: The Professional. As a young person it sort of resonated. Jean Reno as an assassin. But I worry the more pretentious but truer answer is the movie by Akira Kurosawa called Dreams. It’s these vignettes of a person’s life, from the moment where he sees a fox’s wedding and his mom says he can’t come back home now, to him stepping into a Van Gogh painting and seeing Martin Scorsese as Van Gogh. It’s all these vignettes woven together..
If you could put any message on a billboard, what would it say?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. With my interest in politics and all that. I think kindness and love and empathy are really underestimated right now. It’s not a weakness, it’s actually what we need. So maybe, “What’s so Funny ‘Bout Peace, Love and Understanding?”
If you could have lunch with anyone dead or alive, who would it be?
You know, there’s questions like this I read in the New York Times Books section every week, like who you’d gather for a dinner party. But… I just need my mom. I just want to have lunch with my mom again. Somewhere that makes her happy, where it wouldn’t matter about me.
Funny story: one time — you know, I’ve been on Bobby Flay’s show, I’ve been on TV in Louisville with the derby, done all this stuff, been quoted in USA Today. I’ve had some recognition, and I’m really grateful for it. But it never seemed to break through for my mom. And then we went to lunch at Last Resort. And Jaamy [the owner], I’d see him at all these wine tastings in Atlanta back in the day and I’d tell him how much I love his place and how my parents live out there. One day I took my mom to Last Resort. and we’re having lunch, and he comped our lunch. Just like, the industry thing that restaurateurs do for each other. But you would’ve thought I was a lottery winner that day in my mom’s eyes.
What three words or phrases come to mind when you think of the word home?
Food, love, and a sense of security.
