Credit Karmataun Productions
NORTH CAROLINA
Chef Kendall Moore Comes Home to Charlotte with Spaghett, Blending Carolina Ingredients and Italian Style
Written by Eric Barton | July 24, 2025
AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.
Kendall Moore didn’t start cooking because of some childhood dream of becoming a chef.
He started because his mom got sick. “I started cooking just to get food on the table,” he told me. “But eventually fell in love with how powerful it felt to nurture something.”
It was 2010, and his grandma had moved down from Ohio to help care for the family. Moore took over the kitchen duties and found, somewhat to his surprise, that he was good at it. His mom praised how he could make anything out of whatever they had in the pantry. That early resourcefulness still defines his cooking today, now as the executive chef at Spaghett, the newest restaurant from Irreverently Refined Hospitality, which opened this summer in Charlotte’s historic Fourth Ward.
Potato scarpino, credit Karmataun Productions
Moore’s path from family cook to chef wound through Charleston, where he studied hospitality and tourism management at the College of Charleston. He nearly walked away from it all after a class on food and religion reshaped how he thought about his role in the food chain. “We should re-approach our thoughts that we’re not masters of the world but a part of a greater thing,” he said. For a while, he considered dropping out to become a farmer. The school had a plot-to-table program where students could rent a small piece of land, and Moore became obsessed with the idea of growing what he’d one day cook.
That fascination with the natural process of food still drives his cooking, but these days it plays out in a far more refined way—on plates of housemade pasta and heirloom vegetables that nod to both Southern roots and Italian traditions. Spaghett, which he runs alongside James Beard Award finalist Sam Hart and beverage director Amanda Britton, aims to do exactly that: celebrate Carolinian ingredients through an Italian lens.
Kendall Moore, credit Jonathan Elyea
What that looks like on the menu changes with the seasons—and sometimes with the deliveries. One recent dish came together when a shipment of red beets arrived unexpectedly large. Moore turned it into a chilled beet salad with roasted carrots rubbed in espresso. “When cooked, the liquid from the espresso carrots basically turned into a red-eye gravy,” he said. A Southern classic, reimagined and modernized.
Amanda Britton, credit Jonathan Elyea
Ricotta gnocchi arrabbiata, credit Karmataun Productions
“I approach the way we build our plates from the view of how is the guest going to best receive the message we’re trying to convey,” Moore said. That message? Local ingredients matter. Celebrate them. Taste them. Appreciate where they come from. That’s why the front-of-house staff spends time in the kitchen learning about the ingredients and how they’re prepped, so they can tell the story behind each dish.
The restaurant itself feels equally intentional. Housed in the 19th-century Young-Morrison House, Spaghett is intimate and unfussy—44 seats, three dining rooms, a six-seat bar, and a patio still to come. Inside, it’s all vibrant green walls, floral wallpaper, and artwork from local artists. The cocktail list, designed by Britton, leans playful (including their namesake Spaghett: Miller High Life, Aperol, and citrus), but it shares the same reverence for regional ingredients as the kitchen.
For Moore, the opening of Spaghett marks a kind of homecoming. “Every time I came back Charlotte truly felt like home,” he said. “I’m celebrating and falling back in love with my roots.” His brother, also a chef, lives in the city, and Moore likes being closer to family again.
High LIfe Cocktail, credit Jonathan Elyea
When he’s not in the kitchen, Moore and his fiancé take their dog on long walks at Mallard Creek Park—the same zip code he grew up in. They grab coffee at local spots like Hex, Under Current, and Night Swim. He doesn’t drink anymore, but that hasn’t stopped him from joining trivia nights at Resident Culture Brewing.
It’s a life, and a menu, that circles back to something he told me about those early days in the kitchen: “It made me enjoy more types of food than I originally thought since I could prepare them however I wanted.” Now, at Spaghett, he’s preparing them his way—and finally, at home.
