PROFILES | TENNESSEE
Nate and Jessica Henssler Are Building a Place at the Table
At Amelia Gene’s in Memphis, his decades in the kitchen and her belief in hospitality come together over dinner.
By Eric Barton | Sept. 25, 2026
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.
At 17, Nate Henssler was stacking wood and tending the stove that heated his family’s New Hampshire home. His mother was chronically ill, and his father’s job kept him away during the week.
A half a continent away, Jessica Henssler had learned a different household routine at her grandparents’ home in Oxford, Ohio. Dinner was at five, everyone sat down, and whatever had happened that day could wait until after the meal.
Both came to understand something defining in their early days, something that would shape what they do now: Caring for the people around you is just something you do. Jessica defines it this way: “When I look back now, through all of that uncertainty, there was always a table to come home to.”
Today, the couple lead Amelia Gene’s, the Memphis restaurant where Nate is executive chef and managing partner and Jessica is general manager. He knows what a dish needs and what it can do without. She knows the details that make guests and employees feel looked after. The staff gathers for a meal before service, a practice Nate considered essential when planning the restaurant.
Nate’s education began in front of the television. Julia Child made cooking look like fun, even when things went sideways. His first restaurant job taught him what a pinch of salt could do. He learned to keep tasting for balance.
At home, his mother’s illness brought on responsibilities no cooking show could prepare him for. He dreaded the work but saw his family draw closer. “I realized, as my mother’s health worsened, that life is finite,” he says. “I was glad to take care of the woman who selflessly cared for my brother and I as children.”
Jessica’s earliest food memories come from her Thai mother’s kitchen near Fort Bragg, North Carolina. She watched her mother pound garlic, chiles, and lime in a mortar and pestle. Pad krapao, nam prik, and som tam appeared at home, while larger gatherings brought together Thai and other Asian military families, including women caring for children while their husbands were deployed.
In second grade, Jessica went to live with her grandparents in Ohio. She was suddenly the only Asian child in her classroom, with her mother gone and her father traveling overseas with the military. The food changed, but dinner together did not. Her grandparents taught her to keep going and show up for people.
Nate took the professional cooking route, starting at a New Hampshire bed-and-breakfast and attending the New England Culinary Institute in Vermont. Work followed with Christopher Gross in Phoenix and Michael Mina in Las Vegas and the San Francisco area. Then he spent four months traveling, cooking, and eating through India. He learned about naan, curry, vegetarian cooking, and his hosts’ generosity. “I fell in love with the culture of sharing everything that was available,” he says. He returned to Las Vegas with a changed palate and a clearer idea of how good ingredients could carry a dish.
After more than six years with Michael Mina’s organization, Nate was offered an executive chef position. He turned it down, wanting a different perspective, and joined Martin Heierling to open Sensi in Las Vegas in 2004. Heierling’s fermented pickles, Japanese techniques, and assertive flavors gave Nate another way to think about balance. Nate later led the kitchen at Tao in Las Vegas, held executive chef roles with Joe’s Seafood, Prime Steak & Stone Crab, and became a chef and partner with Chicago’s Fifty/50 Restaurant Group, where his work included Portsmith.
Through those moves, he carried a warning from fellow chef Mark LoRusso: “That’s two different dishes on the same plate, Henssler.” At Amelia Gene’s, Nate still asks himself what a dish is trying to say. He weighs the central ingredient, the grill’s charcoal flavor, whether a sauce needs acid or something pickled, and how the dish will work during service.
Jessica’s path through hospitality took a sharp turn when the pandemic shut down Chicago events. Repeated furloughs sent her into tech sales while she worked toward an MBA focused on growth and innovation and marketing. The job paid the bills, but she missed restaurants and the people in them. She also came away with firm ideas about leadership after watching hospitality workers navigate pay cuts and uncertainty. “I learned that a company can talk all day about culture and loyalty, but you really find out what those words mean when things get difficult,” she says.
Graduate school taught her to examine how small changes repeated throughout a day affect service. Her wine training reinforced a simpler principle. She can explain why a bottle ought to work with dinner, but the guest has to want to drink it. Knowledge, in her view, is useful when it makes someone comfortable.
Nate joined Carlisle Restaurant Group in 2022 to develop Amelia Gene’s, which opened the following year inside a former ironworks and machine shop. Jessica became its general manager in 2024. Remnants of the old machinery remain part of the design. Their work happens in smaller moments: a cook learning when to stop adding to a plate, a server learning when to step back from a table, and colleagues eating together before guests arrive.
Jessica is proudest of watching an unsure employee grow confident enough to teach someone else. Nate talks about promoting his cooks and passing more responsibility to sous chef Jonathan Lazo. Both want to keep building the restaurant.
Jessica grew up knowing there would be dinner at five. Nate learned to tend a fire because his family needed the heat. Neither could have known those routines would follow them into a restaurant in Memphis, where the staff eats together before going to work and care is measured in what people do for one another, every day.
The Inaugural Nashville Michelin Guide (Fixed)
Michelin got a lot right in its inaugural guide. But it wasn’t perfect. Here are the star-worthy restaurants you need to know in Nashville.
Maui: Upcountry Farms to Chef's Tasting Menus
Start near Kahului Airport, climb into Upcountry, and finish along the Wailea coast with 12 restaurants that explain how Maui eats now.
