Interview with The Chef, Jimmy Noble

The chef is in the kitchen.

Actually, I'm in an office with a chef, Chef Jimmy Noble, one of my favorite people on this planet. He loves Jesus. He's a pastor. He's a chef. He's an entrepreneur.

I can't even list all the things. I don't even know how someone would even introduce you if you were the keynote speaker, Chef Jimmy Noble, but how do you introduce yourself? Who is Jimmy Noble? It's me. I'm Jimmy Noble.

That's all I am. I eat at your restaurants. You've got these coffee shops. We're in North Carolina. We're actually in Charlotte, North Carolina. This is kind of your office, but you spend a lot of time at your restaurants, and you spend even more time at a place that's called the Dream Center right here where God's doing some great things here. That's really a passion of yours, isn't it? Absolutely.

This is Charlotte Mecklenburg Dream Center here in Charlotte, right across the street from the Noble Smoke BBQ Restaurant. I'm kind of annoyed. These guys, I'm driving down the road. They've got to sign up. We'll work for food, or I'm a Vietnam vet, or give me some free money.

I'm struggling, single mom, blah, blah, blah. While I'm sitting there maybe annoyed at them, Jimmy Noble's inviting them to come worship. Talk about what God's doing there.

Give us a little maybe attitude adjustment, even for Stu here. Well, I mean, the question, some of those guys are in a racket. They make pretty good money, but you don't know who they are.

I wouldn't ever have that money. I always hand out food. Our ministry is taking food to folks that need it. We'll see these guys out on the streets, but we also see them uptown or in our places. They'll come in for Bible study. We'll pick them up from the men's shelters and some of the tough hotels in town. We pick them up on Sunday mornings and take them to church. We try to reach them and find out where they are and then help them meet the needs they've gotten.

Just really teach them to trust God for the problems they have in life. I love that. You're a hard guy to track down.

It took us a while just to be able to sit down. Of course, I've known you for years. We've eaten at your restaurants for years. We love Noble's Grill, Rooster's, Bossy Beulah's.

These are all restaurants that if you're ever anywhere in the 704, Charlotte, if you're anywhere in the 336, Winston-Salem, Winston-Greensboro, High Point area, you've got to go to one of these places. It's unbelievable. It's delicious. There's an excellence there. There's a stewardship there. It spills over into your ministry as you preach on Sunday mornings. You prepare sermons at this Dream Center.

But tracking down is tough because they'll say, well, he's doing prayer meeting today. He's at the King's Kitchen. There's literally a place in downtown Charlotte called the King's Kitchen.

I remember when I got married. We closed it in December. From a stewardship perspective, downtown never really recovered like the rest of the party, Charlotte did. I can either raise money for operations, which would be okay, but it'd be another $100,000, $200,000 a year, or I can take that and do everything that we were doing through the King's Kitchen, through the Dream Center now. The King's Kitchen served its purpose. It helped us launch the church. It helped us launch the Dream Center.

Once we get built out, we bought about 13 acres. We're going to put housing for about 200 or 300 on it and do a Bible and discipleship program for people, a recovery program. There'll be a kitchen that serves everybody. We'll call it the King's Kitchen. It's not going away.

It's just not going to be uptown. Just a season of time. I remember praying with you in that King's Kitchen. I remember a bunch of guys waiting in the lobby so you and I could finish our meeting about advertising and stuff in our own time of prayer, your own mentor and me.

You go out and lead them in a Bible study in downtown Charlotte. Now this Dream Center, now you're building a whole facility which is exciting. Jimmy Noble, what drives this passion to do excellence with these restaurants, so many wonderful concepts, but also with this ministry of the Dream Center? Tell us what drives your heart with the Lord and all that. Well, before I got in ministry, I was really passionate about food and serving people. Ministry and restaurants, they're parallel a lot. If you don't like serving people, you'll not be either one of those. The restaurant business, if you don't want to serve people, this is the wrong thing to get in because it's not about us anymore.

Even as a chef, it's not about us. It's about taking care of people. Ministry is the same thing.

It's just running a little bit over. It's more the natural realm than the spiritual realm. The ministry is more spiritual.

Restaurant is more natural, but it's the same thing. We're reaching out to help other people. Now, the same passion that we had to do great food in the restaurant with great food and wine and pairings and stuff, it's the same spirit of excellence I want to do in the ministry side. When we do food ministry, we're not using soup kitchen food.

We're using food and ingredients that we have in our restaurants, so it's similar food that we serve in our restaurants. We really probably more than drives anything else is for people to find hope who don't think they have any hope. Some people are giving up on life, and there's a scripture in Proverbs that says, hope deferred makes a heart sick. The Bible definition for hope is not wishful thinking, but it's a joyful intense expectation of good. God's promises meet that need.

They give them hope when there is no hope. My wife and I went through some tough times in our life, and people began to bring the gospel to us. I said, this sounds too good to be true, but if it is, I know this. I can prove it for myself. I'll get myself in the word of God.

I found that it was better than I thought. I wanted to share that whatever's been given, you're supposed to give away. I wanted people to know the truth about the kingdom. A lot of people know about your restaurants.

Some people know about how some of your restaurants came to being and the really cool stories inspired by your grandma, you know, Bossy Beulah's and such. How did you come to know the Lord? Tell us your spiritual journey to Christ. I can't go back in my life and find out when I didn't believe in Jesus Christ because my dad's dad was a Pentecostal holiness preacher. He got miraculously healed when he was a kid and caught into ministry but didn't want to do it because he stuttered but the first time he preached he quit.

He stuttered and never did again. My mom was raised pilgrim holiness, so when my parents got married, they went to First Methodist Church in High Point, a little bit quieter place, nicer, easier, 11 o'clock to 12 o'clock out for lunch. We went kind of back to the old ways of our grandparents, particularly my Pentecostal holiness grandfather. All our life, we believed in Jesus. Now, was he Lord of our life?

There's a big question, Martin. When we got married, my wife and I started going back to church again. Then, as we started having families and we went through some really tough times, we turned to God because there's no place else to turn. We were faced with impossible situations and we found out that with God, nothing's impossible. If you can believe and you get to believe what he says, which is where your hope comes from, nothing's impossible. We found out nothing's impossible no matter what you face. I wanted to spend the rest of my life telling people, don't give up because God's got a promise for you.

Just because he gives you a promise doesn't mean it's come to pass. You're going to have to do something about it. How does that faith translate into business? In your case, the restaurant business and so many things you're doing. You've got multiple locations. You've got great concepts.

We haven't even started talking about Noble Smoke. That's some of the best barbecue I've ever put in my mouth right here in Charlotte. Our goal there was to be among the best barbecue restaurants in the Southeast.

Not the best, but among the best because there's a lot of good guys out there. We wanted to do it halfway away. We wanted to do the best quality barbecue we could. We studied brisket and went to Texas back in 15 or 16. We really wanted to hone in on it.

We took vegetables that my grandparents would serve me and put them there. We have a lot of sides. We just wanted to produce great barbecue.

It's really the same passion that our whole team has. If you're going to do something, do the best you can. Do this unto God.

Talk about that, how your faith affects influences, how your faith is fleshed out in the business that you're doing every day. The restaurant business, it's got to be tough. You've got a lot of hiring. You've got a lot of firing. You've got a lot of customers. You've got a lot of tables to turn. You've got a lot of vendors and suppliers. You've got a lot of quality.

You've got a perishable good on top of that. Talk about how your faith in the Lord has influenced that. Well, I'll say this. I'm in the people business. We just happen to serve food. It really is a tough business. You really have to care about it.

You really have to want to serve it. There are some of these projects now, and I give God credit for them. He showed me things.

Then I put them down on paper. Roosters was a download from God. Bossy Beulah's was one. We were looking at Noble Smoke. There was a little building beside it.

Two people looked at it and turned it down. I said, I think I know what we can do with it. We had an Aunt Butte. I had to call her Butte because somebody owned the name Butte. She was our great aunt. She would fry chicken for us.

We'd say Butte tomorrow after church. Would you fry us chicken? She said, yes. We always loved her chicken. She was my great aunt. She was my granddaddy's sister. It was just a throwback to her and my family. Noble Smoke, I walked in the building. I knew exactly what I wanted because God had showed it to me already. He just shows me things. Roosters, I sat in my computer one day and just typed it out.

He just downloaded it to me what to do. There's a scripture in Proverbs, I think it's Proverbs 23. This is a passing translation. It says, wise people are builders. They build families, businesses and communities.

Through intelligence and insight, their enterprises are established and they're endured. God is into business. He's into growth. I mean, look at what everything He's playing on this earth.

It just grows if you leave it alone. God's into growth. He's into creation. If you dream with God, you give Him creative license. It's just so cool the projects that we have of new things coming up we've not done before. I mean, we're taking Cobain, making it into a brass arena, a couple new projects where it's going to be a full service restaurant night.

These are things He just showed me. I've always cared about the food. I've always cared about the passion of it and just put it together on paper. I don't know if I can find it, but I drew the smokehouse probably two or three years on a piece of grid paper, that quarter inch grid paper.

I knew exactly what it looked like before I even found the building we found. They call him the chef. That's the voice of Jimmy Noble, longtime friend. He loves Jesus. He loves good food. Aren't you glad for these restaurants?

Those of you who are getting FOMO, our listeners in Salt Lake or across all of our other affiliates that are brave enough to carry this show, you need to come. Now you know another reason you need to come to North Carolina, to go to Noble Smoke. List off all the restaurants.

I'm going to mess it up. Listen to all the restaurants that God's blessed you with. You know them. They're your babies.

Go ahead. This is about 14 or 15 right now and some more on the way and some other new projects on the way, but right now we have what was originally the original Roosters was Noble's Grill in Winston-Salem. We had Nobles, a restaurant in J.

Basil Noble and High Point. When we went to Winston, we wanted a big casual place like Roosters is and we called it Noble's Grill, which meant more casual, but everybody wanted to be high end. So eventually we changed it to somebody walked in and said, this smells like Roosters in here.

So this was the original Rooster. So we have Rooster's Wood-Fired Kitchen, Bossy Bula's Chicken Shack. The Jimmy is an Italian, Mediterranean influenced restaurant here in town. We got a steakhouse in our head getting ready to come out one day. Noble's Smoke, of course, our barbecue place. Copan is our retail bakery slash restaurant and we're getting ready.

We're working on today. We're working on a project. We're building a 10,000 square foot production facility just for the bakery. The whole point about it, I want the bread and if it takes all that to get it, then I'm going for it. But I really want this Italian, I mean not Italian, but French hearth, naturally fermented organic bread, which here's an unusual stat. Folks that can eat bread in Europe that can't eat American bread can eat this bread because it's all natural, all organic. It's natural fermentation. We don't add yeast. It just does it on its own.

It's like a two or three day process and actually a three or four day process. And that is the reason we do the whole thing. And it's been decades. One of the first experiences I had in your restaurant, as you and I were kind of getting closer early on, was that olive oil. Oh my soul. Now olive oil ain't just for healing. It's for eating. And you dip that Rooster's or Noble's bread or Copain Bakery bread into his olive oil. But I looked at the back of the bottle and it had James 5 on there.

And I said, I got to meet this cat. And I think so were the back of the day. We were importing olive oil from Tuscany. I think some of the world's best produced olive oil comes from Tuscany.

We're not importing it right now. I'd love to get back into doing that. But we were bringing this olive oil in and it's the reason I came to Charlotte to sell Dean and DeLuca. And I got down there and said, man, there's a, there's a lot of stuff going on down here in Charlotte.

So we were fully entrenched in the, in the restaurant industry and Winston-Salem, Winston-Salem, Greensboro, and High Point where we started. But it's funny when we went back to open Copan, one of the local writers said, well, this outsider can make it here with all these bakeries we have in town. I said, girl, I was making bread in Gilroy County before you were born. Even talking about I'm from here. I'm not coming from outside. This is our place.

You know, our bakery started in Greensboro, 1984 on Davie street, downtown. Unbelievable. Yeah. Just a blessing. Hey, thank you for the ministry and the encouragement.

Now the Bible is an amazing book. Obviously you preach from it every week at the dream center. I want to ask you two questions as we close. I want you to tell us how listeners can support the dream center. A lot of businesses have come alongside Carolina Panther guys and athletes here and other people have supported. How can people support and pray for the ministry of the dream center?

And then I'm going to ask you your favorite Bible verse after that. Oh, that's a great question. You can go to our website. You can go to any of our restaurants and go to the bottom. You'll see the dream center and Charlotte Mecklenburg dream center or dream center church. You can always donate there too, but there's a CLTDC.org is a website for Charlotte Mecklenburg dream center.

Our dream center church is dream center church CLT. And then you can get involved and help us. I mean, we need human capital and financial capital.

We're getting ready. We're starting on a, we're five men into a 30 or $40 million project. We're doing these housing and putting this a discipleship recovery program together to get folks off the street. So we need a lot of help and nothing good has ever happened by one person by themselves.

So we can use your help, even financial capital and human capital, because we have probably 400, 500 volunteer slots every week. We have something going on every day in the ministry. And we did it all out of King's kitchen. And just to a few years ago, we didn't have a building.

We were a church without walls cause we literally did not have any walls, but so it's, it's a great place to plug in. And also we're doing this other project called 10 million meals to go. We figured out that since the ministry in 2001, which is a radio mission, I was involved with you first because our radio broadcast was on your air on your radio stations. And we were on the air for 12 years and we figured those restaurants and our restaurants and our ministry could part together, feed the poor, which became 2001. They did the first one we did at Thanksgiving and High Point.

We invited whoever wanted to come in from the tough part of town. Since that time, we've, we realized we've fed about a million people that we've donated meals to. And then I went back and figured out that since 83, when we opened in High Point, we probably fed 10 million people. So our goal became 10 million meals to go.

So every restaurant you come in, you can look on your check and you can add five or 10, it's $5 a meal will cover the food. We give everybody an opportunity to give back. Now everybody agrees with our doctrine, but they surely understand that people who are hungry need to be fed. So even if you're not a strong believer, you should get involved to help people.

You can help take care of the widows and the poor. Now my favorite scripture is the one that radically changed my life. And when we're going through some tough things in our life, we began to read and somebody told me, I didn't believe it, but I went and looked at it. And I'll back up to verse 11 and Phillip said, Lord, just show us the Father would be satisfied. And Jesus has given his last instructions to his disciples before he goes to the cross. And he says, don't you believe the Father and Phillip said, Lord, just show us the Father and there will be suffice.

He said, Phillip, how long have I been with you? If you've seen me, you have seen the Father. How can you say show us the Father? Don't you believe the Father is living in me and I'm living in him? The words I speak are not my own, but they come from my Father who lives in me, lives in me and performs his miracles, signs and wonders through me. Don't you believe I live as one with my Father and he lives as one with me and not at least believe me for the miracles you see me do. And then he said this, and if you believe on me, these miracles, signs and wonders that I do, you do and greater works in these you do because they go to be my Father. And whenever you ask my name, that will do that the Father may be glorified the Son. But John 14, 12 is usually how I sign most of my donation thank you letters. And it says, Jesus said, if you believe on me, the works I do, you do. Now you can give me all the doctrine you want, but when Jesus said something that's in red, it's what he said and it's true.

We don't see it taking place and it's my heart and desire for we become the church that Jesus called us to be, to believe and do what he said do. Well, you heard it from the chef. He's cooking up food and he's serving up spiritual food at the Dream Center in Charlotte. Thanks for your ministry. Thanks for being encouraging me, man. You're a blessing. God bless you. Thank you too.