Cooking at the library with Jasmen Richmond

If you’re like most people we talk to, you read the title of this piece and said, “cooking? In the library?!” It’s not a typo or gotcha journalism; it’s a genuine offering at our Memphis Public Libraries. For those of you lucky enough to consider Raleigh Library your home branch, you know that, hidden upstairs, is a beautiful, fully functioning demonstration kitchen.

When the Memphis Public Libraries and architects conceived the new Raleigh Library, they hoped to make the demo kitchen a key feature of the branch’s programming. Unfortunately, like many enterprises that year, Raleigh’s opening in December 2020 meant programming got off to a slow start. In the last few years, the Raleigh staff - led by the fearless and delightful Angela Adams - have set their sights on highlighting this truly unique space.

In that vein, the Raleigh staff asked the Library Foundation to secure a chef/culinary artist for the Innovators in Residence program.1 When the MPL and MLF staff were reviewing applications, we knew Chef Jasmen Richmond would be the perfect fit. Her mission to help Memphians, especially those in Raleigh, understand what it takes to be an entrepreneur and/or in the food industry is exactly in line with what MPL hopes to offer:

My view is that, if I’m someone who comes to the Raleigh Library to learn about business, I want to know, ‘What are the resources specifically in Raleigh that can help me support my food business?’ So essentially, I want it to be like a one-stop shop where you’re either learning how to cook, creating a business, or getting support for your business.

Before applying to be an Innovator, Jasmen worked for a non-profit, teaching nutrition education, and gave cooking demonstrations and speaking engagements. Additionally, she owned her own vegan food service business focused on catering and meal prep for festivals. “I was the first black owned vegan business to do Memphis in May. I’ve done all of the Memphis vegan festivals. So, it’s been a journey.”

While Jasmen’s career experience readied her for the Innovator experience, it was her connection to the Raleigh community itself that effectually motivated her application:

I’m originally from Knoxville. We moved to [Raleigh] in 2010. So when we first moved to Raleigh, I told my mom, I said, “Why do you have us in the country?” Because we came from the back roads and I didn’t even see any McDonald’s or anything! I’m in 11th grade at that time, I need some fast food. So she was, like, “Just wait!”

When we finally came across Austin Peay, I finally saw everything: McDonald’s, and then the mall, all the stuff. So I’m, like, “Okay, we’re good. You picked a nice location.” Then in 2014, I went to the military, came back home, and everything just kind of transitioned. It wasn’t the Raleigh Mall anymore. They just started renovating.

So Raleigh has been my home away from home, but I also want to be a part of the change that’s in Raleigh. I also want to bring a piece of my purpose to individuals in Raleigh. I definitely want to impact all of Memphis, but that’s where I am most of the time, so why not just leave your mark on where you are and work on the other areas sooner or later?

What is most impressive about Jasmen is the clarity of her mission. She talks about Raleigh as someone who knows the neighborhood not just as a place, but as lived-in memory: the long drives down back roads, the revelation of Austin Peay’s bright signage, the sense that this place, with all its transitions, could still feel like home.

For Jasmen, the Innovator role is less a title and more a throughline: a way to braid together food, entrepreneurship, community care, and the kind of practical knowledge that doesn’t always find its way into traditional library programming. She’s not just teaching people how to cook. She’s teaching them how to build lives around their skills — how to see possibility on a cutting board, how to imagine a kitchen not only as a personal space but as an economic opportunity: “I want [Raleigh’s demo kitchen] to be like a one-stop shop,” she said. “Where you’re either learning how to cook, creating a business, or getting support for your business.”

In a city where food is paramount, Jasmen is helping Raleigh residents see themselves as part of that long lineage of providers of tasty morsels that figuratively and literally feed a community. This is, at its core, what Innovators-in-Residence are meant to do: not simply share expertise, but catalyze communities, free of charge, fully accessible. Jasmen, in that bright Raleigh kitchen, is making the idea tangible.

Her earlier life — moving to Memphis as a teenager, navigating the unfamiliarity of a new city, shipping off to the military, coming back to a transformed Raleigh — has carved in her an attentiveness to change. She’s seen the neighborhood shift, rebuild, reimagine. And rather than lament what’s gone, she’s choosing to participate in what’s coming.

“So Raleigh has been my home away from home,” she told me. “But I also want to be a part of the change that’s in Raleigh. I also want to bring a piece of my purpose to individuals in Raleigh.”

Purpose is a word she returns to often. It surfaces when she talks about teaching nutrition to families who have never set foot in a commercial kitchen. It appears when she describes long days at vegan festivals, introducing Memphians to plant-based dishes they swore they’d never try. It shapes her belief that entrepreneurship isn’t a luxury reserved for the well-connected, but something that can — and should — be taught in communal spaces like libraries.

And it’s especially present when she talks about the people who show up to her sessions.

Many walk in seeking cooking tips and walk out with a clearer sense of their own ideas and the gravity of (and excitement for) the tasks before them. Her “students” arrive curious about cooking for others or small business formation, and leave with so much more than new recipes to try: they leave the library’s doors with professional connections, the beginnings of a plan, the confidence to build on their dreams. The kitchen becomes a space where creativity and practicality meet.

And maybe that’s the quiet magic of it — cooking in the library isn’t just cooking in the library. It’s mentorship. It’s economic empowerment. It’s honoring the place you live by teaching others how to build within it.

Upstairs at Raleigh, the burners click on, the knives clack on cutting boards, and neighbors gather around the counter, reminding us all that innovation doesn’t always look like technology or startups. Sometimes it looks like a kitchen in a small, local library branch.

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