Southport Magazine

It sounds almost too good to be true — teenaged immigrant moves to America, works hard from day one, finds love, raises a family, starts and grows a hugely successful small business and then thanks the community for his success by giving back. But for Chris Dabideen, aka The Kitchen Man, the story is true. 

“I moved to New York City August 2001,” Chris said. “I wanted to go to college, I wanted to do something like railroad engineering. So my momma came, found me a place to live, and she went home and I was supposed to work my way through college.”

He was just 17 years old and full of the American Dream. 

“I got a job mixing concrete, then September 11 happened and everything just stopped,” he said. “Now I’m in a new place, I ain’t got no money and I gotta figure out what I’m gonna do.”

What he did was get to work, first in a grocery store, then for that store’s supplier. “Then across the street was an auto body shop and I got a job there detailing cars, and then that guy had a granite business and he was looking for employees, and he gave me an opportunity. He asked if I wanted to work in the granite business and my first word were ‘What is that?’” he said.

“I said ‘Sure, I’ll give it a try,’ and that was 2008 and ever since then I’ve been in the granite business,” Chris said. “Granite was very difficult until I got into the kitchen business. The design part of it was really cool.”

Chris lived in Queens and Long Island, but never quite felt at home in New York. “In about 2015 I got tired of living in New York, because I grew up in the Caribbean, everything was laid back, not a whole lot of traffic,” he said. “So in 2015, when I had my second kid, I was like ‘Man, I don’t want to live here no more. I just don’t want this busy pace of life.’

“My friend Henry and I got in a truck and drove the entire coast from New York to Florida. We looked at all of the towns and stuff and then out of the blue, when I got here it was what I wanted.”

Chris said besides being halfway between family in New York and Florida, our community reminded him of home.

“The people were different, the place was different, it was sunny, it was HAPPY,” he said. “People would talk to you. I went into a store to get gas and snacks and ended up having a 15-minute conversation about nothing. That’s just the way that people were and I really enjoyed that. That’s the way things are in Trinidad.”

The Southern way of communicating was very familiar. “In Trinidad when you give directions you use landmarks. It was the same thing here. Nobody says street names, at least not the original people,” Chris said. “A lot of the words people use down here are the same, it’s really cool. Like cabinets referred to as cupboards, the faucet is called a spigot, the one in the kitchen is called a tap, so those words resonated a lot, because when you go to New York City you don’t hear that stuff. The Southern feel of it really made it feel like home.”

Chris said he lives in Topsail Beach, which he described as a small, but growing community where you pretty much know everyone. 

The Kitchen Man has ridden the wave of growth in the Cape Fear. “The first year I did Kitchen Man I had two employees and we did $250,000 in business. Today we have about 14 W-2 employees and we grossed about four and a half million last year. So in five or six years, it’s tremendously grown.”

The Kitchen Man is based in Winnabow on U.S. 17 but has expanded with three showrooms in Hampstead, Wilmington and Shallotte. Chris said the showrooms save people having to drive too far to see what The Kitchen Man offers.

When you stop into a Kitchen Man showroom, you’ll find material you’re not likely to see elsewhere.

“Last year, what I wanted to do was to bring in material that was very, very unique. You see the same material over and over and there’s nothing wrong with it, but I wanted to give people a chance to see something different,” Chris said.

That difference is directly imported Brazilian marble. “We order direct from the quarry, from the guys who cut the material,” Chris said.

“The reason why I started importing directly from Brazil is that normal suppliers will just bring in what will sell, not things that are distinct,” he explained. “Like I have a couple off slabs out there that will sit there for a couple of months, even a year, then you get that one person who walks in and says ‘Holy crap, I absolutely love it!’ but the 300 people before him didn’t see the beauty of it. Everybody’s expression of creativity is different and that’s what granite does, and Brazil is one of the places you can find that— a lot of different colors, a lot of different density. I like to say it’s an expression of yourself.”

Each slab can weigh up to 3,000 pounds, and while they like to make use of as much as they can, The Kitchen Man puts design first. “One thing we do different here is we don’t skimp on using material,” Chris said. “We try to create patterns, and when you have patterns and veins and stuff, sometimes two thirds of the material gets wasted just to keep the veins going in the right direction.”

The parts of the slab not used for a project can become smaller pieces of another job, like table tops or vanities. The rest is recycled by a company in Wilmington where it’s ground up and used for things like driveways. 

Chris can hold forth on any part of his business because he has learned each part himself. “I’ve learned every process in this business then delegated and trained employees, so that it’s easy to talk to them and relate to them when I’m creating ideas,” he said. “It’s easy to have great ideas, but when your carpenter shows up and you can’t relate to him, everything goes haywire. It’s good that I can do all of it. I can speak carpenter to the carpenter.”

Chris said people often ask him if The Kitchen Man is a franchise. “It’s not, it’s family organization.” He said. “It’s my wife and I, and I have three employees and their spouses who work here. When we say it’s a family business, it’s a family business.”

When asked what came as a surprise as a small business owner, Chris laughs and talks about how he and his wife, Amanda, expected things to go. 

“My wife’s going to hate me for this, but the whole point of starting a business was we can do three jobs a week and have time to go home and do all the fancy stuff she wants, but when we started the demand for it was so good, people wanted more and more and more.” Chris said. “We went from my promise of two to three jobs a week and we’d have all the free time in the world to her working at the desk. Because I need some help.

“She enjoys it as much as I do, or at least so she says,” he said. “She’s a better salesman than I will ever be. She’s the one who taught me how to sell granite. Back in the day when I met her, the company we were working for, she was the manager of the company. She used to be my boss. She runs the ship”

Chris and Amanda have four daughters, ages 16, 9, 8 and 4, and making time for family is important. 

“We make time for everything,” Chris said. “And it’s the same with the employees when they have kids and stuff, that comes first. We’re never so busy we say you can’t attend a function for your kids. Family comes first in this place, we’ve always done it that way.”

Chris tries to take care of his community as well as his employees, donating a thousand dollars a month to different local charities. “Giving back is a big thing in my family. You have to show appreciation for those who helped you along the way,” he said.

And every year since 2019, The Kitchen Man has donated turkey dinners for Thanksgiving. Chris puts out a call on social media and in advertisements looking for families in need of help, and everyone who asks gets a turkey dinner. The project has grown to close to a thousand turkeys each year, and takes the entire company to make it happen.

“We shut down work the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and for the next three days that’s all we do,” Chris said. “Delivering 1,000 turkeys is not an easy task.”

Chris said the favorite part of his work is meeting his customers. “I go to every job initially to meet the people and see what they want,” he said. “And I leave an email address so customers can contact me and any time in the process.”

That process sometimes entails explaining that the kitchen his customers fell in love with on HGTV may not work for them in the real world. 

“I get to be the dream killer, but I also get to be the person who can transform your imagination into what you want,” he said. “It’s a fun job…when everything goes right.”