Restaurant group built on her pledge to stay fresh

FULL PLATE: Jessica Silver Wood, co-owner of Fire & Water Restaurant Group, in the kitchen Caliente Mexican Grill in the Kingston Emporium. / PBN PHOTO/BRIAN MCDONALD
FULL PLATE: Jessica Silver Wood, co-owner of Fire & Water Restaurant Group, in the kitchen Caliente Mexican Grill in the Kingston Emporium. / PBN PHOTO/BRIAN MCDONALD

By 5 a.m. some mornings, Jessica Silver Wood is at Caliente Mexican Grill preparing fresh chicken and steak, as well as guacamole, salsa and salad dressing from scratch.
“After lunch everything has to be remade, so it’s always fresh,” said Wood.
The dedication to fresh, local food at reasonable prices didn’t start out to be a profitable way to manage Caliente, but volume and efficiency have made it so, said Wood, who owns the Mexican grill and six other businesses in her Fire & Water Restaurant Group.
Caliente is one of three restaurants Wood owns in the Kingston Emporium in South Kingstown, where the clientele is mostly from the tcampus community at the University of Rhode Island. Burger Shack and UMelt, a grilled-cheese eatery, are also in the Emporium and are run with the same emphasis on fresh, local food.
Wood, who is from Amherst, Mass., worked in restaurants through college and long had the desire to launch her own business.
She ran track and cross-country at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and athletic events sometimes took her to Rhode Island. The state won her over.
“It’s the most amazing state, with the ocean and the farmland and the city all within a 60-mile radius,” said Wood.
The Fire & Water Restaurant Group grew from one concession near the water, at Old Silver Beach in Falmouth, Mass. She and her business partner and husband, Ben Wood, who had also worked in restaurants through college, heard that a concession was up for bid by the town and they got it.
“We were looking for something to do in the summers. We had to make an investment and we borrowed the money from his parents,” said Wood, who was 24 years old and in graduate school at the time. “We took a little gamble, but we paid it back after the first summer.”
Their recipe for success was “giving people more than they expect,” said Wood. “We wanted to elevate the usual beach food and served fresh burgers, wraps and fruit cups.” That one concession expanded to another one at a second Falmouth beach. When they wanted to expand to a year-round business, Wood recalled her trips to URI.
“I remember in college, as a runner, going to the Ryan Center and URI and being dropped off at the Kingston Emporium,” said Wood. That gave her an idea, because there was a similar setup in Amherst.
Her idea was that whatever food seemed missing in the Kingston Emporium, she could open and follow the Amherst model.
Her strategy was to do some market research in Rhode Island, telling South Kingstown Kingston businesspeople that she was working on a graduate-school project on economic development in college towns.
“It was a little, white lie,” said Wood, who was in a master’s degree program in education, and there was no economic-development project for that. But her unofficial research got her what she needed to plan a restaurant.
“There wasn’t a Mexican restaurant in the Kingston Emporium,” said Wood. “I wrote a business plan from the information I got from those calls.”
Caliente opened in 2005. It took a while to get systems organized for efficiency, but that’s what eventually made the 750-square-foot Mexican grill profitable.
“We were not willing to compromise on everything being fresh,” said Wood about their expansion to the other two food ventures in the Emporium. “And it had to be reasonably priced because it’s mostly college students.”
In addition to the two Falmouth beach concessions, the three storefronts in Kingston Emporium – Caliente, Burger Shack and UMelt – Wood is opening a second UMelt on Weybosset Street in Providence, expected to be in operation this month.
The seventh business, Wildwood Catering, is Wood’s favorite, she said. “I just find food really inspiring. I like to be able to transform everything from Rhode Island into beautiful food, and that’s Wildwood,” said Wood. She focuses on beauty in presentation of food and the element of surprise.
Her version of steak and potatoes, for instance, is house-made potato chips topped with a local steak and marinated onion jam.
Some of the events catered by Wildwood are unusual, too. Wildwood Catering is located above Sons of Liberty Spirits Company, a whiskey distillery, in South Kingstown.
“I had never been in a whiskey distillery, never mind catered a party in one,” said Wood. But that’s what she sometimes does now, with lots of appetizers like fried local oysters with a special sauce.
It might seem like a busy schedule, managing seven food businesses – which include 40 year-round, full-time employees, a figure that swells to 60 in summer – but there’s more. Jessica and Ben Wood have two young sons. She has some help caring for the children and works to keep a balance and spend plenty of time with the boys.
With a degree in English and journalism, she did an internship at “NBC Nightly News” in New York City.
“I was working there during the 2000 election and we were sleeping there, calling Florida all the time about hanging chads,” said Wood, about the voting ballot fiasco.
“I didn’t want a life like that,” said Wood.
An important part of Wood’s restaurant work now encompasses more than preparing and serving food. It’s about dedication to local sourcing and the people who produce the food.
“Rhode Island has oceanfront farmland. We have Matunuck oysters. We have cattle farms in Jamestown. We have Sweet Berry Farm in Middletown where we go pick berries. It’s so beautiful,” said Wood. “If we don’t start participating in keeping these farms as part of the local economy, they’ll be condominiums.” •

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