MATIAS AND KALEN WHITTINGSLOW, owners of Authors Kitchen and Bar in Appleton, certainly didn’t need any more projects. But when the Franklin Street Inn closed its doors in June of 2024, they couldn’t resist its charm. This beautiful three-story home, built in 1897, sits in Appleton’s historic district. “It was scary to move and buy a house this old, but we had stayed here for our anniversary a few years ago and loved it.” Kalen and Matias connected with the owners during their stay and when Kalen learned the bed and breakfast was closing, she felt a pull to inquire even though the timing of the move wasn’t ideal. Leaving a house and neighbors they loved, the Whittingslow family moved a few miles away, only a few blocks from where Kalen grew up.
The home’s original wood and floors have century-old charm and boast of a time when things were built to last. Because it was a bed and breakfast for years, it has some unique features. Kalen laughed, “Yes, as a former Bed and Breakfast we are full up on bathrooms, but have no closets.” Its bedrooms are large, their doors still announcing the name of the bedroom—Rhodes Suite and the Lawrence Suite—and other names paying tribute to Appleton on the vintage signs. Kalen keeps these signs as a tribute. And yes, there are a lot of bathrooms, some with old features, some with updated features. The substantial size of one bathtub made me laugh. The home’s wide front stairwell leads to an upper hallway that is big enough for the kids to perform cartwheels should they ever have the urge. And, as with many old homes, there is an extra set of narrow stairs leading back down to the main floor to the kitchen.
Kitchens are special places. It’s the place where busy moms and dads prepare dinner while helping with homework, where families share their day to laugh, or vent, or just check in. They are the places where the mail piles up or where the laundry sits on the island, waiting for people to put it away. In many homes, it’s the first room people walk into from the foyer or garage; it’s the hub, the heart. It’s where people grow and learn through not only recipes and dishes, but through conversation and connection. Kalen described how a kitchen is “almost a sacred place.” She has fond memories of her childhood kitchen. “My mom was the ‘Dip Queen’. That’s what people called her,” she tells me. “She would have these parties and there would just be bowls and platters of various dips everywhere.”
While in past decades, kitchens have become the center of our homes, they used to be hidden, especially kitchens in homes built at the turn of the century. The Whittingslow kitchen is no exception, and because the home was a bed and breakfast, the kitchen is even more closed off from the rest of the house than in other older homes. Kalen and Matias love this house. “When we go into that room, we feel good about it,” says Matias, pointing from the dining room to the front room. “When we go to that room, we feel really great. The upstairs is pretty, too. But when we’re in the kitchen, it’s kind of clunky. I don’t want to be unappreciative of what we have, but I work in a kitchen, like, 12 hours a day. And when I come home, we are in the kitchen. We have people over. But really, this house is such a great house. It deserves a great kitchen.”
Kalen and Matias are currently working with a designer to create a kitchen that still maintains the integrity of the historic home, but that will open up the space, so that when Matias is cooking his kids can also be in the space more comfortably and more often.
This new space is inspired by a stove Matias found. This stove is dreamy. It seems to exude its own personality. It’s a shiny nickel color with gold knobs and accents. Its vintage, almost ornate accents are set on a sleek design; it’s a mixture of old and new. And that is Matias’s goal with their kitchen design. The Whittingslows want to create a more open space that’s “clean and bright, but not stark.” Matias’s wish is to respect the home’s historic quality, “The kitchen needs to be updated, but it needs to also match the rest of the house. It can’t be overly modern.” In the future, Kalen and Matias want to host cooking classes in their home for small groups and the new space will accommodate this. More importantly, a remodel that combines the separate dining room with the kitchen space will allow the family to be together as they gather after a hectic day.
This is not to say that the Whittingslow kids don’t help out in the kitchen already. They love their dad’s flatbread. Matias grew up in a small town in Argentina. His family lived only a few blocks from his grandparents’ house where he enjoyed many meals. There they go to the market daily, and sometimes twice a day. Everything is made from scratch, including pasta. Kalen also sometimes makes homemade pasta now. I watched Matias make his flatbread without measuring any of the ingredients. As his kids rolled the dough, I commented on the lack of measuring spoons around, and he just shrugged, “I make this all the time.” When I asked Mia, their daughter, with their father, Chef Matias Whittingslow.
If their dad ever messed up dinner, she couldn’t think of a time. Matias uses his kitchen at Authors as his place to try new ideas. However, Kalen laughed, and said, “I’ve screwed up a few times.”
Kalen and Matias are incredibly easy to be around; they emanate a mutual respect and a playfulness. She and Matias both finished each other’s sentences, recounting Kalen’s pasta with lemon cream sauce.
“This was when we were living in Chicago. He was working like thirteen hour days,” Kalen said. “I remember working a lot at the time, and she just wanted to do something nice for me,” Matias added. Kalen laughed, “ I guess I didn’t know how to zest a lemon. I really zested that thing. The entire lemon was white when I was done. I started crying when we tasted it. Matias tried to fix it, but it just couldn’t be fixed. It was just so bitter.”
That’s another thing about kitchens though. If you can’t make a mistake in the comfort of your own kitchen, where can you? And the mistakes just make great stories. And those stories are stories of ourselves and our families. The name of their restaurant, Author’s Kitchen and Bar, pays homage to this idea of writing a story, constructing an idea, creating a piece of art—through food.
“When we first opened Authors, we thought of calling it Cocina de Autor, which means “Authors” in Spanish, but a name in Spanish may have been confusing [since we are not a Mexican restaurant] and would not have mirrored the type of food we planned to serve there. But we really liked the idea of how in a kitchen we are authors, in a way, who create.” Those who have had the chance to enjoy the food prepared by Matias and his partner, Josh Sickler, know that their creations have a lot of thought behind them.
True to activities of an author, sometimes there is a concrete plan and preparation carried out in a linear way. But more often the process is meandering, embracing a willingness to pivot in order to grow, and an eagerness to turn a new page with a readiness to scribble out a phrase or paragraph to start fresh.
With a little fearlessness and a lot of faith, Matias and Kalen are authors of their own story, their own space, their own kitchen.
