Before there were restaurants and accolades, there was a mother with two little girls at her side, playing in the kitchen, hands dusted in sugar.
It was the summer of 2013, and Kristen Hall, owner and executive chef of La Fête, stood with a two-year-old and a five-year-old—Eleanor and Emma—measuring, spilling, stirring right alongside her, sleeves pushed up, hands already sticky, batter clinging to their fingers as something baked in the oven.
“It was one of those things,” Hall says. “It was going to be a mess, and I knew that going into it, but that’s part of the teaching process.”
In that kitchen, she was showing them how to live—preparing her daughters to be self-sufficient, to leave her house one day with real skills.
“I wanted to raise girls who could care for themselves,” she says.
Before long, the kitchen was filled with scones, jam-filled linzer cookies, rosemary shortbread, and lemon bars—and the idea to box them up, leave them on neighbors’ porches, ring the doorbell, and dart off before the treats were discovered.
Many in Birmingham remember what came next: Baking Bandits, the sold-out Saturdays at Pepper Place, the lines that formed quickly and kept coming.
Behind the scenes, there was a mother of two working full-time, staying up all night on Fridays to bake, packing the car at dawn, selling out, coming home to rest for a few hours, and starting it all over again.
Hall had spent more than a decade at UAB’s School of Medicine after studying biology and chemistry at Samford. It was steady, demanding work—a full life. When she baked, something larger was happening, taking on a life of its own.
“I have always said that it truly felt like pastry chose me,” she says. “Baking is a lot of chemistry—attention to detail, understanding how things work—so much of my skillset translated.”
What didn’t translate as easily was the decision to leave a successful career for a newly discovered passion.
When she handed in her letter of resignation at UAB, she could not have imagined what would come next: La Fête, her love letter to Paris; a MICHELIN Guide Bib Gourmand designation, and a 2026 James Beard Award nomination for Best Chef (South).
“I remember standing on the Michelin stage thinking, ‘Ten years ago, I would not have believed this was possible.’”
The journey unfolded as she began to step more fully into her own life, a lesson she hopes to see her daughters carry on:
“The way that I got here was continuing to choose myself,” she says.
“I was raised to be small. To be quiet. To go along to get along.”
That expectation can take time to move past.
“It’s been a hard journey to re-parent myself into believing there was more for me.”
At La Fête, it comes to life through pâte à choux baked until crisp and airy, delicate tarts filled with pastry cream and fruit—the kind of layered textures she fell in love with in France. Every detail of the dining experience is meant to bring Birmingham the feeling of walking cobblestone streets in Paris–complete with savory offerings like poulet au citron and quintessential beef bourguignon.
Building restaurants while raising children has required her to live in a space she calls “betwixt”—a space many women know well—the tension between work and home, where “it sometimes feels at odds and sometimes feels cohesive.”
“I spend less time trying to find the balance,” she says. “A lot of people think balance is 50/50, but I’ve discovered that it often looks more like 80/20.”
When she is at work, she works without the guilt of being away. When she is home, she is home, fully engaged with her now 15- and 18-year-old daughters—walking, singing in the car, listening.
Once in a while, the three find themselves in the kitchen again, baking something together—perhaps a pastry or even just brownies from a box.
“Baking doesn’t always have to be complicated,” she says. “Sometimes it’s for me to remember that it can just be for fun.”
Because the lessons learned in that kitchen were never just about baking.
They were about learning how to care for yourself, how to trust your instincts:
How to choose your life and refuse to stay small.
“I think we all owe it to ourselves to live our greatest truths,” Hall says, “to pursue our wildest dreams. And that’s not only good for ourselves, but it’s good for the communities we live in and for our families.”