The people who make it work

Keith Baxter — owner and executive chef

Born in London to a nurse and a father who worked for NATO, Keith spent a childhood moving between postings before making it to America in his twenties. He worked his way through kitchens across Florida, landed in Tallahassee, and in 1996 opened Kool Beanz with the help of a friend’s faith and a small crew willing to work very hard.

He has run it ever since. He calls himself American now, having lived here longer than anywhere else, and has been open that opening a business like this would have been far harder in Britain. When the restaurant turned thirty in June 2026 he described the whole thing as surreal, and said it had been a great journey so far.

We’re not going anywhere. I still enjoy coming to work every day. Keith Baxter

Sylvia Gould — pastry chef

Sylvia joined Kool Beanz as a server roughly five months after it opened. When the pastry chef left, she asked for the job despite never having worked in pastry. Baxter asked what made her think she could do it, decided she had earned the chance, and gave it to her.

Two decades on, she was named one of twenty national semifinalists for the James Beard Foundation’s Outstanding Pastry Chef award — one of a handful of Florida names on the list — and was invited onto Food Network’s Best Baker in America. Baxter, forty years in the business at the time, called her far and away the most gifted and creative pastry chef he had ever worked with. Her own reaction to the nomination was disbelief.

She was born in Bay City, Michigan, to a Vietnamese mother and a German-American father, and holds a fine arts degree from Florida State. Both show up on the plate. Her Vietnamese coffee baked Alaska — candied kumquats, sesame tulip, blackberries, hibiscus and chocolate syrups — is the dish guests describe back to us years later. See a dessert menu.

Susannah Frick — front of house

Hired in the opening year of 1996, when she was twenty-five, after her brother’s work in the wine business brought her into Baxter’s orbit at exactly the moment he needed wine for a new restaurant. She has stayed ever since, and describes Kool Beanz as her happy place. She has said that consistency, and loyalty to Keith Baxter, are what kept her here through decades in an industry where nobody stays anywhere.

The kitchen and the floor

The thing visitors notice, and reviewers keep writing down, is that the staff here are unusually good at talking about the food. That is a direct consequence of the daily menu: when the card changes every morning, everyone on the floor has to taste it, understand it and explain it. Servers get named in reviews by first name years afterwards.

The kitchen has similar tenure. Some cooks have been on the line for well over a decade, which in this industry is close to unheard of. During the staffing crisis that hit hospitality nationwide, Baxter was blunt about it publicly, and equally blunt that he believed his wages were among the best in town.

If you eat at the bar you will watch all of this happening from about four feet away, which is the best argument for that seat.

Working here