For Biggs, food — and all it represents — was reported with heart
Jennifer Biggs, the do-it-my-way food reporter with an enormous work ethic and a head for news and the people who make it, gave food an urgency in her hometown.
She had a long list of source cellphone numbers — people who canned and welcomed her in their home kitchens when they were putting up, people behind the church festival traditions here, restaurateurs, industry people and the legions of everyday others. People who, like humanity everywhere, had to eat and were interested in doing it better – for less money, with more flair or closer to the ground in Memphis.
Biggs, 60, knew them all, and not just well enough to call for a comment but to talk for hours and keep much of what was said close to her vest.
She died late Wednesday, Aug. 16, at her home, eight weeks after posting on Facebook that she had been diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer and would immediately undergo surgery.
“She had every intention of getting back to work. She was going to fight it,” said Karen Blockman Carrier, the restaurateur who started Automatic Slim’s here in the early 1990s and added a string of others, including The Beauty Shop, now more than 20 years old.
Biggs wrote the stories on the daily operations and the big anniversaries alike, sitting in a back booth and getting Carrier to start from the beginning with the memories, “like reliving a roadmap in my brain,” Carrier said.
“Jennifer she was so flippin’ full of life and loved what she did so much. And that smile,” she said.
If Carrier had to leave the interview to do something in the kitchen, she would come back to find Biggs already absorbed in writing the story.
“Jennifer she was so flippin’ full of life and loved what she did so much. And that smile.”
Karen Blockman Carrier
“She was wonderful,” Carrier said. “And it’s not because she wrote great things about some of us. It was not that. It was her love of what she did.”
Biggs understood the whirly-whirl world of restaurants, the late nights, the perishable product and the relentless push to be new but comfortable.
“She understood what we went through. She understood the peaks and valleys. She understood the pandemic. … And it just wasn’t fluff with her. With some writers, it is,” Carrier said. “I think at the beginning, she was scared. But she got more confident and realized how great she was at what she did. Then she just started saying the truth in a beautiful, constructive, critical way. It was needed. We all need that.”
She credits Biggs for helping make Memphis a food-destination city.
Biggs was born in Memphis to Jane and Gwinn Biggs. Her father died when she was a teenager.
She graduated from Raleigh-Egypt High School and attended then-Memphis State University before she started a series of jobs, including working in a cotton business somewhere in the city.
“My mother did elaborate stories some, so I’m not sure if all of this is true. But she apparently was one of the first women to ever work in a cotton room. She was just telling that story at my birthday,” daughter Megan Biggs said.
Beyond that, “she wrote for whoever she could,” Megan said, including Oden Advertising and The DeSoto Times, a weekly, in the 1980s and ’90s, based in Hernando and run by publisher Bill Bailey.
“Without formal journalistic training, Jennifer was a natural. She was highly curious, intelligent, engaging and fearless,” Bailey said. “It was a joy to be around her and watch her grow and thrive.”
Biggs joined The Commercial Appeal staff in 2001, writing for The DeSoto Appeal and later alongside reporters and editors, including Michael Donahue and Peggy Burch, who were often the anonymous lunch partners she referenced in the hundreds of restaurant reviews she wrote.
Donahue remembers a poster in the features department with the trite-at-the-time prompt: WWJD?
But in features, where Biggs wrote, it stood for “What Would Jennifer Do,” Donahue said.
“We all knew we could go to her for advice. She knew everything,” he said. “I watched her become celebrated as a food writer and local celebrity. Her photo was even on the MATA buses when she began working at The Daily Memphian. She was one of my best friends. It’s unbelievable to think she is gone.”
Biggs moved through a series of short beats at The Commercial Appeal, at one point covering physical fitness.
In 2007, she moved into her own with the food beat, turning it into not just a how-to in the kitchen but a panoply of what food means to a place – its celebrated crops, personalities, festivals, eateries and the challenges each faced.
She continued on at The Daily Memphian, starting in 2018, as one of the first three reporters on the staff.
She wrote about the big restaurants, but also the startups that often got a breeze to float on with her attention.
Jonathan Magallanes, who was successful with his father in the first Las Tortugas Delimexicana in Germantown, opened a second location in East Memphis.
“Jennifer made me want to be a better chef,” Magallanes said. “She genuinely inspired me in a singular way. She was a true tastemaker and an original influencer.”
Biggs made the stories personal and seemingly was able to keep the sources as friends, including Father Nicholas Vieron, the long-loved head of Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church.
When he died in 2020, Biggs quickly dashed out a story of the times they had shared, fresh and poignant but with a dab of her inside-track humor. In this case, it was the story of their harrowing drive to Collierville, Vieron at the wheel, blissfully careening in his lane and running a red light in Germantown.
“He called me when the ticket came in the mail, delighted that he had a picture of us together, running a red light,” Biggs wrote.
The next line, a quote from Vieron, symbolized so many things at once, including Biggs’ verve and her ability to smile at herself.
“Jennifer, you have your hands over your eyes,” Vieron said.
In 2023, Biggs wrote just as warmly of the life of Anastasia Anagnos Vergos, matriarch of The Rendezvous family.
“I’m so sad,” John Vergos texted early Thursday, Aug. 17.
“I helped her arrange her trip to Isla Mujeres (this summer). She was my friend. She loved my mother and the women who cooked in the Greek community.
“She was always accurate and fair to all in the food industry,” he said.
Burch edited her at both The Commercial Appeal and The Daily Memphian, a job she found energizing because Biggs was an able thinker and writer.
“And she wanted to get serious criticism from an editor because she was such a pro,” Burch said. “Our personalities just meshed – she had an exuberant approach to the work, and I was the dour cynic.
“We met in the middle.”
Biggs’ writing had a personal feel, likely because she drew on a large world of her own experience, including being a single mother and, later, a grandmother.
“What made her so special was she wrote just like she talked,” said Louis Graham, a longtime editor of The Commercial Appeal. “That was her magic. We were colleagues for many years, but I always felt like I had known her my whole life. She had an innate ability to connect like that with everyone.”
Anyone who followed Biggs on social media knew how close she held family, including her grandchildren, Jackson, 9, and Chloë, 7. She chronicled them growing up and their tastes in food and decorum.
“My mother and I come from a line of women that are strong and independent. We have been lucky enough to have that passed down. She passed that to me, and I am passing it to my daughter,” Megan said.
Early Thursday, Kelly English, the entrepreneurial chef who opened Iris more than 15 years ago and then added Second Line and Panta, spoke in a teary halting voice, reminding him of another time he had to stop speaking to pull himself together.
“Jennifer and I did a podcast at the start of the pandemic,” he said. “She stopped it four times so I could gain my composure.
“Back then, we all shared the uncertainty of it. It felt like the beginning of a funeral for our industry, small businesses, not just me, but that we had all worked so hard to build.
“I think that she was incredibly gifted at her craft, not just the X’s and O’s of food, but she really could put a story together.
“She was the first person that reviewed Iris. That review was the beginning of us really being able to provide people with a space to earn a living, from front-house to back-house,” English said. “I remember knowing it was coming out and not knowing what it was going to say. I’ll never forget reading it.”
Biggs also leaves her mother; two stepchildren, Patrick Brooks of Memphis and Wendy Kuhn of Austin, Texas; and three step-grandchildren, Julia Kuhn and Roberta Kuhn, both of Austin, and Tierra Brooks of Savannah, Georgia.
Memorial services are at 10 a.m. Tuesday, Aug. 22, at Memorial Park, 5668 Poplar. Visitation will start at 9 a.m. at Memorial Park.
Topics
Jennifer Biggs Karen Blockman Carrier Kelly English John Vergos Megan BiggsJane Roberts
Longtime journalist Jane Roberts is a Minnesotan by birth and a Memphian by choice. She's lived and reported in the city more than two decades. She covers business news and features for The Daily Memphian.
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