Alumni

HOD @ Work: Chris Sherrill

Cooking Up a Creative Life

Chris Sherrill may be one of Nashville’s biggest fans. The Birmingham native’s busy life building business for the Zoë’s Kitchen restaurants in the area hasn't kept him from planning a feature film that will showcase the city and its talented residents.

"From my point of view, it will be a great representation of Nashville, as opposed to the Hollywood version," says Sherrill, BS’00. The film, which the 27 year old plans to produce with a friend from L.A., will showcase the singer-songwriter journey and the artistic subculture of Music City. "What Nashville has meant to me," says Sherrill. Of course, it also offers the opportunity for "an amazing soundtrack," he adds.

With a spring production start planned, Sherrill will pursue his goal of producing his own film projects while also overseeing the local Zoë’s Kitchen stores. Offering fresh sandwiches, salads, entrees, family takeout meals, and catering, Zoë’s started in Chris’s Alabama hometown. In fact, he graduated a semester early from Vanderbilt to work with an old family friend, Zoë’s CEO John Cassimus, in the business there.

"From an entrepreneurial perspective, life to me is about networking, people skills, treating people well, interpersonal skills," he says. Zoë’s provided the opportunity to run a small business and follow that entrepreneurial interest. He now owns and operates the Zoë’s Kitchen restaurants in Green Hills, which opened in 2002, and Brentwood, in business since late last year.

The road to the restaurant business has been paved with several other enterprises that show Chris’s creative bent. He toured Europe after graduating, then studied screenwriting at UCLA. He was a production assistant on the festival film The Hawk is Dying, starring Paul Giamatti (Sideways) and Michelle Williams (Brokeback Mountain). And he had a reality-show role as an aspiring fashion designer in the short-lived TV show The Cut after he applied to the Parsons School of Design in 2004 on a whim and got accepted.

"At the very least, it was a great publicity stream," he says, laughing at how he was pegged with the persona of the hat-wearing Southern cosmopolitan on the show. "I exploited it."

While he might not often wear cowboy accessories in real life, Chris says the cultural opportunities and mix of people in Nashville made Vanderbilt his college pick.

"I just wanted to go to a really good school and be in the South," he says. The natural setting of the area also let him continue the outdoors activities he loves, particularly trail running.

He says his HOD degree fit well with his business orientation of "high-concept, big-picture." He enjoyed the variety of the course work and says one real-world project taught him a very important lesson. "I learned exactly what I didn’t want to do, which was investment banking," he recalls.

"HOD was everything I could have wanted for what I ended up doing, which is running a small business," says Chris, who served as the Peabody Council vice president. His Vanderbilt degree brings credibility to his business dealings, he says, and offers an additional benefit: "It’s made me a little more of a Nashvillian."

A Commodore football fan in good and bad times, Chris shares a house with his younger brother, also a Vandy grad, in Hillsboro Village while tending to his many interests. But even with a planned feature film, a burgeoning restaurant business, and other creative pursuits to keep him busy, he remembers his Vanderbilt days with just a little wistfulness.

"I wish I were at Vanderbilt every day. I loved it," Chris says. "I had the best time. I really miss it."