Tacoma’s ‘lunch lady’ and singing chef opens cafe with soup, salad, sandwiches
Tacoma native Chantel Jackson has attracted an audience nearly 75,000 strong on TikTok and another 20,000 on Instagram, where her moniker is The Lunch Lady. She’s also known as The Singing Chef, belting out tunes in the kitchen, at catering events and on stages in a lilac-hued chef’s coat and bonnet. In 2022, she sang the national anthem before Nelly’s show at the Washington State Fair, and in 2023 competed in the Karaoke Cup World Finals in Las Vegas after placing in the Top 10 in Washington state.
Meanwhile, she has managed her own private chef and catering company, Thyme Well Spent, since 2016. Locals might also recognize her name from CJ’s Philly Food Truck, which hit the road in 2017. As of late October, she now has a brick-and-mortar in Tacoma’s South End.
“This is like my retirement,” she said with a laugh. She first leased the space at 5608 S. Park Ave. three years ago, a sign went up last year and she recently had a baby.
“I wanted to be like a lunch lady, and then come home and cook at night for my kids,” Jackson said.
The goal of the cafe is to bring all of her businesses under one roof.
She describes the six-day-a-week cafe operation as a “Southern deli” with soup, salad and sandwiches.
Always on the menu are chicken-sausage gumbo and a Creole chicken noodle soup. A rotating soup feature this week was a Creole broccoli cheddar.
Salads offer a similar fusion of ideas, as in mixed greens with fried chicken and waffles cut to crouton size, served with a maple vinaigrette, and a Caesar with cornbread croutons and a Cajun-spiced dressing. Sandwiches can be ordered as a whole or a half (on a mini hoagie roll), such as The Eastsider with grilled chicken, roasted bell peppers, pepperjack and chipotle mayo, and The Hilltop with steak, arugula, bleu cheese and a sweet-potato spread.
Snacks include deviled eggs topped with blackened shrimp, a collard-green dip served with crackers, and crostinis with a sweet potato “bruschetta.”
The cooler offers homemade desserts, from cheesecake finished with caramelized pear slices, coconut layer cake, lemon meringue pie and beignets fried in a little countertop fryer.
True to the cafeteria-lunch theme, she also has her own line of iced teas (produced off-site) that are packaged in a very fun Capri Sun-style bag with a sip-top. Each herbal flavor incorporates the namesake herb: peach, chocolate, applemint and superfruit.
Jackson decided to pursue her own business almost a decade ago after a seemingly simple task: making a sandwich for her dad on Father’s Day.
“He loved it,” she recalled, so she started making sandwiches for friends. At the time, she lived just off South 56th Street. She took small-business courses and county-sponsored programs, some of which offered modest grant funding that helped her acquire the food truck. Her catering business grew, as did her social-media following and singing-chef persona.
The cafe, in an unusual curved-front, low-slung, 800-square-foot building next to a residential house at South 56th and South Park Ave, brings her journey full-circle, she said.
On Oct. 23, she posted what she thought was a ho-hum video just to say the cafe was soft-open. It caught the algorithm and now has more than 13,000 views.
“I thought the video was ugly, and it just took off!”
Thyme Well Spent Cafe
- 5608 S. Park Ave., Tacoma, thymewellspentinc.com
- Monday-Friday 10:30 a.m.-4 p.m., Saturday 12-5 p.m.
- Details: new lunch cafe with soup, salad, sandwiches, desserts and iced tea coolers; a few small tables inside, but packaged to-go; follow instagram.com/thymewellspent_ for updates
This story was originally published November 6, 2025 at 5:00 AM.