‘Love my community’: Chef gets stolen grill back with help from social media
A local chef told Channel 9 his grill was stolen while he was in the hospital recovering from a crash.
To his thousands of social media followers, he is known as The Premiere Chef. But to his family and friends, he is Kevin Bardge. He’s a local celebrity of sorts -- videos of his cooking have racked up nearly 20,000 followers on Instagram and around 6 million views on TikTok.
“A guy seen me out here, Cory, he’s one of the food critics here in Charlotte, and he posted a video of me doing a demonstration with my food and it just went viral,” Bardge said.
But a life-altering event this past December changed his world. It was all documented as it happened in real time on Instagram.
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“I was involved in a very bad accident. I had to have emergency surgery on my neck,” he said. “I was almost paralyzed from the neck down. I had two disks from my neck replaced with titanium.”
It was a tough road ahead, only made tougher when Bardge found out one of the grills he uses to cook with was stolen while recovering in the hospital.
“My recovery is going well. I’m moving along quickly, I am able to walk by myself,” he says in another Instagram video. “Still got a couple of things. I came to the restaurant to see my grill gone. Somebody done stole my baby.”
“So you notice it’s gone -- what do you do?” Channel 9′s Mark Taylor asked Bardge.
“I instantly make a video saying it’s missing and if anyone sees it contact me,” he replied.
As for what happened afterward: “My followers responded,” he said.
Equipped with surveillance video of the theft -- which showed someone in an SUV taking the grill -- and an address tipped off to him by his followers, Bardge took things into his own hands.
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“You go to the neighborhood, you spot the grill, what happens?” Taylor asked.
“I spot the grill, I file a complaint first. Then the next day, I went and got it,” Bardge said. “I just said I wanted it back. I’m not even going to press charges on the people ‘cause that’s not me.”
Taylor asked him what led to that decision.
“I look at it like this,” Bardge said. “I love my community, I love my followers, I love everybody who supports me. And I feel like it’s a waste of time. I got my grill back. No one was hurt.”
Bardge had to close his business until April. That’s when doctors say he should be fully recovered from the crash, which has left him unable to work.
>> If you would like to help with the expenses he faces on the road to recovery, click here to donate to his GoFundMe.
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