Wichita chef was near death before April liver transplant. Now, he wants to cook.
When he woke up in the hospital after his liver transplant back in April, Wichita-area chef Rick Jeffrey said he instantly felt better.
“Everybody tells you that you’ll feel like a new person, and when I woke up after the operation, I was ready to go,” Jeffrey said this week. “I’m like, ‘OK, let’s go home.’”
Now, Jeffrey, 61, is home. After months in Kansas City waiting for a liver, getting a liver, then recovering from surgery at his daughter’s house in Liberty, Missouri, Jeffrey is now back at his home in Derby, working to gain weight and get his strength back.
His next step, he said: returning to the kitchen. He even recently felt good enough to pull out some old recipes from Red Bean’s Bayou Grill — the now-closed Wichita Cajun restaurant that he helped found — and is contemplating whipping up a batch of tomato bisque.
And after that? He says he’d love to resume his popular Red Beans To Go business, which was derailed when his health took a sharp decline several years ago.
“I am definitely going to come back and cook one way or another,” Jeffrey said. “Maybe even a food truck. Who knows?”
Months in the hospital
Late last year, Jeffrey was in bad shape. He’d been fighting nonalcoholic fatty liver disease for years, and his body was shutting down. Doctors told him that his only hope for survival was a liver transplant.
But for a while, he was too weak to survive the operation and was taken off the transplant list. He was able to go to a rehabilitation center and got stronger, and finally in April, he was put back on the list.
“They put me back on the list on a Wednesday, and then on Friday, I got offered a liver,” he said. “That’s pretty much a miracle.”
Jeffrey said his memory of the months leading up to the operation is cloudy. He was often not sure what was going on. The usually goofy, good-natured Jeffrey became combative.
“I was just out of it,” he said.
He does remember being told they’d found a liver for him and waking up feeling so much better. But Jeffrey had to stay in the hospital for another couple of months while doctors monitored him. After being released, he had to stay in the Kansas City area for a few weeks. He finally got back to Derby about three weeks ago.
Though he’s so happy to be home and to be able to again spend time with his grandsons — TJ, 5, and Clay, 1 — Jeffrey says he still has a lot of healing to do. Because of neuropathy in his legs, he needs a walker to get around. He’s also working to gain weight. At one point, he said, he was down to 129 pounds. He’s put 20 back on so far.
“When I first came out, I looked like Skeletor,” he said.
His legs should continue to improve, he said, but he suspects it will be six months or more before he can get back to work. He said he may start slowly with a few caterings.
Creator of famous Wichita dishes
Jeffrey, an Iowa native, first became known in Wichita as a recipe developer for Carlos O’Kelly’s, where he worked for 22 years. Then, in 1998, he left that job to help Richard Waite open the first Red Bean’s, at 7088 E. Kellogg. The duo went on to open several more Red Bean’s restaurants as well as Mexican favorite Red Mesa, which was at 756 N. Tyler from 2000 until 2006.
Wichita loved the food at both restaurants, so much so that even after the last Red Bean’s closed in 2014, the demand for its tomato bisque, pork loin Thibideaux, New Orleans butter cream pasta and firecracker chicken and shrimp remained so strong that people still crowd in year after year for Fat Tuesday Red Bean’s memorial dinners, which feature a buffet of the restaurant’s favorites. Jeffrey developed all those recipes.
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In 2020, Jeffrey started a new business that got Red Bean’s favorite recipes back in circulation: Red Beans To Go, which he opened at the start of the pandemic. He would prepare take-and-bake versions of Red Bean’s favorites like crawfish etouffee and Cajun chicken cordon bleu and sell them at The Coop, a coffee shop and co-op restaurant in Derby.
Jeffrey said he still misses operating Red Beans To Go, which was more popular than he could have imagined.
“It was huge,” he said. “We came up with it right at COVID, which was perfect timing. And people just went nuts that they’d be able to get Red Bean’s again.”
‘I’m blessed’
Now that he’s home, life is a little harder than Jeffrey thought it would be. His wife, Angie, has been an “angel” through the process, he said, having lived for years with a man who was just a shadow of the person she’d married.
Jeffrey wants to be able to do his part around the house and help her, he said, but his body won’t let him.
“This side of it is harder than we thought,” he said. “We thought I’d get a liver and I’d have to go through some therapy and get strength back. But it’s been hard.”
Jeffrey said he was overwhelmed with all the love and support he got from family members, friends and members of the community. A GoFundMe campaign that his daughter, Chelsea Foster, set up to help pay for his spiraling medical bills has raised $33,930 to date.
“I’m blessed. I have so many friends and so much support,” Jeffrey said. “My wife would have a heck of a time if she didn’t have all these friends of ours that would take me to appointments. ... We’ve had lots of good support. Oh my gosh, I don’t know how anybody could survive without it.”
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