lit a candle 2h agoMy mum rang me about this, we used to visit my aunt in Battle Creek every other summer and Lucky Rooster was the treat night, the open kitchen, watching him work the pasta from our table. Strange to hear about a place like that from six thousand miles away.
Their story
Trent Mead was a chef who spent roughly 25 years in the restaurant kitchens of Battle Creek and Kalamazoo, Michigan, most recently as executive chef of Lucky Rooster Kitchen and Cocktails and a leading culinary figure at One Nation Tap and Table. News of his death circulated through local media…
Trent Mead was a chef who spent roughly 25 years in the restaurant kitchens of Battle Creek and Kalamazoo, Michigan, most recently as executive chef of Lucky Rooster Kitchen and Cocktails and a leading culinary figure at One Nation Tap and Table. News of his death circulated through local media and the Southwest Michigan food community on 28 September 2026. As of that reporting, no cause of death, exact hour, or age had been made public.
Born and raised in Battle Creek, Mead built his reputation across the area's restaurants and country clubs. Earlier in his career he cooked at Malia's Restaurant in Marshall, where he made a name for fresh pasta, then at the Battle Creek Country Club, as corporate chef for Felpausch in Battle Creek, and at the sushi restaurant Restaurant 310 in Traverse City. By early 2009 he was working for the Millennium Restaurant Group. That October the group transferred him from Martell's Tavern on the Green in Coldwater to the Black Swan Restaurant on Greenleaf Boulevard in Kalamazoo, a move covered by MLive as part of a wider chef shuffle in the region.
At Lucky Rooster, a scratch-made Italian restaurant on Columbia Avenue East in Battle Creek that opened under owner Stephen Titus around 2018, Mead was known for making pasta dough in house and for a from-scratch approach to comfort food. He told the Battle Creek Enquirer that the kitchen ran a tight ship and wanted to be proud of what it sent out, including at a kitchen-side counter where diners could watch the work. With Titus he later helped open One Nation Tap and Table, framed as classic American fare with a modern twist, and his kitchen there won local recognition, including a people's choice award for mac and cheese at a community cooking competition.
Beyond his own kitchens, Mead was widely described by colleagues as a mentor. Fellow chef Toni Davis of Kitchen Proper in Kalamazoo said publicly that she felt for the Lucky Rooster and One Nation crews and called Mead a leader and a teacher who left a lasting mark on cooks across the region. The restaurant's own Meet the Chef page described him as dedicated to great dishes and willing to accommodate diners' needs, and as interested in innovative cuisine and current food philosophy. Local radio and dining coverage remembered him as a fixture of Southwest Michigan restaurants for a generation, and as someone whose influence reached students and younger cooks coming up in the industry.
Biography adapted from Lucky Rooster Kitchen and Cocktails, Battle Creek Enquirer, WKFR and local food-community tributes.
Photos
1Chef Trent Mead, executive chef of Lucky Rooster Kitchen and Cocktails
by People Forever
that open kitchen was the whole point of going, good memory