After an accident shattered his mouth, Virginia Beach chef receives gift of teeth from anonymous donor

In the parking lot of Virginia Beach’s Smartmouth Brewing Pilot House, standing next to the food truck that bears his name, chef Donnie Fry IV couldn’t stop the tears from coming. Again and again he tried to talk, and the words stopped in his throat.

“It’s not like I’m sad,” he said, still choking up. “It’s just, it’s unbelievable.”

The tears were gratitude, he said, too much emotion to contain. They were the unexpected resolution to a long and difficult year — and to a long half-decade.

Two days before, he’d received a message that could change his life. It was cloaked in anonymity and intrigue.

“I was contacted by a friend, who had a friend of theirs reach out to them,” Fry said. “They provided information for a Dr. Korman in Virginia Beach. And they told me to give him a call. This is all I knew.”

For the past five years, Fry had been living through a nightmare that most get to wake up from. After a head-on car collision whose impact smacked his jaws together with the force of a 40-mile-an-hour Nissan Armada SUV — not to mention ruptured a disc so severely he needed a bone transplant and a year of rehabilitation — he watched one tooth after another crumble in his mouth. The driver of the other car was an uninsured teenager, who’d apparently been looking at his phone.

“It’s that nightmare that people are always talking about, where your teeth keep falling out,” Fry said. “But it was real life. It was my life. … And it was horrifying.”

He lifted the right side of his lip to show the carnage — back teeth like the crumbling ramparts of an English castle.

He didn’t even learn the full extent of the damage until months after the crash, when he lost a tooth to a particularly crunchy tortilla chip. His X-rays revealed a mouth of jumbled and fractured teeth. But chefs don’t tend to have dental insurance, he said, and he didn’t have the tens of thousands of dollars he needed to fix his mouth.

Last year, when business crumbled during the pandemic, he barely had enough money to make it to work in the morning. To save mere cents a day, he’d begun plotting the most efficient routes to make it there from home. Before his first federal PPP loan he was “days away” from closing his business, he said. His credit cards were maxed. He was so broke he couldn’t have bought the gas to get his food truck off the lot.

Implants were expensive. Extractions were cheap. And so he lost tooth after painful tooth, around 10 in all. He felt them wobble free, break or just plain disintegrate.

Pretzels and thin-crust pizza became a memory. He bought a juicer, because solid food was a constant source of danger. And he began wearing a mouth guard, which he jokingly called his pacifier.

At his food truck, Donnyfrys, he smoked racks of ribs and grilled tender carne asada over sweet cherrywood for his customers at the brewery. But he hadn’t been able to chew a bite of meat in more than a year.

He’d become the chef who couldn’t eat.

The shadowy sweepstakes he didn’t win

Fry isn’t generally the kind of guy to talk about his problems, he said.

“I just put my head down and work,” he said. “A lot of people had no idea. Even friends of mine had no idea that I was still struggling with, you know, remnants from the car accident.”

But he did enter a contest.

Without knowing many details, he entered an internet competition in February called Favorite Chef, in which cooks all over the country were asked to tell their stories, and solicit votes online to be named the “favorite chef in America.” The prize was $50,000.

Asked what they would do with the money, most cooks said they’d sink it into starting their own business, or expanding it. Fry said he just wanted to be able to eat again.

“With this pandemic, luckily, my business has remained open. Morally, I have had support from every direction to keep the window open, but I have neglected myself,” he wrote. “I’d use this money for teeth. I am hungry.”

The contest, run by a somewhat shadowy company in Arizona called Crow Vote LLC, has since drawn criticism for its alleged lack of transparency, its exploitation of the desperation of cooks during the pandemic, its policy on the use of voter data, and its practice of asking voters to pay to vote for their friends. The company had run multiple similar contests: one for semi-clad tattoo models, and for “America’s Favorite Pet.”

“$50,000, a Bon Appétit ad and a ‘fishy’ contest,” read a headline in The Arizona Republic. “Is this Arizona-based competition a scam?”

As the contest dragged on and on through weeks and interminably many rounds, Fry saw friends plunking hundreds of dollars into the contest in the hopes he’d get dental care — a particularly unreliable variant on the crowd-sourced health care funding that has become all too familiar in this country, as social networks pitch in to plug gaps in the social safety net.

“I ended up starting to tell my family and closest friends who actually paid money — I asked them to stop,” he said.

And finally, after making it to the quarter-finals, he was out of the contest.

But then the impossible happened. Someone — someone whose identity he still doesn’t know — had seen his story. A couple weeks after he lost the contest, Fry got word from someone he used to work with. An anonymous benefactor had set up an account on his behalf at the office of Virginia Beach restorative dentist Robert Korman.

“It’s unbelievable,” Fry said. “There’s nothing like this that has ever happened in my life.”

Dr. Korman’s office confirmed the donation when called by The Pilot, but declined to respond to further inquiries. Fry’s friend also gave him no clues.

“They wouldn’t tell me anything. They gave me no info,” Fry said. “I said, ‘How do you know them?’ And they told me that whoever it is, I don’t know them. The only info I was given is that they’ve done this before, and that they strongly don’t want to be recognized. ... And I have always have thought to myself, how cool would it be to be the person that gets to do this for other people? You know, ‘You get teeth, and you get teeth. Who needs a kidney?’”

In his own small way, he said, he tries to do the same. He donates any leftover food from his truck to houseless people around the Oceanfront he’s come to know. He cooks it up extra, and drives around looking for them so he knows they get a meal.

Fry’s first consultation with the dentist was Monday, and he didn’t know what to expect.

“I’ve never had that kind of technology employed in my mouth: digital X-rays, panoramic X-rays. They examined each individual tooth, seeing what’s chipped and cracked,” he said. “But also one of the most important things was for him to get a good idea of what my jaw and bone looks like below the gumline, where new teeth will hopefully have a home.”

It was the first time in years that a dental visit wasn’t occasioned by the unbearable agony of an abscessed tooth. Dr. Korman told him news that wasn’t assured: His jawbone was intact enough it could accept implants. It was the best dental visit he’d ever had, Fry said.

“When you get a whole bunch of bad news every time you get your mouth opened, something like that seems unreal,” he said. “We hit the moment when you have to hand over the debit card, and she just said, ‘You’re free to go.’ I’m used to leaving after dropping a rent payment. It hasn’t completely sunk in.”

He kept asking his dentist, the receptionist, every person who cleaned his teeth: Do you know who it is? Do you? Do you?

“I wish I knew who it was just so I could say thanks,” he said.

“However they found me, whether it’s through social media, Instagram, Facebook, mutual friends or what have you, or even my public posts. I will continue to post there. I’ll continue to show my gratitude. So hopefully they can see it. But it’s a lot.”

Rebuilding a life, part by part

Fry says he’s also just happy to be alive.

“I’m unbelievably grateful to even be standing here — to feel the sun. I mean, not to be too philosophical or turn into Buddha, here. But I’ve learned a lot on meditation, and it makes a lot of life’s small problems disappear. I’m busy being grateful for things like sunshine. And, you know, being able to put my pants on standing up, with both hands.”

He still remembers the thought that he couldn’t get out of his head five years ago, after the accident. It was three days after Christmas, and he was on his way to his father’s house down Independence Boulevard in Virginia Beach. He’d taken the drive maybe hundreds of times before. He’d grown up there. He went to elementary school there.

As he crossed the intersection with Round Hill Drive, he saw the mammoth hulk of that Nissan Armada coming the opposite way, listing ever so gently toward the center of the road.

“It looked like they were going to take a left turn,” Fry said, “like they were going to yield and wait for me to go by. But instead they drifted straight across and blasted me head on.”

The teenage driver had been looking at his phone, he told the police later. He never hit his brakes before shattering Fry’s car, life and body — spinning Fry’s much-smaller Honda Element 180 degrees and knocking it into the grass.

The impact dug Fry’s seat belt so far into his shoulder it shredded through two layers of clothing, and drew blood underneath — an injury the paramedic said he’d never seen in a person still talking and breathing. The shock blew his shoulder out of its socket. And it ruptured a disc into his spinal canal, perhaps millimeters from paralysis. He didn’t know whether he’d ever have the use of both arms again.

But what he remembers thinking still breaks his heart, Fry said.

“I had a little girl. I mean, she was barely 2,” he said, his voice again trembling. “And I was worried maybe she wasn’t going to remember me.”

For the sake of his daughter, he said, he kept battling. He held onto his dream of starting a business, even when his family thought it wouldn’t be possible for him to gain full mobility. His arm got unreasonably skinny, and for some reason he couldn’t feel his scalp.

“Meanwhile, I kind of went through all my physical therapy and I had my surgery on my neck, plates and screws and donor bone discs,” he said.

Though the driver was uninsured, he did get a settlement from the vehicle’s owner, though it didn’t cover everything Fry said. And even with a $25,000 hole made of medical debt, he was able to pull together a business, building his food truck himself. He first sold gelato, and then the vast and rotating array of comfort foods he serves at Donniefrys. He pulled through, he said, by just looking at the next job in front of him, and the next and the next.

“My father says I’ve become really good at this by now,” he said. “But you keep your head down, and you work your ass off. And you just do that. That’s what you focus on. When you look up after a while, things will have changed automatically around you.”

The teeth, courtesy of a donor he may never know, are a final step toward being whole again. The process may take more than a year of procedures and surgeries, but Fry is very conscious of the fact he’s been lucky: Many people he’s worked with still don’t have the means to pay for their dental care, he said.

Let's Eat

Weekly

---

We're serving up restaurant reviews and news about the local food scene every week.

By submitting your email to receive this newsletter, you agree to our Subscriber Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy.

>

“Everywhere I’ve ever worked, in every kitchen, whether it was the front of the house or the back of the house, it seems like everyone’s got a tooth missing,” he said.

He is grateful that he will soon be able to smile without thinking about the visible gaps on each side of his mouth — covered only partly by the mustache he’d grown specifically for that purpose. He’s looking forward to not viewing each bite of food with fear, or measuring his days by the gaps between periods of intense pain. He’s looking forward to a life that doesn’t feel so fragile.

“I need to get back to a life of going to the dentist for reasons other than pain,” he said. “I’m going to be 40 years old coming up this summer. I used to think 40 was insanely old. I don’t feel that way now.”

His first priority, when he finally again has two molars that face each other, is not extravagant.

“I’d really like to eat some peanuts,” he said. “That’s the first thing that comes to mind is peanuts. I love peanuts.”

The Donniefrys food truck is parked Tuesdays through Sundays at the Smartmouth Brewing Pilot House, 313 32nd St., Virginia Beach. Info at eatfrys.com.

Matthew Korfhage, 757-446-2318, matthew.korfhage@pilotonline.com