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July 30 - August 8, 2022
Regional cooking is one of the simplest ways to learn about the different parts of a culture. One could even argue that opening a restaurant is a celebration of culture.
Eating together humanizes. When you are sitting across the table from someone it’s easier to see your similarities than your differences.
The Grey, the restaurant I co-founded in Savannah, Georgia, in 2014, was never really about just building a restaurant. There was a lot more to it than that. For me, it was about finding community and my place in it.
Good policing is a gift. So is good teaching and good cooking. There will always be rules and protocol to follow, but unless one does the work from a loving place and is able to adjust for what’s right in front of them, they’ll never be great at it. They’ll never connect with the work on a human level. Not one officer took the time to look at what was right in front of them or to make adjustments to their approach that night. Not a single one provided comfort to the witnesses.
Savannah was smaller and way more segregated than I’d imagined. In Savannah, locating Black-owned businesses is like finding a needle in a haystack. I can trace the ghosted outline of the Black business community as I drive around the part of MLK near what is now the I-16 flyover. Before moving here, I really didn’t have any idea of the symbolism our partnership would represent in a town that in many ways, has digressed as much as it has progressed since the civil rights movement.
Whites love to point at the Black community and call us violent but they never take responsibility for the violence that their society has inflicted upon us. Violence is a learned behavior and yet it seems to only shock and offend Whites when it spills into their communities.
Pro-Tip: I like asking cooks, “What station are you working on the line? What cooking magazines do you read and why? What cookbooks are you reading right now? What is your favorite knife? Where’s the last place you were impressed by the chef? What was the dish that did it?”
Separate but equal. It was once a way for the people of Savannah and other places in this country to give comfort to Whites while instilling laws and practices that justified inequality, subjugation, and racism toward Blacks. Thank goodness those practices aren’t legal anymore but traces of that way of thinking still exist.
Why does a Black woman have to be able to cook Italian when an Italian woman isn’t expected to cook anything else? I can tell you that I didn’t value my own cultural contributions to American cuisine until I began to learn and cook the foods from other countries. I can also tell you that I needed to work and train myself in other cuisines before I began to value my own. I can feel my frustration bubble up again whenever I hear conversations like this one.
Savannah is a majority Black city, but downtown Savannah is pretty much White unless you live in the projects. So, not only would Black folks have to learn about a Black chef running this kitchen, they would also have to want to come downtown to see what I was doing. It didn’t seem like a tall order to me but actually it was, to think that just because a Black chef is running the kitchen that would be enough incentive to get the
Black community to come to the restaurant. I thought that when Black people found out that I was there, they would start to come out, but, in reality, that didn’t happen right away. It took a few years and now I think we are beginning to share a pride in the food that The Grey serves as a representation of this region and the larger community, especially in the African American heritage inherent in it all.
This conversation strikes me as ridiculous. Three White men talking about finding a Black woman chef as though she’s a unicorn of some sort, a mystical creature with talents that could only be dreamed of. Turns out, I am that Black woman that they were discussing, that business partner that Johno was seeking. So, why was I so hard to find? Why is it that it was so hard to believe that someone like me, who had been cooking in restaurants for years, and who has traveled abroad to cook and eat, wasn’t making an impact on the perception of what an American chef looks like? During the beginning of
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was to do that and then reenter a professional kitchen down the road at a higher level. He just thought all of it was a step backward. My parents wanted a different future for me. They struggled to see past the White-male-dominated aspect of restaurant kitchens or the servitude implied in working in someone’s home and believed either of those things would make my career ascent even more difficult. This made it hard for them to have faith that I could do it and that cooking and leading a kitchen, a professional kitchen, was a step toward the future that I was becoming more interested in
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They were right. When I was doing my search, I learned that approximately 15 percent of all chefs and head cooks in America are Black.
STEAK TARTARE
During one drive in early September, I listened to Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, a narrative written by a woman named Gabrielle Hamilton.
Prune, her restaurant on the Lower East Side of Manhattan,
She addressed the diversity of her restaurant, a cooking line that was mostly women—gay women, straight women, Black and Brown women. She did not seem to see herself as someone who actively pursued diversity, but, rather, someone who lived it.
She mentioned a young woman who was working at Prune—Mashama Bailey. She thought that maybe we should meet and said she would consider making an introduction, but she wanted a little time to think about it and talk to Ms. Bailey. She then offered me a few more names of people she knew who were impacting their communities through food and restaurants. But, at that moment, all I heard was that one name, Mashama Bailey.
Crystal Beer Parlor,
Buildings and churches like these, that helped protect enslaved people as they moved north toward freedom, became popular in the 1830s and 1840s. Due to the increase in escaped enslaved people, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 was reinforced in 1850. This strengthening of the act held Whites accountable for harboring or even ignoring runaways, with high fines and imprisonment if caught. It also allowed Whites to capture Blacks and enslave them, even if they had already been freed. This law was highly controversial in the Northern states and became one of the catalysts for the Civil War.
CRYSTAL BEER PARLOR–INSPIRED GREEK WINGS
On the ground level of a tenement building at 54 E. First Street is Prune, the restaurant at which I spent nearly four formative years of my career, comes alive at dinnertime. Tea
I do remember that at the end of the evening, Mashama finished by giving each person a Bit-O-Honey candy in its yellow-and-red wrapper.
Black Power is not about exercising power over White people. It is not about stereotypes of Black culture or validating those things. It is about understanding that we are in a subjugated position, shining a light on that fact and helping each other by creating and sharing opportunities for self-determination.
made my way to Jackson, Mississippi, and
ate at the Mayflower. I stayed
