A Hungry Society

Today’s guest is chef Chris Cheung, a born and bred New Yorker, who grew up in the heart of Chinatown on Mott Street. He is the current chef and owner of East Wind Snack Shop in Brooklyn and Tansuo in Nashville. On today’s show we’ll talk about Chinese New Year and his formative dining experiences.

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On this special show I speak with Irene Lei of Mei Mei Restaurant in Boston about what running her business has been like since the coronavirus crisis started and the Unsung Restaurant Fund, a fund that she and a friend started to highlight the immigrant owned and run restaurants in Boston.

Photo courtesy of Irene Li.

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Chef Adrian Lipscombe, Texas native and owner of Uptowne Cafe & Bakery in Wisconsin, is a very busy woman. She’s a wife, mother of four, city planner and business owner and the founder of the 40 Acres & a Mule Project, which she launched in June to preserve, research and celebrate Black foodways. On today’s show we talk about the goals of the project and the importance of legacy which Adrian shares from her own personal, familial stories and from the point of view of a Black culinarian, interested in passing on knowledge about Black foodways to the next generation of Black chefs. If you’d like to support the 40 Acres and Mule project, head here.

Image courtesy of Adrian Lipscombe.

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Today’s show is going to be a continuation of the series of interviews from the Soul Food Sessions dinner which was held at the James Beard Foundation house in Manhattan earlier this month. Soul Food Sessions is a dinner series that started in Charlotte, North Carolina as a way to acknowledge and support people of color in the culinary arts, restaurant and hospitality industries, and beverage services. Chefs Jamie Barnes and Greg Williams of What the Fries, Michael Bowling of Hot Box Next Level Kitchen, Gregory and Subrina Collier of The Yolk, Jamie Turner of Jamie's Cakes & Classes, Justin Hazelton of SB&J Enterprises, and friend of the show, Omar Tate were part of the dinner and each made a course for the evening. The name of the series hints at what the founders want guests to experience: dishes that act as an exploration of what we think of as soul food and pushing the boundaries on that definition. Dishes like pork pate with apple buttermilk and warm farro salad with smoked peaches ask what is soul food and what isn’t it? Who cooks it and who doesn’t? If a chef is black is what they’re cooking automatically soul food? Before the dinner service I asked the Soul Food Sessions chefs these questions.
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Michael W. Twitty is a culinary historian and food writer from the Washington D.C. area. He blogs at Afroculinaria.com. He’s appeared on Bizarre Foods America with Andrew Zimmern, Many Rivers to Cross with Dr. Henry Louis Gates, and has lectured to over 400 groups. He has served as a judge for the James Beard Awards and is a fellow with the Southern Foodways Alliance and TED and the first Revolutionary in Residence at The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Southern Living named Twitty, one of "Fifty People Changing the South and the Root.com added him to tbeir 100 most influential African Americans under 45. Beyonce beat him out as number one.” HarperCollins released Twitty’s The Cooking Gene, in 2017, tracing his ancestry through from Africa to America and from slavery to freedom, a finalist for The Kirkus Prize and The Art of Eating Prize and a third place winner of Barnes&Noble's Discover New Writer's Awards in Nonfiction. THE COOKING GENE WON the 2018 James Beard Award for best writing as well as book of the year, his piece on visiting Ghana in Bon Appetit will included in Best Food Writing in 2019 and was nominated for a 2019 James Beard Award.

Image courtesy of Johnathan M. Lewis.

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