Home Plates

These easy slice-and-bake cookies melt in your mouth. Brazil nuts, now found bagged and shelled in many grocery stores, give them a distinctive flavor, but pecans, almonds, or other nuts can be substituted.

Every holiday, Tony Morrow gathers with thirty or so family members at his mother and stepfather’s house for a massive feast that includes turkey and cornbread stuffing with giblet gravy, baked ham, chitterlings, collards, macaroni and cheese, cranberry sauce, and Irons’s signature sweet potato souffle—a creamy, nutmeg-spiced casserole thickly blanketed with a candy-sweet topping of coconut and pecans.

At the flagship Highland Avenue location of Stacey Eames's Highland Bakery, country-fried steak Benedict arrives at the table with the crisp, battered beef paired with poached eggs atop a giant biscuit smothered in jalapeño–cheddar cheese sauce.

Suzanne Vizethann was practically raised on creamed corn in her childhood home in Buckhead, just five miles from her breakfast and lunch restaurant, Buttermilk Kitchen. The canned variety served as the base for the corn fritters her dad would fry up for family dinners.

Duane Nutter, executive chef, One Flew South, was eight years old when he and his mother left Morgan City, Louisiana—a town of 12,000 built on the petroleum and shrimping industries, about an hour’s drive west of New Orleans—for Seattle, Washington.

Kamal Grant, owner of Sublime Doughnuts, has built a career devising flavors no one expects to see in a doughnut box, like strawberry shortcake and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. But long before that, his mother, Nidia Grant, was innovating at the family dinner table.

She was a Korean pop singer. He majored in biology and psychology at Georgia Southern. Today, Jiyeon Lee and Cody Taylor own Heirloom Market BBQ and Sobban, two restaurants where Far East flavors frequently...

Joshua Hopkins, executive chef and co-owner of Abattoir, has built his reputation around utilizing whole animals in his cooking, crafting dishes like tripe noodle soup and duck rillettes. His upbringing prepared him well.

Nygren entered the kitchen almost as soon as she was born. Her mother, Margaret Lupo, became pregnant with her in 1959, three years after Lupo opened her first restaurant, Margaret’s Tray Shop, in downtown Atlanta. In 1962 Lupo became the proprietress of Mary Mac’s Tea Room, and over the next couple of decades she turned the meat-and-three restaurant into an Atlanta icon.