Home Plates

Born and raised about forty miles south of Atlanta in Locust Grove, Woodfire Grill's Kevin Gillespie learned to cook by watching his paternal grandmother prepare gargantuan smorgasbords of humble South Carolina Appalachian fare for an army of relatives who wandered in and out of her house daily.

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.

Sonya Jones is the owner of Sweet Auburn Bread Company and the author of "Sweet Auburn Desserts: Atlanta’s Little Bakery That Could." Desserts were always in the house, and Jones often had a hand in baking peach and blackberry cobblers or apple pie.

Molly Gunn, co-owner of the Porter Beer Bar, usually works the dining room of her Little Five Points gastropub while her husband and business partner, Nick Rutherford, presides over the kitchen.

Jason Hill, chef-owner of Wisteria, used to gripe about leaving his Atlanta friends behind to spend weekends at his grandparents’ house in Ellijay—especially in the summertime.

Long before Roberts learned how to toy with foie gras under Guenter Seeger, another mentor showed him moves in the kitchen: his mom, Jean Roberts. Today, some of her best creations—like her creamy macaroni and cheese—are signatures at Community Q.

s a child, King’s military family was always on the move. But wherever they lived—Virginia, Missouri, Hawaii—her grandmother, Mildred King, came for extended visits, bringing the flavors of Georgia with her. “Ganky” (as King called her) was revered for her layer cakes and pecan tassies. But the dessert that King most remembers is a simple, delicate coconut custard.

Overcooked turkeys and prickly relatives can put a holiday dinner on edge, but nothing comforts a crowd like a warm pie. If you don’t have time to deal with a lattice top or crimped edges, Booker has a solution in this elegant, free-form tart adapted from one in her book, Field Peas to Foie Gras: Southern Recipes with a French Accent, which came out in September.

The Baltimore native’s love for vegetables began on summer vacations to her grandparents’ tiny farmhouse deep in North Carolina tobacco country. On the linen-covered dinner table, collards typically shared space with just-picked corn, tomatoes, and the beans and peas she and her siblings had shelled and snapped that morning. Meat, other than as seasoning, was often absent, and rarely missed.

Hints of Susan Rebecca White’s Georgia upbringing appear on her table as regularly as they do in her books—but rarely in the form of a Southern-fried cliche. Take her riff on a childhood favorite. “When I was little, my mom would make fried toast with a hole cut out in the middle and an egg cooked inside it,” says the Atlanta native.