Home Plates

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.

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.

Food stylist, cookbook photographer, and pastry chef Angie Mosier, who grew up in Tucker, is a past president of the Southern Foodways Alliance and a fervent supporter of numerous other initiatives that preserve regional traditions.

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.

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.

Billy Allin, executive chef and co-owner (with his wife Kristin) of Decatur’s Cakes & Ale, was raised in an Italian American household in Greenwood, South Carolina—an upbringing that presented, as he puts it, “some culinary conflicts.”

Justin Burdett, chef de cuisine at Miller Union, was rarely exposed to fresh seafood until he began cooking in high-end restaurants in Athens, Asheville, and Atlanta. But he's eaten plenty of salmon cakes made from canned fish throughout his lifetime, and to this day it's still how he prefers to get his omega-3s.

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.

Dixie Winfrey, a caterer, traveled to France and learned how to master velouté (a velvety “mother sauce” made with a butter-based roux) after having it served over squash blossoms. Back home, she tried the same sauce technique over the actual squash, which she simmered just enough to retain some of its crunch.

Dinners at the suburban home of Ford Fry, chef-owner of JCT Kitchen and No. 246, typically revolve around the Big Green Egg perched on the spacious deck in back. What emerges from the ceramic smoker takes him back to gatherings he attended as a youth at his grandfather’s ranch outside of Houston.