Home Plates

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.

Among the kitchen crew at Kevin Gillespie’s Glenwood Park restaurant, Ward is the modernist—the one who likes to take recipes that are part of American pop culture (beef Wellington, ranch dressing, cheeseburgers) and reimagine them.

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.

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.

David Sweeney is best known for the stunning salads and vegan creations he served at his still-missed Old Fourth Ward restaurant, Dynamic Dish, which closed in 2010. He was born in Fort Gordon, Georgia, but his military family moved to Europe when he was young, and he lived there for nearly three decades.

With Georgia ancestry that dates back to the 1700s, cookbook author and culinary entrepreneur Virginia Willis credits her predecessors with teaching her the proper way to bake a peach cobbler and simmer a pot of Brunswick stew.

Pano I. Karatassos—wearing faded jeans and a loose T-shirt, his signature pin-striped chef's apron nowhere in sight—welcomes me into the state-of-the-art kitchen of his parents' Buckhead home. Raw vegetables, herbs, cutting boards, and cooking utensils are neatly organized in workstations, as if a television food show is about to be filmed.

Cynthia Graubart studied journalism at UGA and earned her master’s degree in broadcast management at the University of Florida in Gainesville; one of her first gigs out of school was producing Nathalie Dupree’s PBS series 'New Southern Cooking' in 1985.