![]() ![]() “I think that if you're a young Black cook and you look inside the windows of all these high-end restaurants, you don't see a lot of yourself, which may mean to your mind that maybe you're not as welcome there, maybe you won’t fit in there, whether that's the case or not.”īrown hopes his work helps to combat that idea and show aspiring young Black chefs that high-end kitchens can be a place for them. I think due to redlining, people are still kind of divided in Chicago,” Brown says. “We hire within the community, and I think that there aren’t a lot for high-end restaurants on the South Side. The majority of the staff at Virtue are people of color. The representation that was important to Brown in his early days in the industry is something they carried over to Virtue. Luckily, mk was very close to the school and I knocked on the back door, the sous chef opened it, and I saw Chef Williams.”īrown worked under Williams for seven years, and eventually the two got back together to open Virtue, a Southern American restaurant. ![]() “At that time, I didn't have many options. ![]() “I was, quite frankly, seeking out to work for a chef that looked like me,” Brown says. “Things I found delicious or find delicious today are actually flavors and ingredients that people were eating because that was what was available to them … This is all this relative space of why we do things the way we did things and why we do things the way we do things, that I think is fun to connect those dots and search out those timelines.”Īfter he went to culinary school, Brown had to figure out his next steps. “I was being taught flavors from the South,” he says. But eventually I realized that I didn't mind it so much.”īrown says that while he was learning to cook and watching his grandmother wash collard greens or prepare beans in a particular way, he was really learning about history. “So I think they had me in the kitchen to keep me out of trouble, keep an eye on me. My grandmother was in the house and I was an only child,” Brown says. He began by cooking what he called “simple things” – pot roast in a crock-pot, collard greens, beans, braised cabbage, or “anything that smelled the house up and took a long time.” A native of south suburban Harvey, Brown began cooking as a child, about age 7 or 8. “But I couldn't really help but just kind of be myself, and I think that resonated with a lot of people.”īefore his Top Chef success, Brown had years of experience working in the Chicago restaurant industry. I'm not the most talkative person… and traditionally that doesn't make for good TV,” says Brown. “A lot of people told me I should smile more and be more excitable and talk more. He said he enjoyed the experience, calling it “an incubator for rapid creative growth.” Brown was even voted the season’s “Fan Favorite.” That was validating for him. Williams convinced him to take the opportunity, Brown said, and his application was accepted.īrown made it far into season 19, which wrapped up on June 2 of this year–just one episode shy of the finale. He wasn’t sure if it was something he wanted to do, but he talked to his mentor, longtime collaborator, and Virtue owner Chef Erick Williams. “I wasn’t even sure if it was real at first, honestly,” says Brown, the Chef de Cuisine at Virtue in Hyde Park. Damarr Brown’s Top Chef journey began when a producer from the show reached out to him on Instagram and encouraged him to apply. ![]()
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