For attendees, Southern Smoke Festival is a one-day food crawl feast of light bites from nearly 100 chefs nationwide in support of Houston-based Southern Smoke Foundation’s mission to help food-and-beverage workers across the country with emergency relief and mental health support. (The foundation announced Saturday night the event raised $2 million for its causes.)
But the preparation for the annual event begins well before guests arrive, with chefs cooking and celebrating side-by-side here in Houston. Some of the chefs traveling from out of state even source ingredients locally and regionally and utilize kitchen space from other participating restaurants. McKinney, for example, got shrimp for a chef from Oklahoma City and dairy for friends coming from Charleston, S.C.
“It’s our Super Bowl. It’s the restaurant Super Bowl for Houston. … You don’t know who’s going to walk in this restaurant and sit down. You have the greatest minds of our entire industry … and they’re going to watch you serve them,” McKinney told Chron.
“You don’t get to fill your dining room with people that know food as well as the people that are in town this weekend, so it’s a cool experience.”
Josephine’s was at the center of the action this weekend. The restaurant hosted the official after-party for Southern Smoke on Saturday night, and on Friday night, McKinney brought a taste of Texas to the Food & Wine Best New Chefs class with a private “Backyard Boil” party.
“All of our cuisines are so different … It’s cool to think I get to show them what the Gulf Coast cuisine really is,” he explained. “It’s like an opportunity to show them what my house was like growing up. Not only have service and eat, but like we’re going to cook for you the way that I cook at my house for people.”
McKinney said he found out in February that he’d been selected among Food & Wine’s Best New Chefs class, months before the announcement went public in September. All hailing from different parts of the U.S., the honorees got to serve alongside one another at Southern Smoke’s Best New Chefs section on the festival grounds.
“This is like all just like good friends. Now we’re as if we have been buddies for so long because we spend so many intense moments together back-to-back that it just became like a nice class, a bunch of good friends hanging out,” Rishi Kumar, another F&W Best New Chef of Mirra and Mariela in Chicago, told Chron. “It’s refreshing to hear all the people and the way they are navigating through business. Everybody’s going through the same s–t.”
McKinney and his team spent the week preparing 1,000 Gulf Coast shrimp rolls, which were gone within two hours. After all that prep, he said, getting to serve was the fun part … all before he got to host the likes of Southern Smoke co-founders Chris Shepherd and Lindsey Brown, and a host of chefs and workers at the after-party.
“It’s a really good community for the chefs to come together. Like, it’s a great event for our community, but also, it’s built around like, hey, come in town, you know, get out of the restaurant for a little bit, enjoy yourself, you know, and, and you’re surrounded by some of the best minds in our industry that it all feeds off of each other,” he said. “And so on the chef side, it’s really special.”
Dining and Cooking