When I first spoke with Frederick after her sold-out 2025 Juneteenth Farm-to-Table Dinner, she recounted each dish, noting the farmers she worked with to establish her menu. For the first course, she prepared a vegetarian fried “chicken” sandwich, with lion’s mane mushrooms, jerk slaw, and house pickles on plantain focaccia.
KF: A lot of people loved that first course—and a lot of people thought that they were actually eating fried chicken. No, you were eating lion’s mane mushroom! It came from a Black farmer. His name is Micah Colbert of Shroom Traders.
The second course was a melon salad with watermelon, cucumber, feta crumble, cherry tomatoes, pistachios, mixed greens, and a lime mint vinaigrette.
KF: The greens came from McDowell County, West Virginia. I watched the farmers pick the collard greens, the kale, the spinach. . . . A lot of the mint that I made for that vinaigrette came from my balcony garden.
For the main course, Frederick prepared a Suya grilled lamb, with stewed collard greens, sweet potato mash, and a pepper sauce.
KF: Suya is an African seasoning. . . . My best friend, she was from Ghana, I loved going to her house and eating her food, just having something different. My partner is an African man, and so I love incorporating those traditions and those things into my food.
JW: Tell me about the farmers who attended the dinner and the ways that you centered their produce in your ingredients.
KF: I was able to travel to McDowell County to visit Jason Tartt and Donnie Hairston on their 350 acres of land. . . . Being there, it was probably one of the best, rewarding feelings of my culinary journey and experience. Seeing two Black men run a 350-acre farm, that’s amazing. . . . The eggs that I used to fry up the mushrooms came from Donnie Hairston—and these are the best eggs I’ve probably ever eaten in my entire life. . . . Yeah, I could’ve went to Kroger, I could’ve went anywhere to get produce, but I made an effort to put a spotlight on these people.
JW: How did the farmers respond to your dinner?
KF: Jason Tartt of T & T Organics came up to me at the end and said, “Black farmers need people like you.” When I went home, that really sat with me. You need me? I feel like I need you! We need each other; that’s how you build community.
Dural Miller of Keep Your Faith Corporation was there . . . he got me a garden bed. He gave me soil, he gave me seeds, and he really was the one to invest into me wanting to be a farmer or a gardener-chef. And so, I thank him for that.
JW: You gave the farmers a space to show off, too—to celebrate them.
KF: And that’s what it’s about. It’s not about me and me being a chef, it’s about putting the spotlight on the farmers. And letting people know that there’s African Americans who are doing great things here. And this is where you can find them.
When you’re talking about a young Black girl who comes from a major city—like, I can get on a train and go to Washington, DC, and there’s Black culture everywhere, Black food everywhere, Black businesses everywhere. . . . I don’t want to change West Virginia at all. I think it’s a beautiful place. But I do want to change the way we see Black culture here.
JW: You received a standing ovation after the dinner concluded. How do you feel looking back on that moment?
KF: I kept saying that’s the first time I cried as a chef. Of course, I’m crying when I’m cutting onions and stuff like that. [Laughs] Seeing people appreciate me, and for me to be so young to pull something off like this, to not be from here, to show a different way of how things are supposed to be. There were a lot more African Americans in attendance at [the 2025] dinner than it was [in 2024]. Of course, I love all people, but I do these things for my community. . . . There were 135 people there, they didn’t all know each other. People were sitting next to strangers; people were dancing next to strangers. That’s community.
JW: What do you see as the future for this event, and the future for your career?
KF: As long as Capitol Market will allow me to host this event, as long as I’m alive to host it, I want to be able to bring this experience to the city. Hopefully, different people from the Appalachian region will start traveling to attend this event. . . . When they sit down and eat those courses, I just want them to feel all the love and all the rich history that African Americans have brought to this country. I always say, there’s not American history without Black history.
There was this thirteen-year-old girl, I know that she’s interested in being a chef. . . . I reached out to her mom, “Do you think she would be interested in helping me at the Farm-to-Table Dinner?” Because I thought, when I was thirteen and I was at camp, I wish I had someone to say “Hey, do you want to come and do this dinner? Or work at my restaurant? Or x, y, z?” So, investing in the future is definitely a part of my plan, especially building the next generations of African American chefs, African American farmers.
So, if I can invest in the future of young chefs, that means a lot. I have no desire to open up a restaurant. If I had a million dollars, I would probably open up a camp—the same type of camp that I went to when I was a kid. But farm-to-table and hosting dinners like this is always going to be a part of my career. That’s a no-brainer, especially considering how this is the first of its kind. I got to make sure it lives on.
Tickets are on sale for the third annual Juneteenth Farm-to-Table dinner hosted at Charleston’s Capitol Market on June 19, 2026.
Dining and Cooking