Chef Ouita Michel’s culinary portrait of Kentucky selected for NY film festival

Central Kentuckians are used to Chef Ouita Michel receiving culinary honors such as James Beard recognition and popping up on national media outlets such the Food Network and CBS News. Official Selection of Tribeca X, part of the Tribeca Festival co-founded by Robert De Niro, is an unexpected twist in the Chef’s storied career.

In early June, Michel will be at Tribeca with “You Belong Here,” an eight-episode television series she developed with Macaroni Art Productions, a company co-founded by her fellow Midway resident Steve Zahn. The series features Michel traveling around Kentucky connecting with other chefs and exploring connections between food and culture in the Bluegrass State.

“I’ve wanted to do this for a long time,” Michel said. “It just sort of lived in my mind, a show talking about Kentucky’s food culture and showing Kentucky’s food culture as it relates to the larger culture of Kentucky, and not in a studio, but like in Kentucky, visiting people, listening to stories, telling stories.”

The series was recorded between November 2023 and July 2024 so, “you see a lot of the landscape of Kentucky, but you really experience the seasons of Kentucky too,” Michel says.

Michel’s overall aim was to show a Kentucky that is often missed when national media outlets come to the Bluegrass State.

“I especially loved talking with farmers, being on the farm with people, and then being in the middle of downtown Louisville of West Louisville and meeting young chefs of all different kinds of backgrounds, and then being out in the country, outside Bowling Green on a farm, cooking a meal from that farm,” Michel said. “It was, to me, really showing the diversity of Kentucky, of all the different people who live here.

“We’re a complicated state. We have a rich history and an amazing cultural, deep literary tradition, and musical culture. And I just wanted it all to come together a bit more than it ever does in our national media culture.”

Michel said she was inspired by the late Anthony Bourdain whose “Parts Unknown” and other shows explored the places he was visiting in depth through the food and culture surrounding them. The episodes include one focused on music at the Master Musicians Festival in Somerset with Bee Taylor, who wrote music for the show, a Louisville episode looking at how food truck culture leads to a new generation of brick and mortar restaurants, and a literary celebration with chef Kristen M. Smith at Corbin’s Wrigley Tap Room.

“The role of the small restaurant in small communities in Kentucky and the kind of community that they can help build is extremely important,” Michel said. “I’m not sure that I necessarily saw it as clearly as I did after having experienced it through making this series.”

Michel says work on the show had her contemplating a lot of questions that aren’t necessarily asked in but are addressed by the series like, “what am I contributing to Kentucky’s food culture? Is it positive? Is it negative? If it’s negative, what are the ways that I can make it more positive? What do restaurants contribute to Lexington or to Kentucky’s food culture? What is farming? Are restaurants hurting or helping farming?

“We’re also exploring a lot of memory, so some of it’s deeply personal. How does your mother set your palate? What do your parents contribute to your sense of food knowledge and food experience, and is that significant in a person’s life?”

The episode that Michel and the filmmakers are taking to Tribeca and the ATX TV Festival in Austin, Texas, is the first one, which was filmed in and around Lexington in the Fall of 2023. Michel, who serves as host and executive producer, will be joined by Zahn and Rick Gomez, co-founder of Macaroni Art, in panel discussions at the events which are designed in part to help answer the question, where can we see this?

Film and TV festivals are a marketplace for distributors to see properties they may want to acquire. An official selection of Tribeca and ATX is already a strong endorsement for “You Belong Here,” and Michel said she hopes they will help the show find a great streaming platform to carry it. “Maestra,” the documentary featuring Lexington Philharmonic Music Director Mélisse Brunet is now streaming on Netflix.

Michel also hopes to have viewing events in the communities where the series was made.

In addition to a deep dive into Kentucky’s food culture, “You Belong Here” gave Michel a chance to collaborate with Zahn, a versatile, Emmy Award-nominated actor who has made Midway his and his family’s home for years. In addition to the series, Macaroni Art’s “She Dances,” a feature film starring Zahn, directed by Gomez, and filmed in Kentucky, will premiere at the Tribeca Festival.

“He’s been a longtime customer of ours, and he’s a wonderful human being,” Michel said. “He loves living in Kentucky. He’s a fantastic actor, but he’s really just a pretty down home person, and he loves to make burgoo. He stirred that burgoo pot all day long, and we had a big burgoo last year, and I’m hopeful we can have another one coming up in the fall.”

She also hopes “You Belong Here” won’t be a one-and-done.

“I hope to make a season two,” Michel said, “because there’s so many more stories to tell.”