Black history dining event to serve 5-course Southern Roots experience

Lawrence Weeks wants people to bring one thing with them to the Southern Roots Dinner Series event at Honeywood later this month: “An open mind.” Black cuisine in the Southeast, he said, “expands beyond cornbread and collard greens.”

As far as Weeks, who joined Honeywood as executive chef in October, knows this is the first event of its type anywhere, a five-course culinary and oral history experience focused on celebrating black food heritage and culture.

The dishes that will expand minds and palates include New Orleans style hot tamale with lamb, chili, buttermilk crema, shaved radish and lime, and collard salad with fennel, crispy hominy and apple-chestnut dressing.

Some of the ingredients will be sourced regionally from African American farmers, the wines will come from the only African American-owned estate vineyard in the Napa Valley, Brown Estate Vineyard, and a star black chef from Asheville, N.C., Ashleigh Shanti, will join Weeks in cooking the meal.

Weeks looks around the Southeastern United States and sees in the food eaten the deep influence of black culture throughout the region, whether in the Gullah/Geechee influence on the Lowcountry cuisine of coastal South Carolina, the Creole food in New Orleans or the Appalachian/West African black eyed pea fritters that Shanti (her Instagram nametag is “foodordeath”) cooks at Benne on Eagle in Asheville.

Shanti, who has been featured in everything from Garden and Gun to The New York Times, will be the lead chef at the event, Weeks said, although he will prepare a few items, too. He was looking around for a guest chef for this dinner when he went to Asheville a few months ago to meet her and sample her cooking. He loved the food (the current menu includes fried catfish and waffles, liver and pickles and persimmon pork) and, “she’s such a nice person, I thought she would be perfect.”

This won’t be Shanti’s first Black History culinary event as a chef but this dinner is still special, she said. “This particular event is unique as it explores my black and Appalachian history at the same time — anything I can do to honor my culture is fulfilling.” With Appalachian roots herself (“I grew up stringing green beans and hanging britches,”she told Garden and Gun) she’s glad to be coming to Kentucky to cook, and educate. “I do think black Appalachians are largely forgotten in the region,” she said, “and any awareness I can bring to the work we’ve done is special.”

Some of the connections to regional suppliers came from Ashley Smith, who with her husband, Trevor Claiborn, founded Black Soil in 2017 to stem the decline of rural, farming communities generally and the even more rapid disappearance of black farmers in Kentucky. Smith said that while the roots of American cuisine are totally entwined with the history of black people here, people have lost touch with that profound connection. Instead, “degrading images of African Americans like Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben,” became the popular representation of the connection between those slaves and America’s palate. “A lot of this movement is about redefining the role African Americans have played in this country’s food culture and history,” she said.

Shanti claims that movement, too, and is proud to be part of “reclaiming what belongs to us….. To me, it is not a movement, but a recognition of what we’ve known to be true for ages.”

And it’s fitting that Shanti’s food will be paired with wines from the Brown Estate Vineyard. Weeks said he had been aware of Brown but never tasted the wines until he began planning for this dinner. Then, he and Leslee Macpherson, Honeywood’s General Manager, contacted the vineyard, tasted their wine, “and decided that we liked it so much that we were going to include them in the dinner.”

All of this preparation is worth the effort, he said. “I truly believe this is one of the most important dinners I’ve ever done.”

Southern Roots Dinner Series

Where: Honeywood, 110 Summit At Fritz Farm #140

When: 6:30 p.m. Feb. 27

Cost: Five-course dinner and Brown Estate pairing is $125. Dinner without wine pairing is $95. Seating is limited to 100.

Tickets: Online at honeywoodrestaurant.com or ouitamichel.com. (859) 469-8234.

This story was originally published February 13, 2020 at 6:00 AM.