Milk Bar’s Christina Tosi said she cranks up the reggae music. That way, when she’s baking the delectable treats she’s known for, the warm kitchen feels more like a tropical paradise than a workplace. Tosi, the renowned New York-based cookbook author, chef and one time MasterChef judge, was one of many celebrity chefs at Southern Smoke Festival last weekend. She and others who participated in the annual fund raiser for food industry workers were kind enough to discuss how music plays a role in their lives as culinary creators.
“I love to sing, so every time I’m baking I’m probably humming or singing along to a playlist. It’s very important,” said Camari Mick, executive pastry chef at the Manhattan Michelin-starred restaurant The Musket Room. She baked sweet potato bao buns for the hordes of foodies who descended upon the fest, which was held at Discovery Green. They were so delicious this writer ate his after he clumsily dropped it on the ground (he did kiss it to God, just FYI).
“I grew up with music being filled through the house and my mom always cooking, so it’s very nostalgic,” said Mick, who is also executive pastry chef and partner at Raf’s and a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree for 2024. “I will do it in the kitchen today to the point where my cooks are definitely aware when I’m in house because they’re like, ‘Oh, karaoke time – she’s here!’”
Mick said her go-to karaoke song is Amy Winehouse’s “Valerie.” We don’t know if he’s a karaoke king, but Houston’s own Emmanuel Chavez, of the acclaimed Tatemó – a James Beard Foundation Award finalist for Best New Restaurant in 2023 – says another fallen songstress, Selena, is a must in the restaurant’s music-friendly environs.
“They do intertwine. I believe music is an integral part of how we operate as human beings, it defines our mood. And you wanna eat good when you do listen to good music,” Chavez said. “We spend a lot of time curating playlists for our tasting menu at Tatemó, that goes hand in hand with the dishes and the mood. If it’s cold, if it’s hot – just as much time as we spend on sourcing ingredients we spend putting a playlist together that reflects who we are.”
“Maná! Maná always has to be there,” he said, “and Selena. We have a lot of Selena songs, that Tex-Mex and the empowerment of women, it just makes sense to eat to Selena.”
We met with Sean Umstead, co-owner and beverage director of Durham, North Carolina’s Kingfisher, an innovative, produce-driven cocktail bar. He didn’t have much to say about music but did tell us how Southern Smoke Foundation is making an impact in restaurant communities across the country. The foundation was launched in 2015 by Houston celebrity chef Chris Shepherd. He and his wife, Lindsey Brown, have grown the mission of the foundation, but assisting food and beverage industry workers in times of crisis has been at the core of their work. This year’s festival earned $1.5 million for those initiatives.
“Small businesses, restaurant industry, probably music venues too, they’re such a unique industry and they don’t have a lot of support structure. Southern Smoke offers a really unique, efficient way of providing some of that safety net to the folks who work in this industry,” said Umstead, who was representing his farm-centric cocktail bar for the first time at the festival.
“They do a really great job of quickly funding people when they’re in crisis, whether it’s personal or natural disasters affecting a lot of people. They have a new focus on mental health and trying to provide basically free mental health counseling to folks in this industry, too. So, in lieu of there being a better solution, they’re really providing a strong win for the industry. So, it’s nice to be able to be here to help.”
Umstead was manning the booth with a Kingfisher staffer named Lily, who handled our music inquiries.
“We have a jazz night that’s really fun so we get to watch people enjoy improvisational music going on and it’s really paired well with having cocktails and a unique take on what you do with produce. It’s a very creative communal space,” Lily said.
“You gotta strike that balance of what keeps the bartenders’ and the servers’ energy up and what matches the energy of what’s on the floor,” Lily continued and added that could be everything from Italian disco to cumbia remixes to shoegaze.
Isabel Coss was also a first-time SSF participant. She is the chef of Pascual and pastry chef of Lutèce, in Washington, D.C. Born in Mexico City, she’s worked in several top culinary concepts and was named Best New Chef in 2023 by Food & Wine.
“Honestly, I wanna say a little story. We just hired a new cook and we’ve been trying some new things, like we’re trying to implement access to like a 401K and give access to health insurance – all this is very new to restaurants,” Coss said. “I’ve been working in restaurants for 12 years and this didn’t happen. If you get sick, you just suck it up, you know? That was the old way.
“Now I’m a chef and now I have a team and I try to implement stuff but sometimes it doesn’t hit ‘til a few months when someone starts working,” she said. “I have a new cook, an incredible young guy, comes to me – ‘Hey chef, when can I start my health (insurance), when does it kick in, because I really need to get back into my mental health,’ and I was like, ‘Oh, actually you know, don’t worry about it. I know Southern Smoke, they got you, they can help you.’
“These tools didn’t exist before. I was so happy that I could finally provide something,” she said. “I think this is what it is, it’s giving us professionals tools to handle things better and I want it to grow, I wanted to support it.”
Coss isn’t just a kind-hearted chef with amazing taste, she’s also a music fan. She said, “we’re a Mexican restaurant and right now I’m obsessed with a band called Malo.” The band is an old school Latin rock and jazz outfit that was led by the late Jorge Santana, brother of rock legend Carlos Santana. “They’re amazing! I love the music, it’s like kind of cumbias that goes a little psychedelic.”
All these wonderful hometown and visting chefs might have been standing in the park alone if not for the many foodies who came for special tastes and lots of fun. One such group was George Kurisky, Jr., and his family, Kay, Haley and Alex. We saw Kurisky and his wife Kay at the Chefs for Farmers Food and Wine Festival at Autry Park just the weekend before, so trust us, he knows fine dining. Kurisky said he’s a major Rolling Stones fan and he loves to cook. He hosts a pig roast in Galveston and invites folks to an early morning, non-traditional Thanksgiving meal every year.
We asked what is the best Stones song to dial up while fixing whole hog caja china style, as Kurisky prefers.
“We’re big Stones fans, we just finished the whole Rolling Stones tour this summer, we did every show. So, probably ‘Gimme Shelter,’ or ‘Heartbreaker.’ And, in Texas, anything Stevie Ray Vaughan. You have to.”
“Kitchen music very important, not just to me but our whole kitchen staff. Every day I walk in and they’re blasting some playlist or another and it always gets us in the mood,” said Abbas Dhanani, a native Houstonian whose Burger Bodega skews towards NYC 1990s hip-hop and was the Houston Press’s Best of Houston Best Burger in 2023. “Then right at 11 o’clock we make sure we’re on our Burger Bodega playlist.”
“I usually listen to hip hop music,” said Benchawan Jabthong Painter, whose incredible Thai restaurant, Street to Kitchen, earned her the 2023 James Beard Award for Best Chef Texas nod. She said her favorite song to play in the kitchen is titled “Good Morning,” and it’s filled with the vibe that encourages one to follow their dreams.
“I listen at least one time a day. If I’m really tired, I might listen more,” Painter laughed and then handed us a sample of her food which was probably the best food we sampled the entire afternoon.
We gave the last word to an old friend of Southern Smoke Festival, Chef Paola Velez. When we first met her three installments ago at Hermann Park, her star had already risen on the culinary horizon. She’s now one of the industries brightest lights, having just appeared on NBC’s Today show a few days before she was at Discovery Green sharing a Baked Alaska Shaved Ice, her take on the summertime treat flavored with white pearl milk syrup, hochija syrup and a black sesame mousse topped with a torched merengue.
“I think music is the catalyst that can bring about creativity. It brings about peace. It can evoke anger. And, for food, it can invoke flavor,” said Velez, whose work as an activist for food industry workers and culinary creations recently came neatly together in her Bodega Bakes cookbook and nicely mirror Southern Smoke’s own efforts. “Right now, I like to listen to Mulatu (Astatke), so I’m vibing on him right now, that jazzy, like Ethiopian vibe.”
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2024.
