Mashama Bailey: ‘My culinary roots are multicultural’

“We have a beautiful oyster bar. We’re very focused on the Gulf,” chef Mashama Bailey says about Diner Bar, one of two restaurants that she and business partner John O. Morisano opened in 2022 off the lobby of Thompson Austin. Growing up in New York and Savannah, Bailey might never have pictured herself “focusing on the Gulf” in the capital of Texas, but that versatility is what makes her the chef that she is: Wherever she goes, she scans her environment and tucks its best elements into her pockets.

If you’re not familiar with Bailey, you might be familiar with The Grey in Savannah, the Port City Southern-inspired restaurant that she and Morisano opened in 2014 in a restored 1938 Greyhound bus terminal. Not only did the space turn out to be pure cool—Art Deco architecture, shower stalls once used by bus drivers transformed into private dining rooms, a ticket booth-turned-kitchen—the historical symbolism was poignant: When built, the station, its lunch counter, and the whole South were segregated, and now here was Bailey, a Black chef, replacing that history with something beautiful and inclusive. At The Grey, she went on to pick up two James Beard Awards: ‘Best Chef: Southeast’ in 2019 and ‘Outstanding Chef’ in 2022.

Bailey describes her trajectory like this: “I grew up a Southern girl eating figs off the tree. Then I was in the New York melting pot with my grandmother’s Hawaiian chicken, bagels from Jewish delis, Korean barbecue. My culinary roots are multicultural.” When she was young, she watched her mother and grandmother make traditional Southern dishes. Their respectively pork-based and turkey-based collard greens, for example, inform the vegan version she prepares at The Grey with onion, olive oil, and smoke. She entered a whole new culinary world when she got to college, “where everyone was from a different island.” Friends from Trinidad, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico taught her how to prepare sofritos, plantains, and roasted herby chicken. “We weren’t cooking with our grandparents,” Bailey says, “so we didn’t have stock. We had bouillon cubes. We had ham-flavored Goya and we put it on everything.” Over winter break of her first year of college, when she made chicken curry for her family, her mother said, “You should cook for a living.”

_{Diner Bar in Austin. Photos: Diner Bar/Jessica Attie}

At first, she brushed off the advice. She’d grown up cooking with her cousin who, she says, laughing, “thought he was Bobby Flay.” That competitiveness intimidated her, and she’d shied away from getting too serious about making food. Instead, she followed in both her parents’ footsteps by becoming a social worker—a background she frequently calls on these days as a team-leader in the kitchen: “Teaching people how to cook is hands-on and then hands-off. You have to be aware of people’s strengths and weaknesses. You have to know when to apply pressure and when to let them try things on their own.” But her chosen profession, it turned out, was not a fit: “I wasn’t very confident at my job, unless I was cooking food for my co-workers. Cooking for people at work made me feel better.” Soon she headed to culinary school on a work-study program, learned European techniques, and eventually made her way to the iconic Prune, where she worked under Gabrielle Hamilton. “I saw that Gabrielle’s restaurant reflected her personal journey,” Bailey says. “The food resonated.”

When she and Morisano opened The Grey, Bailey sought to do what Hamilton had done: She believed that her food should reflect who she was. And to reflect where she was. That meant not only calling up her “multicultural roots,” but engaging with the present-day South. She embarked on a food tour, tasting hot chicken in Nashville, comeback sauce (a famous-in-Mississippi dip for fried food) at the Mayflower Café in Jackson, caramel cake at a gas station in Alabama, and turtle soup at the Creole restaurant Commander’s Palace in New Orleans. True to form, she absorbed the best parts of Southern cooking, brought them to her kitchen, and added her own twist.

At Thompson Austin, The Grey is deconstructed into two parts: Diner Bar, designed by the same firm that designed the space in Savannah, offers laidback fine dining, including fun takes on Southern classics, like rabbit dirty rice and deviled eggs topped with smoked fish and trout roe. And the adjacent Grey Market offers a hipster spin on an old-school Southern lunch counter—a cheery, light-filled space, where the breakfast crowd sits bellied up on stools, drinking strong coffee with their hash and eggs.

_{Inside Diner Bar. Photo courtesy Diner Bar}

Bailey’s vision for Diner Bar’s menu is ever evolving: “We make our own Parker House rolls and I want to do lobster sliders on them. I want to do swordfish frites, a play on steak frites. I want to do pickled shrimp. Tinned fish. I’m really interested in hand pies [meat-stuffed pastries that are popular in the Caribbean]. Growing up in Queens Village, I loved the hand pies at the Haitian takeout restaurant.”

Bailey’s confidence in who she is, her curiosity about the fresh ingredients her surroundings offer, and her raw talent when it comes to, simply, making food taste good have catapulted her to culinary stardom. And her work ethic doesn’t hurt: When I ask her what she’d like readers to know about her that isn’t food-related, she laughs because she can’t think of much. Then she says, “I love dogs. They should bring me a dog.”

“Sometimes I feel like I’m on a cruise ship,” she says, musing about the time she spends in the kitchen at Thompson Austin. “I never leave.” Frankly, she sounds thrilled about it.