We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jennifer Hill Booker a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Jennifer, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We love asking folks what they would do differently if they were starting today – how they would speed up the process, etc. We’d love to hear how you would set everything up if you were to start from step 1 today.

I am dream driven-meaning that I use lists and vision boards to help me stay on track of achieving my dreams. My focus stays the same, although I may add different things that I want to achieve and remove items as I do achieve them. I’m at a point in my career where I’ve achieved the majority of items on my list and find myself at a loss of what to do next. So, one piece of advice I can give is to Dream Big. No matter how outlandish or unachievable others may find your dreams-they are there to keep you motivated and focused. I sometimes feel that if I had bigger dreams, in the beginning of my culinary career, that I would be further along in it.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

Chef Jennifer Hill Booker has taken her Southern culinary heritage, her belief in healthy, seasonal foods and her classic French training to create a unique cuisine — Modern Southern Healthy Cuisine with a French Accent.

Chef’s cooking style is a modern reinvention of Southern cuisine that incorporates the traditional use of seasonal ingredients, important to maintain a healthy lifestyle, with French culinary techniques she learned from her training at the Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Paris, France.

Her first cookbook, Field Peas to Foie Gras: Southern Recipes with a French Accent. (Pelican Publishing, 2014) includes original recipes that will help you create healthy, delicious meals for your family. Using Southern upbringing and French training as the basis for culinary exploration in her second cookbook, Dinner Déjà Vu: Southern Tonight, French Tomorrow, (Pelican Publishing, March 2017), uses one list of fresh ingredients to create two meals, one Southern and one French. Combined grocery lists provide time-saving tools for recipes from cocktails to desserts and everything in between. In her first illustrated children’s book, Jelly Fries A Fish For Dinner, (Tallahatchie Tales, March 2021), Chef Jennifer highlights the foods of the Mississippi Delta, through the eyes of her daughter Jenelle.

Who is Chef Jennifer Hill Booker? She’s an African American woman of strength and character who can creatively meet life and culinary challenges with grace. Her passion for the culinary world knows no boundaries from creating new recipes, to teaching culinary arts, presenting live cooking demonstrations, keynote-speaking engagements and in the digital world where she engages with her online community. Her focused attention to detail came through loud and clear when she was a contestant on the Food Network’s Cutthroat Kitchen competition food show. Life experiences have given her a special sensitivity to sharing her joy of cooking with others including single, working moms and military families. She takes pleasure in teaching people to cook healthy and delicious food. With her extensive culinary endeavors as a professional chef, culinary arts instructor and cookbook author, Chef Jennifer Hill Booker is like having your favorite chef in the kitchen with you! She is an inspiration and role model for girls and modern women who are balancing life’s many challenges.

Chef Jennifer’s culinary path has not always been a linear one. She earned her Bachelor’s Degree from the University of Tulsa before graduating first in her class; eighteen months later, with an Associate of Occupational Science from Oklahoma State Institute of Technology. Extensive travel while married to a United States Army Officer pushed Jennifer to blaze a trail that fit her unique situation-a female African American chef, living abroad. As a result, her culinary company Your Resident Gourmet was born. During her time living in Germany, Jennifer honed her culinary talents by providing cooking classes for both military and German families. She was also able to fulfill a lifelong dream of attending Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Paris, where she once again graduated top of her class. Twenty years later Jennifer finds herself once again blazing culinary trails as she wears many culinary hats as chef, cookbook author of Field Peas to Foie Gras: Southern Recipes with a French Accent and Dinner Déjà Vu: Southern Tonight, French Tomorrow, reality TV personality, culinary educator and business owner.

She is a Georgia Grown Executive Chef for the GA Department of Agriculture, the Culinary Explorer for the Georgia Department of Tourism and Travel, is the founder of Southern Divas of the New South* Dinner Series. Chef Jennifer is the current President of the prestigious Atlanta chapter of Les Dames d’Escoffier International, a member of SlowFood-Atlanta and of Atlanta’s No Kid Hungry Atlanta Society. Chef Jennifer currently sits on the James Beard Foundation Sustainability Advisory Council.

Weaving her love of traditional Southern cuisine with her belief in incorporating healthy, seasonal foods and her classic French training, Chef Jennifer created a unique style of cooking that she terms Modern Southern Healthy Cuisine with a French Accent. Chef Jennifer shares this brand of cooking through her many guest chef television appearances, with original recipes in such publications as Waste Not Cookbook, Southern Living Magazine, Garden & Gun and Essence Magazine. During her Food Network debut as a finalist on Cutthroat Kitchen, Chef Jennifer was able to showcase her love of Southern cuisine with a French accent, and again when her family was featured on an episode of Andrew Zimmern’s show, Family Dinner-found on Magnolia Network. Her website, ChefJenniferHillBooker.com provides information about healthy eating, culinary trends, travel, and recipes that reflect her culinary point of view of Modern Southern Healthy Cuisine with a French Accent.
Chef Jennifer is opening her first restaurant, Bauhaus Biergarten, in Springdale Arkansas the summer of 2022.She spends her free time in her kitchen, garden, or the farmer’s market with her two daughters Jenelle and Regine and their KorgieJack, Pudge.

Accolades
• President Les Dames d’Escoffier International-Atlanta Chapter
• No Kid Hungry-Atlanta Society Member
• The James Beard Foundation Impact Fellow
• The James Beard Foundation Food Waste Advisory Committee Member
• The James Beard Foundation Chef’s Boot Camp for Policy Change Alum
• Georgia Grown Executive Chef for Georgia Department of Agriculture
• Georgia Explorer for Georgia Department of Tourism and Travel
• Founder Oklahoma State University Institute of Technology’s Chef Jennifer Hill Booker Culinary Arts Scholarship

How’d you meet your business partner?

Funny story. I was in Bentonville, Arkansas for their BITE Festival. At the time, I was actively working as the James Beard Foundation’s No Waste Impact Fellow and there to present a cooking demonstration and create a dish for the festival. I met, my now business partner, Daniel Hintz after a day of festival preparations. He was gathering up all the guest chefs and offering a welcome toast with this really bad bourbon. I don’t even remember the name of it but I do remember that is was so terrible that no one drank it! Luckily his business sense, tenacity and shared dream of opening up a community focused restaurant and bar more than made up for his poor choice in bourbon.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

Gearing up to write and publish my first cookbook, I knew that I needed to build my audience-both virtually and face to face. While I was testing recipes, I was out presenting cooking demonstrations at food festivals, Expos and at local cooking schools building my fan base. I also collected emails at these events, which was extremely important in connecting with potential customers. What I think was most successful in building my virtual presence was sending out a weekly newsletter with cooking tips, recipes and my calendar of events. So by the time my cookbook was published, I had a large group of people who were waiting to buy it.

Contact Info:

• Website: ChefJenniferHillBooker.com
• Instagram: Fieldpeastofoiegras/Bauhausbiergarten/yourresidentgourmetcooks
• Facebook: ChefJenniferBooker/JenniferBooker/Bauhausbiergarten
• Linkedin: ChefJenniferBooker
• Twitter: @chefjennbooker
• Youtube: ChefJenniferBooker

Image Credits
Head shots: Kate Blohm Other photos are labeled.