Honeywood executive chef Lawrence Weeks’ second annual culinary celebration of Black History Month has been expanded to two nights in 2021, taking place on Feb. 26 and Feb. 27. Guest chefs Ashleigh Shanti from Asheville, N.C., and BJ Dennis from Charleston, S.C., will collaborate with Chef Weeks to create a unique menu that celebrates their personal culinary journeys, African American-Appalachian foodways and Gullah-Geechee foodways from Carolina Lowcountry.
The collaborative menu will celebrate these often overlooked food identities, along with the excellent Black chefs, farmers, artists, and musicians. Ashley Smith from Black Soil, a Black farmers group, will host the casual, fun evening. Dinner will be served a la carte with plates ranging from $8 to $20. Reservations can be made on OpenTable or by phone.
More about the chefs:
Chef Weeks dedicated his heart to cooking as a child growing up in a Southern Creole/Cajun household in Louisville. His mother’s family is from Southwest Louisiana and his father’s is from Central Kentucky. Weeks’ professional career began in 2010. After culinary school, Lawrence worked under chef Todd Richards at The Pig and The Pearl in Atlanta, where Richards encouraged him to “find his roots in food.” When Weeks returned to his home state, he started LocalsOnly, a Louisville pop up that focused on local people, products, and food. Weeks joined Honeywood in 2019 assuming the executive chef position in October of 2019. Weeks was named a 2020 Smith Fellow by the Southern Foodways Alliance.
Ashleigh Shanti is an American chef and sommelier from Asheville, N.C. Shanti specializes in African-American foodways, especially from Appalachia. Shanti's credits include chef de cuisine at Benne on Eagle in Asheville; Minibar, José Andrés's vaunted D.C. restaurant, a coveted stage at Blue Hill at Stone Barns under chef Dan Barber and culinary assistant for Chef & the Farmer co-owner Vivian Howard. She also taught fermentation classes at the Southern Food and Beverage Museum in New Orleans and has a deep knowledge of the craft. In 2019, Shanti was nominated for a James Beard Award for Rising Star Chef and named an Eater 2019 Young Gun.
BJ Dennis, born and raised in Charleston, is widely considered the national expert on his native Gullah-Geechee cuisine. Chef Dennis teaches and preserves Gullah-Geechee culture through cooking, preserving and sharing his ancestral dishes. He also grows indigenous heirloom ingredients for those recipes. He possesses a deep knowledge of the foods enslaved Africans brought with them to the shores of the southeastern United States and how African farming skills gave root to many ingredients now considered the backbone of Lowcountry cuisine and more broadly Southern cuisine. Chef Dennis infuses the techniques of his ancestors, learned from four years of study in St. Thomas, as well as the lessons he learned from his grandparents about eating from the land, to create fresh interpretations of local dishes. His work has been featured in The New York Times, Bon Appetit, Parts Unknown with Anthony Bourdain and this past year on Padma Lakshmi’s Taste the Nation.