There are just so many different people who make up the south and created what we consider to be Southern cuisine. Southern cuisine is not anywhere else in the world. They didn't bring that from somewhere, it was a melding of all of these different people coming together.


I wanted Southern Table to be almost like an homage to the way I grew up, the things that I love the most about my family's farm, and picking greens and being able to transition that into something so delicious.


The one thing I wanted and I craved was the foods I grew up eating that were not being represented well. Either they weren't being represented at all, or it wasn't being represented well, in the ways that I grew up.


I got so tired of seeing people only talk about dishes when they talked about the South. They forget about all the abundance of beautiful produce we have, all of the people in our families who were hunters and fishermen, and all of that… and that's what the South was about.


You have to first always honor the dishes that you're doing. There is a fine line where you can lose the dish's identity.