🇺🇸 United States · American cuisine · b. 1975
The Savannah chef whose Grey reframed Southern cuisine through African-American kitchen traditions.
Mashama Bailey is the executive chef and co-owner — with business partner Johno Morisano — of The Grey, a restaurant in Savannah, Georgia, that has become one of the most critically important American restaurants of the past decade. The Grey opened in 2014 in a meticulously restored 1938 Greyhound bus terminal in downtown Savannah, a building that had operated under segregation and that Bailey explicitly took on as a site for confronting and reframing the racial history of American Southern food.
Bailey was born in the Bronx and spent her early childhood there before moving as a young girl to her grandparents' home in Waynesboro, Georgia, where the food culture of rural Black Southern cooking — collards, rice and gravy, garden vegetables, smoked meat — became foundational to her. She returned to New York for college, worked as a social worker, and then decided in her late 20s to enter cooking professionally. She trained at the Institute of Culinary Education in New York and cooked under Gabrielle Hamilton at Prune, where she became sous chef.
When Johno Morisano approached her about opening a restaurant together in Savannah, she insisted that the project make explicit the African-American kitchen traditions that underlie Southern food but had been largely erased from the celebratory mythology of 'New Southern Cuisine' as it was being told in the 2010s. The Grey's menu draws on those traditions while integrating West African, Caribbean and global elements — and the restaurant's design preserves the bus terminal's segregated layout as a permanent reminder of the history it sits in.
Bailey won the James Beard Best Chef Southeast in 2019, was named one of the 50 Best Restaurants' "Chef's Choice" honourees in 2021, and won the James Beard Outstanding Chef Award — the most prestigious individual award in American food — in 2022, becoming the first Black woman to receive it.
Tell the truth about where Southern food comes from. Bailey argues that the cooking traditions celebrated as 'Southern' are overwhelmingly Black and African in origin, and that any restaurant calling itself Southern has an obligation to acknowledge that history rather than launder it. Her cooking is committed to historical accuracy as much as to flavour — to making visible the African, Caribbean and African-American hands that built the cuisine.
Restaurant in a restored 1938 Greyhound bus terminal; opened 2014. Multiple James Beard Awards.
Casual lunchtime deli-bodega offshoot of The Grey.
Second Grey location, opened 2023.
These recipes from our database reflect the american cooking tradition that Mashama works in. They are not direct reproductions of Mashama's copyrighted recipes, but traditional dishes inspired by the same culinary heritage.
“Southern food is Black food. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling you a lie about American history.”
— Mashama Bailey, Black, White, and The Grey
“We did not restore the segregation in the building because we love it. We restored it because we refuse to pretend it did not happen.”
— Interview, The New York Times
Decides to leave social work in her late 20s and enter cooking professionally.
Graduates from the Institute of Culinary Education in New York.
Joins Gabrielle Hamilton's Prune in New York; eventually becomes sous chef.
Meets businessman Johno Morisano, who is restoring the Greyhound bus terminal in Savannah, Georgia, and looking for a chef to open a restaurant there.
Opens The Grey in the restored bus terminal in Savannah.
Wins James Beard Best Chef Southeast.
Publishes Black, White, and The Grey with Morisano — a dual memoir of their partnership across racial and class lines.
Wins James Beard Outstanding Chef Award — the first Black woman to do so.
Opens The Grey at Diner Bar in Austin, Texas; named to Time 100 Most Influential People.
Mashama Bailey is an American chef and co-owner of The Grey restaurant in Savannah, Georgia. In 2022 she became the first Black woman to win the James Beard Outstanding Chef Award — the most prestigious individual honour in American food. She is widely credited with reshaping the public understanding of Southern cuisine by foregrounding its African-American and African origins.
The Grey is a restaurant in downtown Savannah, Georgia, housed in a meticulously restored 1938 Greyhound bus terminal. It opened in 2014 with Bailey as executive chef and Johno Morisano as business partner. The building's segregated layout has been preserved as part of the restoration — a deliberate decision Bailey has been outspoken about.
The Grey serves what Bailey calls 'Port City Southern' — a menu rooted in the rural Black Southern cooking of her childhood in Waynesboro, Georgia, integrated with West African, Caribbean and broader Atlantic-world influences. Dishes have included country captain, smoked collards, foie and grits, and rice-and-pea preparations that trace Lowcountry rice culture back to West African origins.
Black, White, and The Grey (2021) is the dual memoir Bailey co-wrote with her business partner Johno Morisano about the experience of opening and running The Grey together. The book is unusually candid about the tensions and negotiations involved in a Black woman chef and a white male businessman building a restaurant together in the American South, and is widely considered one of the most important food memoirs of the past decade.
The 1938 Greyhound terminal that houses The Grey operated under racial segregation for nearly 30 years, with separate waiting rooms, ticket counters and bathrooms for Black and white travellers. Bailey insisted, when she joined the project, that the segregated layout be preserved in the restoration rather than erased — making the building itself a permanent acknowledgement of the racial history of the American South.
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