Chris Shepherd
Midwest-raised, James Beard Award-winning Chef Chris Shepherd has helped change the landscape of the Houston culinary scene since opening Underbelly in 2012. He built the restaurant to support the Houston food community and its suppliers by buying local and drawing inspiration from the people and cultures that live in the city. Thanks to Chris’ vision and passion, Underbelly was a James Beard Award semifinalist for Best New Restaurant, was named one of the best new restaurants in the country by Bon Appetit and Esquire and was named one of 38 essential restaurants in America by Eater. Chris was named one of the 10 Best New Chefs in America by Food & Wine in 2013 and was then awarded the 2014 James Beard Award for Best Chef: Southwest.
Chris was a semifinalist for the James Beard Award for Outstanding Chef in 2019 and was named Robb Report's Chef of the Year the same year. Chris’ first cookbook, Cook Like a Local: Flavors that Will Change the Way You Cook—and See the World, was published by Clarkson Potter in September 2019 and was nominated for a 2020 James Beard Foundation Book Award.
Chris began his fine dining career at Brennan’s of Houston, where he spent seven years in the kitchen and then ran the wine program for two. He left Brennan’s in 2006 to open Catalan Food & Wine, which was named one of Esquire’s Best New Restaurants in America that same year.
Chris' foundation Southern Smoke has distributed more than $10 million directly to people in the food and beverage industry in need via the Emergency Relief Fund.
Cook Like A Local
James Beard Award-winning Chef Chris Shepherd is a champion of Houston’s incredibly diverse immigrant cuisines. In this book, he calls out the names of the cooks—Vietnamese, Korean, Indian, and others--who have inspired him, and ihe teaches you how to work with those flavors and cultures with respect and creativity.
Houston's culinary reputation as a steakhouse town was put to rest by Chris Shepherd. A cook with insatiable curiosity, he's trained not just in fine-dining restaurants but in Houston's Korean grocery stores, Vietnamese noodle shops, Indian kitchens, and Chinese mom-and-pops. His food, incorporating elements of all these cuisines, tells the story of the city, and country, in which he lives. An advocate, not an appropriator, he asks his diners to go and visit the restaurants that have inspired him, and in this book he brings us along to meet, learn from, and cook with the people who have taught him.
The recipes include signatures from his restaurants--favorites such as braised goat with Korean rice dumplings, or fried vegetables with caramelized fish sauce. The lessons go deeper than recipes: the book is about how to understand the pantries of different cuisines, how to taste and use these flavors in your own cooking. Organized around key ingredients like soy, dry spices, or chiles, the chapters function as master classes in using these seasonings to bring new flavors into your cooking and new life to flavors you already knew. But even beyond flavors and techniques, the book is about a bigger story: how Chris, a son of Oklahoma who looks like a football coach, came to be "adopted" by these immigrant cooks and families, how he learned to connect and share and truly cross cultures with a sense of generosity and respect, and how we can all learn to make not just better cooking, but a better community, one meal at a time.
Nominated for a 2020 James Beard Foundation Book Award in the American category.
"The Nine Best New Cookbooks of the Fall" - Robb Report
"18 Essential New Cookbooks for Fall" - Food & Wine
"Our Favorite Fall Cookbooks" - Garden & Gun
"Best cookbook, food and wine books of 2019" - Amazon.com
Amazon Barnes & Noble Books-A-Million Indiebound Apple Books
Southern Smoke is here to serve you.
From farmers to fry cooks, servers to sommeliers, Southern Smoke takes care of our own by putting dollars directly into the pockets of F+B workers when it's most needed.
Whether there are unseen mental health needs or unforeseen hardships, our funds and resources help those who put food on the table. No ask is too big or too small.