Cooking Quote by Ed Smith

"Many of the master chefs in the South, both the upper South as well as the deep South, were blacks and many of those people came here to Washington, D.C., and opened up establishments. Very, very few of them have survived. But they certainly were very prominent"

Ed Smith

About this Quote

Ed Smith is doing two things at once: restoring credit and marking its disappearance. The line starts as a corrective to a familiar Southern mythos in which cuisine is treated like inherited white gentility, not skilled Black labor. By naming "master chefs" and insisting on their geographic breadth ("upper South as well as the deep South"), he’s pushing back against the idea that Black culinary expertise was marginal or regional. It was foundational, portable, and professional.

Then the sentence pivots to Washington, D.C. a city built on migration and proximity to power. The subtext is that Black cooks didn’t just feed the South; they shaped the capital’s public tastes by opening their own establishments. That’s a quiet refutation of the stereotype of Black foodways as strictly domestic or informal. These were entrepreneurs, not just employees.

The sting is in the repetition: "Very, very few of them have survived". Smith doesn’t specify what did the killing, but the omission is its own indictment. Jim Crow-era exclusion from credit and capital, urban renewal, rising rents, changing corridors, and the way food history gets written around celebrity restaurateurs rather than working traditions all hover in the background. "They certainly were very prominent" lands like an epitaph, not a celebration: prominence without preservation.

The intent, ultimately, is archival. Smith is pointing to a cultural inheritance that was visible in its time, then allowed to vanish in plain sight.

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Ed Smith is a notable figure.

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