Experience
2025 - Present
Chef & Co-Owner
L’ArretParis, France
2021 - 2021
Co-Author
Black, White, and The Grey: The Story of an Unexpected Friendship and a Beloved Restaurant
Education
1997
City University of New York-Brooklyn CollegeBrooklyn, NY
Advice from Mashama Bailey
Quotes about career path, skills, and teamwork from an industry leader.
The hospitality industry is not just supporting the chef and the server.
You're also supporting the farmer, the delivery truck driver, the person who sells the seed, and the person who raises the cattle.
There's a huge system that you're supporting when you dine at restaurants. I think hospitality leaders need to continue to speak to that and continue to shed light on that in order for us to be able to charge the fair prices that we need to charge to support those systems, so people feel connected to what we're doing.
If you're ever struggling, find the person that helps connect you to the things that inspire you, that grounds you and calms you down.
You need somebody that's gonna listen to you and that's gonna hold your hand when you need your hand held.
You're right where you're supposed to be.
Don't rush it.
Business partnerships are like a marriage.
You have to be able to communicate. You also have to know what good, fair communication is and what's on the table and what's off the table to talk about in order to have a business that thrives, because you don't want your staff to see you and your business partner bickering like an old married couple.
Savannah is such a small city, and it's a hospitality city.
I think that the types of restaurants that were here were really focused on tourism, focused on having folks come in once, twice. We really wanted our place to be a local restaurant. We wanted to focus on local people, the local people of Savannah. In order to do that, we had to be consistent. We had to find cooks who were willing to be consistent and who came to work with integrity.
Opening a restaurant is hard.
When you start cooking and you want to be a chef, you're just thinking about cooking good food and making dishes that people like. You're not really thinking about creating a culture in order for people to thrive in. You're not really thinking about the P&Ls and how to pay people. You're not really thinking about advertising and how to recruit people.
At Prune, I worked with someone that was teaching me how to be a better human at the right time, because the lifestyle of kitchens and how you treated people just wasn't a sustainable way to be if you weren't going to be nurturing to your staff.
Not to say that I haven't had backslides or anything like that, but I'm now more conscious about how I communicate with people.
Gabrielle Hamilton is probably the best chef I've ever worked for.
She just has so much integrity. Chefs have integrity, but she has integrity not only for her food, but also for her staff and the type of restaurant that she runs, how she wants people to treat one another.
I think I learned a lot of bad habits in kitchens, and in Prune, there was a mirror that was reflected on me with those habits, and I learned lessons on how to be a better person, which has moved me into being a better leader here.
Roles in Culinary
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