Bailey, Mashama

Impact on the world

Co-founded The Grey in 2014 with business partner John O. Morisano inside a long-abandoned, 1938 Greyhound bus terminal in Savannah, Georgia that had operated under Jim Crow segregation, a building located directly across the street from the Chatham County Courthouse where her own parents had married decades later in the 1980s; the restaurant, built around her personal interpretation of 'Port City Southern' cuisine blending Southern comfort food with seafood and multicultural technique, was named Eater's Restaurant of the Year in 2017 and included among Time's 100 Greatest Places in the World in 2018, and Bailey became the first African American chef to star in a season of Netflix's 'Chef's Table' before winning the James Beard Foundation's Best Chef Southeast award in 2019 and its top Outstanding Chef award in 2022.

Life & background

Born in the Bronx in 1979 to David and Catherine Bailey, the eldest of three children, Bailey moved to Waynesboro, Georgia at age two, then to Savannah at five, before relocating to Queens, New York at eleven, learning to cook throughout this itinerant childhood from her mother, grandmothers, aunts, and cousins; she initially pursued physical therapy and then social work in college, working at a Brooklyn homeless shelter before losing that position amid organizational changes, an unplanned turning point that led her to enroll at Peter Kump's New York Cooking School and begin a culinary career at SoHo's Aquagrill. She spent four formative years at Gabrielle Hamilton's acclaimed restaurant Prune in Manhattan, a mentorship that proved directly consequential when entrepreneur John Morisano, having purchased the derelict former Greyhound terminal in Savannah, asked Hamilton to recommend a chef and she suggested Bailey; Bailey and Morisano spent years lovingly restoring the building before opening The Grey at the end of 2014, deliberately preserving its Art Deco architecture while transforming what had been a site of racial division into what the restaurant's own materials describe as a destination of elevated hospitality, a once-segregated structure now co-run by a white man and a Black woman. She and Morisano opened a second, lunch-counter-inspired concept, The Grey Market, in 2018, and co-authored 'Black, White and The Grey,' a book examining their business partnership through the lens of race, class, gender, and culture; she has served since 2017 as chairwoman of the Edna Lewis Foundation, dedicated to preserving the legacy of pioneering Southern chef Edna Lewis, already profiled in this collection, whose influence she has cited as directly shaping her own menu, and the Financial Times has described her as among the most important chefs working in America today.

Sources

1. Fine Dining Lovers; NNPA; James Beard Foundation (Celebrating Black Culinarians)