Compton, Nina

Impact on the world

Won the James Beard Foundation's Best Chef: South award in 2018 for Compère Lapin, the New Orleans restaurant she opened in 2015 specifically to blend the Caribbean culinary traditions of her native Saint Lucia with the French and Italian technique she'd trained in and the Gulf Coast ingredients native to her adopted city; she finished as runner-up and fan favorite on 'Top Chef New Orleans' in 2013, the experience that first drew her to the city, and went on to open Bywater American Bistro in 2018 and the fast-casual Nina's Creole Cottage in 2023, while serving as an official culinary ambassador for Saint Lucia and publishing her first book, 'Kwéyòl/Creole: Recipes, Stories and Tings from a St. Lucian Chef's Journey,' in 2025.

Life & background

Born in Saint Lucia in the Caribbean and raised in the island's Moulin à Vent area, one of five children of Janice Compton and Sir John George Melvin Compton, who served three separate terms as Saint Lucia's Prime Minister and led the country to independence from Britain, Nina grew up cooking alongside her English maternal grandmother and mother during large family weekend meals, deciding early on that cooking would become her life's work. She left Saint Lucia at sixteen for boarding school in England before her parents, somewhat warily but supportively, arranged an internship at a family friend's hotel in Jamaica, where she fell in love with the creativity and camaraderie of professional kitchens; she went on to graduate from the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York in 2001 and worked under a succession of major chefs, including Daniel Boulud in New York and Norman Van Aken, Philippe Ruiz, and Scott Conant in Miami, rising to chef de cuisine at Scarpetta inside the reopened Fontainebleau Miami Beach. It was Conant who encouraged her to accept a casting call for 'Top Chef,' and the show's New Orleans setting in 2013 left her, by her own account, enchanted enough by the city's culinary culture that she relocated there permanently two years later to open Compère Lapin, named for a mischievous rabbit from Caribbean and Creole folklore, inside the city's Warehouse District; the restaurant received a glowing New York Times review and recognition as one of Eater National's best restaurants in America. She has continued expanding her New Orleans restaurant group while remaining a vocal advocate for Saint Lucian cuisine and culture on the international stage, and was named a semifinalist for the James Beard Foundation's Outstanding Chef award in 2023.

Sources

1. Fine Dining Lovers; New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau; The Connected Table; Southern Smoke; National Restaurant Association Show