How a Disney Cookbook and a Sushi Sink Led Chris Shepherd to Change Hospitality Forever

Tinfoil Swans Podcast

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On this episode

Growing up in Oklahoma, school was not Chris Shepherd’s thing. Traditional classrooms just aren’t the right fit for some brains — but it turned out that restaurants were. In junior college, he picked up a job as a dishwasher at a sushi restaurant and on the day the tempura guy didn’t show up, his culinary journey began. The 2013 F&W Best New Chef took time out from his extremely busy travel schedule to talk about finally finding his calling in the kitchen, the Disney cookbook that lives on a pedestal in his home, and the ingredient he just can’t stand. Then his powerhouse wife Lindsey Brown joined to talk about why they founded the game-changing Southern Smoke to help restaurant workers in crisis, how 20 free therapy sessions can change a restaurant worker’s life, and the two-word question that makes all the difference.

Meet our guests

James Beard Award–winning chef Chris Shepherd grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He honed his craft in Houston, where a nine-year tenure at Brennan’s taught him high-volume fine dining and Texas-Creole flavors. After being named a 2013 Food & Wine Best New Chef and winning the James Beard Award for Best Chef: Southwest in 2014, he opened acclaimed restaurants such as Underbelly and One Fifth. Shepherd now channels his platform into philanthropy as co-founder of the Southern Smoke Foundation, which has distributed millions in emergency relief and mental health resources to food and beverage workers nationwide.

Lindsey Brown spent more than a decade running a Houston-based hospitality PR firm before she moved to full-time nonprofit leadership. As co-founder and executive director of the Southern Smoke Foundation, Brown oversees a rapidly growing team, nationwide crisis-grant operations, and the Behind You mental health program that offers free therapy to industry professionals in multiple states. Under her guidance, Southern Smoke has expanded from a single fundraising festival into a 365-day safety net for hospitality workers across the country.

Meet our host

Kat Kinsman is the executive features editor at Food & Wine, author of Hi, Anxiety: Life With a Bad Case of Nerves, host of Food & Wine’s Gold Signal Award-winning podcast Tinfoil Swans, and founder of Chefs With Issues. Previously, she was the senior food & drinks editor at Extra Crispy, editor-in-chief and editor at large at Tasting Table, and the founding editor of CNN Eatocracy. She won a 2024 IACP Award for Narrative Food Writing With Recipes and a 2020 IACP Award for Personal Essay/Memoir, and has had work included in the 2020 and 2016 editions of The Best American Food Writing.

She was nominated for a James Beard Broadcast Award in 2013, won a 2011 EPPY Award for Best Food Website with 1 million unique monthly visitors, and was a finalist in 2012 and 2013. She is a sought-after international keynote speaker and moderator on food culture and mental health in the hospitality industry, and is the former vice chair of the James Beard Journalism Committee.

Highlights from the episode

On the cookbook that lives on a pedestal in his home

“My parents gave me the Walt Disney cookbook when I was eight, and it’s still the only cookbook with its own pedestal in my house. I’d lie on the kitchen floor, flip through the pictures, tell them ‘I want to make this,’ and they’d eat whatever came out — even hot-dog pizza.” — Chris Shepherd

On aligning his brain and his body

“I react quickly to things. I can store it and process it really fast. Over time, body repetition and understanding what needs to happen first kicks in. You have six pans on the burners going, and you have to know this here and that there. This one’s in the oven and that’s in the fryer. Now I’ve got to get my timing right with this person and this person. I just wanted to be a good cook. I studied, I read, I did everything. I wanted to not just be good at what I was doing then, but I wanted to be good at what was going to happen in the future.

I remember Mark Holley, my executive sous, came in one morning and I’d made a mistake. He was like, ‘In the walk-in!’ I was like, ‘We’re done.’ But we had a four-plus hour conversation in the walk-in about when I was going to stop being a cook and start thinking like a chef. It changed my mentality.

I needed to study. I needed to read books every day, every night, days off. Back then, like internet wasn’t the friendliest place. I would mail restaurants and get copies of the menus and have them faxed over. I wanted to learn so much. I would talk to the vendors constantly. There wasn’t YouTube to watch it all.” — Chris Shepherd

On a lesson from a hospitality legend

“Brennan’s of Houston is the sister restaurant to Commander’s Palace in New Orleans. Seeing Ella Brennan walk through the restaurant wasn’t unheard of. I got a rich history real quick, and it was historical food. Then you brought in the Texas atmosphere to it and it was just so much fun.

I’ll never forget, when they made me a sous chef, and I was walking through the dining room, and they said, ‘Ms. Ella wants to talk to you.’ And I was like, ‘I’m going to throw up in my mouth right now.’ Knots all over my body, just, ‘Oh my God, what is she gonna say to me?’ And I went and sat down at the table with her and she said, ‘Chris, you’ve been doing great things and congratulations and good job, and I appreciate all your hard work, but I’m going to tell you one thing right now. You can run with me, or you can run ahead of me up this hill, but I’m not dragging you.’

I answered, ‘Yes ma’am — you won’t have to pull me,’ and I’ve never forgotten it.” — Chris Shepherd

On the three people every restaurateur needs in their corner

“Have your attorney, your tax person, and your banker — that triangle will save you later. Most young restaurateurs budget for uniforms and plates but forget legal, and they don’t realize rent keeps escalating even after sales level off.” — Chris Shepherd

On the start of a mission

“In 2013, I was a Food & Wine Best New Chef, and in 2014, I was a James Beard Award winner. It just mounted, and we thought, ‘We have a voice, let’s use it.’ We were doing dinners to raise money to put kids through culinary school, because I knew how expensive that was. We raised enough money to put somebody through college with this dinner series. The sommelier doing this dinner, Antonio Gianola, we had worked together in the past, and he would come in, help us out, and hang out. Then he asked if we would do a dinner for Multiple Sclerosis. I was like, ‘Yeah, but why?’ He said, ‘I got diagnosed with MS this week.’

There was a young chef in town — he got all the stars, was on all the lists, had just signed onto a new project — but nobody knew that he had been diagnosed with MS and started to lose the use of his hands. He died by suicide. Antonio, the sommelier told us, ‘Hey man, I want to be the face of this. I want people to understand what’s going on with me. I want people to understand what this is.’ That’s how the first Southern Smoke Festival happened. We hoped to raise $100,000 and ended up with $180,000 the first year, $284,000 the second. When Hurricane Harvey hit, none of the big money was reaching dishwashers, line cooks, or farmers, so we rewired everything. We took 230 applications and gave 139 families half a million dollars.” — Chris Shepherd

On the growth of Southern Smoke

“We had one staff member in 2017, two by February 2020, and now 10 full-time employees. PR — which is what I was doing before this — is hard, but nonprofit work is a lot harder. The stakes are higher because we’re responsible for our own team’s livelihoods and for thousands of people in the industry who rely on us.

Our Behind You program gives food and beverage workers 20 free therapy sessions. We fund university clinics so we don’t drain community resources, and it’s usually about two weeks from application to the first session. If someone needs a higher level of care, they can apply for an emergency grant to cover it.

Although we do have a licensed social worker on staff who runs our mental health program, we connect you to the experts. We follow HIPAA rules. We do not know anything other than you are enrolled in the program. Unless the applicant chooses to share that they have received a grant from us or are participating in Behind You, it’s 100% anonymous.” — Lindsey Brown

On a lifesaving question we should all be asking

“At the restaurants and pretty much in my daily life, I walk up to people and ask, ‘You good?’ That’s kind of an unnatural thing to hear, right? It can mean many things like, ‘Are you good with your station? Are you good with this? Are you good with that? But are you good?’ 

It opens the door for people to have a conversation. If they start to say, ‘Man, I really got this issue, you know,’ I am not qualified to hear what they’re about to tell me, but I can give them access to people who are.” — Chris Shepherd

If you or someone you know needs help, reach out to Southern Smoke for emergency relief or mental health resources. If you are experiencing a mental health crisis, contact 9-1-1 or go to the emergency room and ask for a mental health professional.

About the podcast

Food & Wine has led the conversation around food, drinks, and hospitality in America and around the world since 1978. Tinfoil Swans continues that legacy with a new series of intimate, informative, surprising, and uplifting interviews with the biggest names in the culinary industry and beyond, sharing never-before-heard stories about the successes, struggles, and fork-in-the-road moments that made these personalities who they are today.

This season, you’ll hear from icons and innovators like Roy Choi, Byron Gomez, Vikas Khanna, Romy Gill, Matthew Lillard, Ana and Lydia Castro, Laurie Woolever, Karen Akunowicz, Hawa Hassan, Dr. Arielle Johnson, Dr. Jessica B. Harris, Wylie Dufresne, Samin Nosrat, Curtis Stone, Kristen Kish, Padma Lakshmi, Ayesha Curry, Regina King, Antoni Porowski, Run the Jewels, Chris Shepherd, and other special guests going deep with host Kat Kinsman on their formative experiences; the dishes and meals that made them; their joys, doubts and dreams; and what’s on the menu in the future. Tune in for a feast that’ll feed your brain and soul — and plenty of wisdom and quotable morsels to savor.

New episodes drop every Tuesday. Listen and follow on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

These interview excerpts have been edited for clarity.

Editor’s Note: The transcript for download does not go through our standard editorial process and may contain inaccuracies and grammatical errors.