Virginia’s culinary heritage is inseparable from Black cooking traditions — from the enslaved men and women who built Southern cuisine from the ground up to the modern chefs reshaping what Virginia food means on a national stage. Here are three Black chefs whose stories, talent, and dedication have left a lasting mark on the Commonwealth.
Edna Lewis — Freetown (Orange County), Virginia
Long before the term “farm-to-table” became a restaurant marketing phrase, Edna Lewis was living it in the red clay hills of Orange County, Virginia. Born in Freetown on April 13, 1916, the granddaughter of enslaved people, Lewis learned to cook from family members who used fresh, seasonal ingredients. Freetown was an Orange County community that had been settled by emancipated African Americans in the Virginia Piedmont, and as a child, Lewis learned to appreciate food by watching her mother prepare meals and observing her family and neighbors grow their own vegetables, preserve their own fruits, and smoke their own meats.
Lewis left Virginia when she was about sixteen, first going to Washington, D.C., and then New York City, where she found work as a seamstress. Her career in food came later after she went into business with a friend, becoming the head chef at Café Nicholson in 1948, where she cooked for the likes of Truman Capote and Marlon Brando.
Her influence, however, was cemented on the page. In 1972, she collaborated on The Edna Lewis Cookbook, and then worked with Judith Jones — Julia Child’s editor at Alfred A. Knopf — on the groundbreaking The Taste of Country Cooking (1976), which combined recipes with reminiscences of rural Black life in early-twentieth-century Virginia. Known as both the Grande Dame and Grande Doyenne of Southern cooking, Lewis was among the first African American women from the South to write a cookbook that did not hide the author’s true name, gender, or race.
Her legacy endures not just in kitchens but in Orange County itself, where an Edna Lewis Menu Trail was created to celebrate the 50th anniversary of her first cookbook, with several Virginia restaurants in the Orange County community participating, each featuring one of her recipes. As fellow chef and writer Nathalie Dupree summarized Lewis’s impact, “Edna was the most important southern restaurant cook — male or female, black or white — from the late 1940s to perhaps the 1980s.” She passed away in 2006 at the age of 89, leaving behind a culinary philosophy that continues to shape how America understands Southern food.
Chef Leah Branch — Chesterfield / Richmond, Virginia
Leah Branch carries Virginia’s culinary heritage on her shoulders with remarkable grace, cooking at the intersection of history, memory, and creative ambition. Branch was born and raised in Chesterfield, Virginia, just 20 minutes outside of Richmond, where family fish fries and whole hog roasts inspired a lifelong passion for food. Fond of cooking from a young age, she graduated high school and went straight to culinary school, enrolling at Johnson & Wales University in Charlotte, North Carolina. Branch stayed in North Carolina for the next ten years, working her way up from sous chef to executive chef at Moonrakers in Beaufort.
When the pandemic hit, she made a pivotal decision. After COVID, she felt a strong pull to return home to be closer to her family, and now lives next door to her parents. That homecoming led directly to her current post: executive chef at The Roosevelt in Richmond, a neighborhood restaurant in a turn-of-the-last-century building in Church Hill, Richmond’s oldest neighborhood, where her cooking has been featured in Garden & Gun, Eater, and the Cooking Channel’s Sugar Showdown.
Branch’s approach to food is rooted in both place and purpose. In 2023, she hosted The Roosevelt’s first Juneteenth dinner, celebrating the legacies of eight African American culinary figures, including Edna Lewis and John Dabney, touching on classical approaches to the way they made food and how they laid the foundations for Virginia and Southern cuisine. She has been dubbed a rising star of the dining scene by both The Richmond Times-Dispatch and Richmond magazine and was featured in The New York Times in a profile documenting the dramatic evolution of Richmond as a Southern city.
Her most recent honor confirms what Richmond diners have known for years. Branch was named a 2026 James Beard Award Semifinalist for Best Chef: Mid-Atlantic — the first Richmond chef to receive a Beard nod since 2020, and her first year of eligibility for the award. Notably, in 1994, Patrick Clark became the first Black chef to win a James Beard Award in the Best Chef: Mid-Atlantic category — and three decades later, Branch, a Chesterfield native, earned her first nomination in that same category.
Chef Joy Crump — Fredericksburg, Virginia
Joy Crump’s path to Virginia was winding — from Pennsylvania to Los Angeles to Atlanta — but Fredericksburg is where she found her purpose, and where she built a culinary empire. Crump began her culinary career in Los Angeles, where she worked as a contract caterer for the president of Capitol Records and hosted large-scale functions for musicians and executives, and also served as a private chef for actors and executives on Warner Bros. television series and feature films.
She eventually traded Hollywood for a culinary classroom. She moved to Atlanta to deepen her understanding of food, enrolling at the Art Institute of Atlanta and studying under farm-to-fork pioneers Chef Kevin Gillespie and Chef Michael Tuohy. She became known for her ability to take seasonal, locally sourced ingredients and turn them into refined yet beautifully approachable food.
In 2010, Crump set her sights on Fredericksburg. Located between two major foodie hubs, Richmond and Washington, D.C., the city had a lower cost of entry and a stable economy — but what she didn’t expect was how fiercely the community would show up for her. In 2011, Crump opened FOODE in Historic Downtown Fredericksburg with business partner Beth Black, and in 2014 they opened their second restaurant, the breakfast-centric Mercantile, also in Fredericksburg. In 2016, Crump purchased the nearly 200-year-old former National Bank of Fredericksburg building and transformed it into a 90-seat restaurant with two dining rooms, an open kitchen, and seating inside the original bank vault.
Her national profile is equally impressive. Crump appeared on Season 12 of the Emmy Award-winning competition series Top Chef, and has had the honor of cooking as a featured chef at the James Beard House in both 2016 and 2017, while remaining actively involved in the James Beard Foundation’s Impact Programs for Food Policy, Chef Advocacy and Change. She and business partner Beth Black have also participated in the Black Kitchen Initiative alongside Marcus Samuelsson at Red Rooster in Harlem, shining a spotlight on chefs of color and their contributions to American cuisine.
For Crump, it all comes back to community and memory. Food has always played an important role in her life and family — “all of our memories and our most important moments seemed to happen around food and our meals,” she has said. In Fredericksburg, she found a city that feels the same way.
