Culinary Connections

Culinary Connections

The Southern Food & Beverage Museum celebrates culinary diplomacy in Louisiana

Alexandra Kennon

Of all of the ways people can come together across different backgrounds and cultures, we in Louisiana are well aware that sharing food can be one of the most effective, most visceral, and most delicious methods. In April, when Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman visited New Orleans, the Southern Food & Beverage Museum hosted a special lunch reception to celebrate just that—particularly New Orleans’s many culinary contributions to the country and world, and the international chefs living and working in New Orleans who serve as sorts of culinary ambassadors to their home countries. The visit was part of the Department of State’s recently re-launched Diplomatic Culinary Partnership initiative, developed with the James Beard Foundation, which highlights the ways cuisine and hospitality can serve as diplomatic tools to unite cultures and strengthen international relationships.

Deputy Secretary Sherman was introduced with a speech by Chef Serigne Mbaye of Dakar NOLA, who was recently nominated by the James Beard Foundation for its Emerging Chef Award. “I knew that I wanted people in the United States to taste the greatness of Senegalese cuisine as I learned to cook it. I want to help to put the flavor of my small West African country into a world conception of great food,” Mbaye told the gathering. “But it’s not every day that a Senegalese-Harlem Chef gets to speak in front of the Deputy Secretary of State.”

Also among the featured international chefs were Ana Castro of Lengua Madre (also a 2023 Beard nominee for Best Chef: South); Roni Dacula of Philippine pop-up Gatâ; recent Top Chef competitor Nina Nguyen; Byron Bradley, who is passionate about New Orleans’s connections to the Caribbean; and Dee Lavigne, owner of New Orleans’s only African American-owned cooking school, Deelightful Roux. Each came to the lunch reception offering a small plate as special and memorable as the chef serving it: from Castro’s blue corn tortilla-blue crab tacos with pancetta and pistachio molé to Dacula’s interpretation of Ginataang Hipon, a Filipino recipe of shrimp cooked in coconut milk served on a shrimp and squash purée with garlic rice.

“The chefs here with us are culinary diplomats in their own right,” Secretary Sherman said as she addressed the group. “These chefs contribute to this city’s, and by extension our country’s, rich culinary diversity. Collectively, their culinary expertise expands the globe, and incorporates flavors and techniques ranging from Copenhagen kitchens to Southeast Asian markets to West African homes … they are a microcosm of American food culture, whose ingredients include creativity, sophistication, and fun.”