I didn’t want to be stereotyped, so I did everything I could to get away from that. But as I have grown as a chef and evolved, I rediscovered who I was and came full circle in how I cook and what I cook and what I do.
Describe how you cook today. How has your Delta upbringing informed your menu at Acre? More than anything, the menu at Acre is seasonally and ingredient-driven. We Chef David Schrier cures some don’t really hang our hat on the locavore lamb to make lamb bacon. movement even though we try to source most of the produce and meats locally. I lot of opportunities down there so the younger want the ability and flexibility to be able to serve morel generation is going to go off to college, if they have mushrooms from the Northwest in the spring. I want that opportunity, and they are going to move off. to be able to offer my guests skate and wild striped bass from the Atlantic, two of my favorite fish. I want How does anybody make a living running a to serve Wild Alaskan or Colombia River salmon when restaurant in a ghost town? they are running in the spring. Otherwise, I don’t People drive all over the Delta to go eat, compared serve salmon the rest of the year. Growing up as a to Memphis. Memphis is a fairly big city; it would take Chinese-American in the Mississippi Delta afforded you 35 to 45 minutes if you lived on one end of the me a perspective on food that most cooks don’t have. I city and then wanted to go downtown to eat. It’s no absorbed the cooking techniques as well as the flavor different, say, if you lived in Cleveland and you wanted profiles of the various cultures there. Even though to go to Greenwood for dinner. So it’s just a matter you might not see overt references on my menus, of driving to a different town as opposed to driving hints of the flavor profiles sneak in there somehow. from one part of the city to another part of the city.
Should the rest of the world care to explore Delta cuisine? Of course. Southern food is enjoying a lot of publicity in mainstream media now. So I think the Delta plays a big part of it.
What’s so special about the Delta? The mystique. People always say that. There’s a lot of history there and it’s unlike any other part of the South, where in some ways things have changed and evolved and in other ways things have not. You can drive through a lot of the small towns and see people living the same way that they were 40 years ago.
In your career, how have you tried to keep food traditions alive? Earlier in my career I did everything I could to get away from it. I didn’t cook Asian-influenced food and I didn’t cook Southern-influenced food, because when I was starting to get known they were writing about this Chinese chef cooking the food I was cooking in the middle of nowhere. You just don’t see that. I didn’t want to be pigeon-holed, I didn’t want to be categorized,
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Why did you fight so hard to not be stereotyped? Back in the late ‘80s, there was no Food Network. People weren’t as obsessed with food as they are now. So when they see somebody like myself, especially in the Delta, they would see Chinese chef first, Chinese food first. So that’s the reason I moved away from all that, and that’s mainly why I think I was getting the national and regional attention that I was — because I wasn’t a stereotype.
Is there anything you would want people to know about the Delta or Mississippi in general? Yeah I do. I have traveled all over the country cooking, and when they would ask me where I am from and I would say “Mississippi,” I would hear the stupidest things. I mean people think there are still lynchings down here. For the longest time I was a traveling ambassador of fighting those negative stereotypes. It’s a great state; the Delta is a great place. There is a lot of history there. We are not a bunch of backwoods hicks that are running around lynching people or riding around in our pickup trucks just getting drunk on highways.
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