349: DeVonn Francis

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0:31and again this word hospitality for me is all-encompassing it's not just about i was served this really expensive thing it's how do i feel about myself after i sat here with this person who and who was i sitting with and tomorrow when i go to work am i still feeling those vibrations from the love, from the care, from the thoughtfulness. This is Taste. I'm your host, Eliza Barbanel.

0:59Devon Francis is a chef, recipe developer, and events producer based in Brooklyn. His culinary event studio, Yardi World, has developed a cult following around vibrant, lush experiences rooted in Caribbean cuisine with some of the best vibes and playlists around. And now they're joining the CPG Boom 2. It's a joy to have Devon in the studio to talk about his distinctive POV, starring in the second season of High on the Hog, his dream dinner party lineup, and more.

1:34Devon Francis, this is Taste. Thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me. I feel a little guilty because today is the first snow we've had in like two years in New York, and it is the day that I made you come into Midtown. So thank you. I love a romantic New York moment. So I just saw it as like a way to experience the city. Yeah, that's a nice way to look at it. Yeah. Are you going to like cook anything cozy in the snow now that when we're done? My sister's in town and she requested broth. So I'm going to make us a little marrow broth moment. Whoa, okay. So take me through briefly, what's your marrow broth approach?

2:09So I actually was just watching like a ton of different YouTube videos on, on broth and they all kind of say the same thing. So there's no real knowledge that I have to offer there. But what I like to do is I like to take chicken wings and, uh, carcasses and I'll just roast the shit out of them. Um, and then cook them down with onions and usually like kombu, um, until it's like really delicious and juicy. and then usually what I'll do after that is I'll reinforce that I'll take that broth and I'll reinforce that with like three different types of mushroom um and then I'll use then I'll season that however I feel so I'll make quarts of that freeze it and then heat it up and just add my seasoning as I go um I've been really into just like really nice like fatty pork recently um I'm also on my like muscle journey your bulking journey i'm sorry for saying the word that you were clearly avoided you you outed me sorry no it was good it's good um so yeah anything that's like kind of like high in protein and like lots of like delicious greens oh my god wait can i talk to you about greens for two seconds yeah please because greens is all i want to talk about okay good i did not realize that kohlrabi greens are so fucking delicious right now i'm racking my brain to think if I've ever had this before.

3:32Exactly. Because I usually just trim them off when I'm making like a thin, delicious kohlrabi salad or something. But the greens are so tender and so delicious and sweet. I was at the market last week and doing my meal prep stuff. And I was like, let's just see what she's giving. And she gave. Wow. So are you blanching it or eating it raw what's the approach i made what did i do i was sauteing shrimp um with like guajillo guindia pepper and urfa with coconut milk and i just added the greens in at the last minute to sort of like sweat them down nothing crazy because the crop kohlrabi itself was already like a little baby um so not woody at all like really really sweet and really tender and they just like cooked down and like they wilted, the color got really magical and I ate it and I was like, holy shit, no one ever told me this before.

4:25Wow. Okay. I don't actually cook kohlrabi at home very often. I would say it kind of is intimidating to me, which is funny because I love vegetables so much. I feel like that's my core brand. So if that's what you did with the greens, what did you do with the rest of the kohlrabi? I just, I'm making like a little kohlrabi like carpaccio. So it's, it's shrimp and kohlrabi it's like it's like pounded shrimp and then i'll put like a blanket of like dressed kohlrabi on top of that um okay dressed in like nice acid and zest okay and you also said the word meal prep to me earlier also my bulking journey also your bulking journey which is also my new year's resolution is to be doing more meal prep maybe not to be bulking but i should you know i'm trying to get into the climbing gym more this year so maybe it is also bulking let's go do you go where do you go uh i've been going to vital a little bit that's near my place.

5:16Oh, I feel like you're so much taller than me. So you're going to be able to get like everything, but I would love to go with you. It's, it's fun. I have friends who are like half my size who like scale walls. And I think it's, I think it's maybe harder for me actually, because I'm taller. Maybe my girlfriend did say that I shouldn't make excuses about not being tall enough because like, because you can see all kinds of people doing it, you know? Yeah. Um, but on the meal prep front, what does meal prep look like for you? I mean, it depends on the week. I have tons of projects that I'm always working on.

5:48And the reason why I started was because I have been just trying to get in a better place with understanding what my body needs and also cooking for myself, not because it's a professional thing, but because I want to just integrate food and pleasure into my life in ways that feel organic and like on my own time. So aside from bulking, it's like from a place of self-care and love, which is also bulking. Anyway, the point being is my meal prep is usually Sunday or Monday. I have stopped taking meetings on Mondays and just have that day to kind of just like sort my stuff out because usually I'm like either – I just need two days back to back really to like really get in the groove and feel like I've done things I need to do for myself versus being stuck answering emails and stuff, which I do a lot of.

6:37Um, and so for me, it's like go to the farmer's market on a Friday or Saturday, make a little list. I'll write it. I even, I make a chart. I tape it to my wall. Wow. Um, and I record every single thing that I eat, um, and just plan out like starches, proteins, fiber, vitamins, et cetera, throughout the week. That's really cool. And I imagine that might be useful to you in your own recipe development as well to have some kind of record of what you've been eating in your own time. Does it ever translate? Yeah. And you know what? A lot of what I was doing in my early time cooking, like when I started Yardi was a lot of sort of like restaurant driven food.

7:19Like it felt like it had to be of a certain echelon and tier. And so now I'm kind of thinking more about like, I'm a person. I have a full ass job. What's going to make me feel good today? What can and also what can I accomplish in my capacity that I have today? Because I think that's a big question. It's like I love food, but like I don't actually have as much time as I want to when it comes to like doing things for myself. So just making that making those steps accessible for myself has been a really nice lesson in what I guess the rest of the world has always been kind of doing, you know? Yeah, definitely.

7:54I think like as someone that cooks for myself, like there may be three or four things that I make very often and none of them are on any level compared to what I make for another person. And something I've been thinking about is like, how do I cook for myself as if I was cooking for somebody that I love, which like I do love myself, but I also love making a quesadilla for lunch every day. And like, maybe I should be doing something a little more than that, you know? I love a quesadilla. Yeah. What's your go-to cheese? I mean I love like a squeaky Oaxacan cheese and I also really like American cheese but not on my quesadillas I do like a not very traditional but just like a sharp white cheddar I think is a good like base cheese for a quesadilla and then I will put in if I have like leftover kale or something they all just go into the quesadilla so it's kind of a vehicle for eating something else too normally Totally, totally, totally.

8:47Yeah. And my meal prep kind of looks like that too. It's like, what is going to be the vehicle for just making sure I meet my food group needs and feel like I'm treating myself well at the same time? Yeah. And I'm happy we're talking about wellness and food because something that we've worked on together previously is when I was at Bon Appetit, you did the feel good food plan for Healthy-ish in 2021, which was like one of my favorite ones ever. And I think that like this idea of like, what is like healthy-ish food or how are you nourishing yourself in a way that is exciting and inspiring to me is something that all of your food kind of naturally does.

9:19I'm curious, like, do you think about, obviously we're talking about in your own life, getting like your starches and your veggies and everything, but when you're developing in general, like, are you operating from a perspective of wellness or from something else entirely? Well, that's a good question. I feel like I have had to really expand my understanding of what wellness means to me on my own terms, because I think that you can think about it from a nutritional standpoint, which is empirical and scientific, but then also there is wellness that has to do with history and place. I think that for me, wellness for probably my whole entire life has really been about exploring and finding ways to come into a better relationship about where I come from and the sort of friction between what history says I am and can do with food and where that then goes into the future.

10:17And I think that's really what my whole practice as a chef or a cook is about is really trying to bridge those gaps. So to answer your question in maybe a more practical way, it's like, you know, when I think of wellness, it's I'm well because I'm taking the time to learn and discover ways to honor myself and my history, but also pushing that forward too. While also being like, I'm a human, I have a body, I need to energize, I need to rest properly. Like that's also wellness for me. Yeah, I appreciate that. I think that wellness like doesn't even mean anything as a word. And so it's kind of like a dangling question that I'm giving to you because I think it means something different to everyone.

10:57And certainly there are a lot of places that have made a lot of money on saying that wellness is like a kale salad when that's not the only form of wellness that is out there. Totally. In terms of what you're speaking about, like connecting with your heritage and your background and centering that and your food and pushing it forward, have there been any projects or recipes that you've done recently that you feel are doing a good job of that? So my whole entire last year for the most part was spent outside of New York. I would say the ratio of New York to outside of New York was like 75, 25. Yeah.

11:28Do you feel like on Instagram I saw you in like warm places when I was not warm? No, exactly. It started, and actually it's funny, it started last year this time because I had gone to Jamaica with my family for my 30th birthday. And going there with them was really special for me because it was the first time in my adult life that we were all there together going to my mother's family home. and then also going to see her father had passed away during the pandemic. He got COVID. And it was a way for us to kind of acknowledge that moment with her too. And in that moment, I realized how important it was to be in a Caribbean place.

12:14I think my understanding and my respect for it has grown so much now that I'm in my adult life. And now that I am trying to have more nuanced conversations around food and place and people and work on these projects. So the whole of last year was really about being able to explore the region, you know, Jamaica, even like Central America, too, because there's so many foodways that are a part of a part of that as well. So, yeah, it was it was really eye opening for me. Yeah, that sounds really special. And I'm glad you had time with your family there as well. And you also were shooting High on the Hog last year, jumping ahead a little bit, right?

12:51Did you shoot that last year or it came out last year? I shot it last year, I'm pretty sure. Like what is time? What was that like for you? It was really scary, actually. It was really scary for me because I love food. I love food and I love history. But if I'm being completely transparent, oftentimes I doubt if I'm the right person just because there are so many incredible people who have come before me who have been telling these stories. And so I kid you not, like I spent so many nights and so many lunch breaks and so many conversations with friends, even talking like talking to Dr. Jessica B.

13:31Harris or even Stephen working on the project being like, what do I do? What's that like? How do I tell this story properly? I invested in a lot of like time training to do it well because I wanted to honor those stories well. And so when I'm talking about black women in media, when I'm talking about being able to like adapt recipes into something that feels like it honors both the past and the future, it was because I wanted to be really good, you know, because there'd be so many people who I knew who look like me who are watching this show, you know? So I wanted to show up for my community. I wanted to show up for myself and I wanted to show up for the history of the people that we were honoring too.

14:17Definitely. And after all of the work and prep and filming was done, how did you feel about the result? What was it like when you watched it? I felt really good. And actually it was nice because I went home and watched it with my parents for Thanksgiving. And the part about it that actually made me really happy was because they showed a photo of my dad and me when we were younger. And so my dad's also on Netflix, which is kind of really cool. And it just felt really good because I know that, I mean, from a personal standpoint, just to like zoom in a little bit, like, you know, my parents are my heroes.

14:50I love them so much. They have given me so much when it comes to understanding food and where I come from in place. And to see them smile and laugh at something that I was doing and to share that with their friends who are just going about their days, taking care of their family, going to work or whatever, you know, the fact that they really care and they're championing, not what I do because they're Jamaican, but because they love and care about me. It's just like really, really special. So I loved being able to bring that to them. Yeah. It's so sweet. Cause I imagine like so many people were watching that with their families around Thanksgiving anyways, and you were having that exact same experience, but it's you guys both on TV.

15:27Totally. Oh, I love that. Yeah. And that's how I started to like the reason why I started cooking is because I would be, you know, in bed, like on a Sunday with my mom as a kid watching cooking shows all day. And then by the time dinner happened, we were like, which recipe we're going to do, you know, it was, it was such a part of, um, how we bonded. And so to be able to give that back to them, it feels just so incredible. Full circle. What, What shows were you and your mom watching? Oh, the list goes on. It's such a long list. Martha, Judd at Loretta, Emeril, Bobby. I would watch like Iron Chef, but the Japan version with my dad.

16:08And I remember the first time I saw him just chomp into a bell pepper. If it was an apple, I was like running to the kitchen, like grabbing a bell pepper, biting into it. Can I just say that I am so attracted to that man? Yeah. I mean, the drama alone when he's chomping in, it's like the juice is running down his chin. So good. So good. He's so hot. I should be careful what I say. Yeah, it was so, that's so fun. And also I feel like your parents, I remember hearing about how they would throw kind of like legendary parties growing up. And I feel like that must have informed your own like dinner party trajectory as well.

16:38Yeah. It's funny because if you ask my mom about it, she's just deeply annoyed by the whole process because she'd be like, okay, another party again. But yeah, so the backstory about that, I'll keep it as brief as possible, is my grandfather, my uncle and my dad were all DJs. So sick. Right. And so when my parents, sorry, when my dad immigrated to the U.S. specifically in Flatbush, my grandfather would host these basement parties for people to come down to the basement and play Domino's and drink Red Stripe. and it was so major and everyone wanted to be a part of it and he had created this community and they would also have block parties they became um members of the block party association and would just have the whole community come and just eat food that really reflected where they came from um but also just like things that they like to eat in general you know um there was curry goat and oxtail and a ton of fucking gravy.

17:42Oh, shouldn't be sorry. A ton of gravy and jerk chicken and all these, you know, these, these delicious, amazing, uh, Jamaican things that made them feel connected to where they came from. Yeah. I think it's really special. And, um, you know, like I first got to know you through your work, throwing dinner parties with Yardi, and now you do so many things, including that. And I'm curious, like how having this background in throwing dinner parties and pop-ups, which are very community-based impacts, like all the different kinds of work that you do now. It's funny because I feel like I'm only just starting to understand what I do and why I care about it.

18:22I think that I do consider myself a chef, but I think by and large, maybe like I'm an entrepreneur who like loves food. I love a project-based thing. Maybe it's my Aries moon that makes it so that I always want to start something. The astrology podcast is popping out. Yeah, the energy and fire and that. Yeah. And also, too, it's, you know, in every section of food, whether it be tied to food policy or wellness and diet or restaurants, hospitality, hotels, making products, there's a challenge connected to people and a need connected to those people. So for me, when I think about food, I'm always just like, what is at the heart of making this experience better for someone, right?

19:11And in that way, hospitality isn't just about where you go and eat. It's about how food comes into your life in general. And also how that is connected to this idea of being of service to someone. Um, and so for me, you know, if it's, if it's hosting a dinner party or giving a lecture, being on a panel or making food videos for people to cook from, um, and watch at home that are just entertaining, like it all feels like a way to get people excited about what they can do for themselves. Um, and that makes me excited. Yeah, I really love that. And you mentioned products a little bit earlier. And one of the things you've been working on is this snack mix with Yardi World.

19:54So I'm curious, like to you, what is the ultimate snack mix and how did you go about developing something that was going to be made at scale and distributed? Well, it actually started with our events. So, you know, we were making different dishes for this hotel event that we were doing and we had all of these leftover sort of like bits of like nuts, coconut, banana chips. and we were just like, we gotta move this. Sometimes it's like, we gotta move. And sometimes - That's how it is, yeah. No, literally. And sometimes that's how the best dishes become a thing. It's how do I translate this in something that's just like magical and delicious that people want to eat.

20:36And so me and my culinary manager, culinary lead at the time were in the back end. He was like, oh, I have like these things. And then I was like, well, what if we toss the banana chips? You know, it just, it just was an organic thing that we were just trying out. And then people really loved it. You know, people were actually kind of upset in a scary way, like obsessed with it. And in the back of my mind too, if I'm going to make something, it's gotta, it's gotta tell a story. It's gotta be connected to something that feels larger than life. Because why, like why do something if you're not gonna put your whole self in it?

21:16And I started, I was also reading all about like just how the CPG space was changing around the time of the pandemic, but also just thinking about how Jamaica, you know, as a former colony of the UK was still in a lot of ways in service or in servitude to the IMF from the World Bank because of debt, because of these agreements they created in the 60s and 70s. It was just like, I'm like, okay, well, what is there a way that we can create something that is emblematic of this place that we can get farmers involved or get people involved in creating in that process? And the snack mix seemed really cool because, you know, it's like with dinner parties, you get to have so many people there.

22:08But when you're doing something like food media or you're doing something that's like a packaged good and you are in all these different stores or people can order from you online, you're like sending a part of yourself out into the world it feels like, you know. And so my whole goal for this current year that we're in is to find ways to make sure that those through lines between, you know, the supply chain, where we're sourcing from, the sort of economics of scale all kind of make sense in terms of making this product come to life. And also the whole thing, too, is like I went to art school, right?

22:42So I love design. I love what design can do when it talks about symbolism and representation. So all those factors kind of made me really excited because it was like, oh, this product could really be a stand in or represent all these different aspects of my creativity and my love for where I come from. And so this is a long story for saying we have this really sick stack mix that people should definitely order. No, it's a great story. And I think that when you're an interdisciplinary person, having a project that lets you flex those different muscles is really exciting because a dinner party is like one of the most interdisciplinary things there is.

23:18there's obviously the food, but then there's like the whole space that you're creating and the soundtrack and what you're wearing and who else is there. And obviously all of those variables are different for a packaged good, but I think like the good packaged goods still have those things in common. Exactly. Exactly. So you went to art school. Did you study performance art? Is that true? I did for a time. I moved to New York thinking that I was going to be a painting and drawing major. And then it turned out that, um, because actually when I moved to New York, this was around the same time that Occupy Wall Street was really big and large in effect.

23:54And so I would literally be sitting, um, in my dorm room and hear people just like yelling, going down third Avenue. I was like, what's going on? And I would look out the window and there were just like people putting their bodies in the street in ways and spaces and places that I didn't, you know, I'm from Virginia. Like we don't, I don't, that wasn't happening when I was in high school. I didn't know anything about protests at all. Um, and so why that matters to my art background is because my practice then became about thinking about the body more. Performance was a way for me to really discover and cite the ways in which my body as a queer black person, queer black man specifically, um, is sort of interpolated into this really like crazy system of the world and assigned and ascribed all these different things that I never, I never agreed to in a lot of ways.

24:53Um, and you know, the history of food connects to that so well and high in the hog. And this is also why I signed onto that project too, because it was really about, you know, what is the history of what we're saying black people can do and can be in the world. And so for me, when I was halfway through art school, I was like, oh, performance feels like a really nice mechanism to talk about these things because it's so physical. It's so deeply emotional. There's also something very non-verbal about it. There's like something that language just doesn't quite get to when you think about like dance or something like that.

25:31So So, yeah, performance became a really cool way to think about all the things I was already kind of questioning and learning about James Baldwin and Audre Lorde and Frantz Fanon and things like that. Definitely. I think performance art is the most, for me personally, like emotional art form that I interact with, except for music maybe, where like I've had the experience in performance piece more than anywhere else where I need to like lie down afterwards, you know, because my body has been, I guess, live theater, which is also performance. Totally. You're holding tight, like watching with somebody.

26:02And I think like as somebody that throws parties and has worked in restaurants and does pop ups, I guess I'm interested if you think your performance background impacts the way you think about like creating a space or an energy associated with it. It does. It does. I mean, you know, it's all about staging. When someone walks into a room, whether it be theater or some type of live music event or dinner party or what have you, the space is charged. um in in as in as a simple way of thinking about it as like who who do I know here right do am I gonna know any familiar faces and who am I sitting next to who am I sitting next is it those familiar faces yeah exactly exactly and so I think that when when I started doing projects with the Yardi world um you know I was thinking about who was in the room um what also what are some mechanisms of like collaboration that I could use to get people excited about being there.

27:08Yeah. I had named the series I was doing the living room series because I was thinking about just being a young person sitting in living room with my aunts and uncles and just like listening to them have these very intimate kind of gossipy conversations. But at the same time, this energy of trying to recenter the home space as a space that was just as important as a restaurant space or a fine dining space. Because that's where learning happened for me first. It wasn't, I didn't go to school for cooking. I didn't really have a formal cooking background. And so I was really trying to recenter these ideas of what we think of as chic or cool.

27:54Because for me, the chicest, coolest people were my aunts and uncles. They were turning it out. And as you read about the... The crazy thing is when you read about the history of how food happens in America or the world in general, it's always the people who are sort of put in the background and cast in the background who are really setting the tone for these ideas that we think are really chic and cool. Yeah. Is there an idea in your head right now? Of what that looks like? Yeah. Let me think about it. Okay. Let me think about it. All good. It'll come to me. So like hypothetically, you're a dinner party guest.