A new Dawn
With ‘Top Chef ’ run and restaurant on the horizon, Burrell hits bigger stage
Dawn Burrell believes in goals. Not just setting them but powering through with almost single-minded determination. As a high school athlete in her native Pennsylvania, she set a goal to win four individual state track and field titles. She did. Next came a goal to get a college track and field scholarship. She got it and went on to represent the University of Houston at NCAA Track and Chef Dawn Burrell will appear on Season 18 of Bravo’s “Top Chef.” Late August, Burrell’s first ownership-stake restaurant, is set to open this summer.
Field Championships from 1993 to 1995.
Her next goal as an amateur athlete was the Olympics. She made that, too, representing the United States in the long jump at the 2000 Sydney Olympics.
A series of injuries put an end to her career as an athlete and trainer
in 2008, which is when Burrell set her sights on a new life as a chef. It came with another set of goals that took her through a succession of culinary jobs as a caterer and eventually into the kitchens of high-profile restaurants she insisted would challenge her to be at the top of her game. Last year Burrell found herself in exalted company as a semifinalist for Best Chef Texas for the James Beard Awards, considered the Oscars of the food world.
The 47-year-old Houstonian’s adherence to goal-setting has now brought her to a place most chefs dream of — a golden moment when planning and hard work are paying off in a confluence of new projects and national recognition.
Burrell recently partnered with chef Chris Williams of Lucille’s to create the new Lucille’s Hospitality Group under which she’ll helm several projects, including her first independent restaurant, Late August, opening this summer. Burrell’s profile is sure to rise considerably when America meets her on the April 1 debut of the new season of Bravo’s “Top Chef.” There she’ll be among 15 chefs competing on one of television’s most popular reality shows.
“In order to accomplish anything, you have to have goals in life,” Burrell said. “I’m not a stranger to work. When I set my sights on something, I know I’ll meet my goal.”
Her “Top Chef ” role, for example, was part of a personal five-year process to get on the show. At the conclusion of the show’s nine-week taping (the 18th season was set in Portland, Ore.) in the fall, Williams proposed the partnership to form a hospitality group in Houston. Burrell found it an irresistible offer. With national media exposure in the can and the promise of her own restaurant, Burrell entered the new year ready to welcome a brave new chapter in her career.
Another path
Sports brought Burrell to Houston, but it was the city’s exciting, eclectic food scene that most shaped her post-athletics adult life.
A 1996 graduate of the University of Houston, where her brother, Leroy Burrell, is head men’s and women’s track and field coach, Burrell recalls the culture change from the Philadelphia suburbs to Houston.
“The first practice on the track here I almost died,” she said. “The air! The heat! I believe I crawled back to the dorm and collapsed.”
After graduation, Burrell continued to train, intent on getting back into competitions. But a series of injuries plagued her for seven years. She realized in 2008 she needed a new direction.
Burrell always nurtured a love for food. Her mother was a good cook; she had an uncle who was a hotel chef and a cousin who is a professional baker. Her maternal grandmother, who grew up on a farm, was a particular inspiration. “She understood what it means to have really fresh ingredients,” Burrell said.
At 34 — late in the game for most aspiring food professionals — Burrell enrolled at the Art Institute of Houston in 2008. It was a year of upheaval. Her athletic career came to an end, her short-lived marriage failed, and her father died. Those were the miseries of 2008.
But it was also the year she found new purpose. While attending the Art Institute, she worked at Sage Dining Services preparing meals for private schools. The athlete in her appreciated the discipline that a culinary career demanded. Soon she was searching for the creative side.
After two years with Sage, she landed work in the catering arm of chef Monica Pope’s celebrated T’afia, and then at the rebranded restaurant Sparrow Bar + Cookshop, ultimately as sous chef. Burrell left to try her hand at her own catering business for two years, selling baked goods at farmers markets and prepared meals. In 2014, she got in the door at James Beard Award winner Tyson Cole’s Uchi Houston, where over two and a half years she rose to sous chef.
Pope, who has been called the “Alice Waters of the Third Coast,” said she brought on Burrell to provide that next step in her culinary journey.
“I gave her the opportunity to feel like a chef, learning how to work with a kitchen staff and in a kitchen culture,” she said. “She wanted to get started, so I told her start: Cook. She likes to cook globally, and my menus have always been melting pot-y. She fit in. She came in with some good skills.”
And she left even better. That job led to taking over as sous chef at Uchi’s sister concept, Uchiko, in Austin.
In 2017, Marcus Davis, the owner of Houston’s legendary the Breakfast Klub, was on the hunt for a chef to helm his Kulture restaurant, one of the dining venues in the shiny new Avenida Houston at the George R. Brown Convention Center. It was a major step for the restaurateur who was looking for a fresh, exciting presence to oversee his exploration of the foodways of the African diaspora.
He found that voice in Burrell. In 2018, Kulture opened with a menu of Southern- and Caribbean-inspired dishes that quickly earned raves. In a three-star review, Houston Chronicle restaurant critic Alison Cook marveled at Burrell’s “neo-soul food” efforts such as tempura okra, collard green purses filled with smoked turkey and nestled in pot liquor; pickled-shrimpfestooned deviled eggs; hoppin’ John with crunchy rice puffs; johnnycakes topped with ham and red-pepper maple glaze; and oxtail ragout with coconut grits.
“It was no accident that an African American woman was our choice for Kulture,” Davis said. “I created Kulture with the intent of highlighting African American contributions in the arts — visual, music, the art of the palate. I wanted to find a chef who needed a canvas to paint on.”
Burrell, he said, delivered that artistry. “What she brought to the table was a cut above anyone else,” he said.
The food world took notice. In February 2020, Burrell was among an enviable clutch of Houston chefs in the semifinals tier for Best Chef Texas, a new regional category for the James Beard Awards recognizing the country’s best cooking talent.
The winner may never be known. Only weeks after the semifinals announcement, Texas recorded its first COVID-19 death. Harris County issued its coronavirus disaster declaration. President Donald Trump declared a national emergency. A global pandemic began its rapid, deadly assault.
Help from a ‘beautiful heart’
Like many food professionals, Burrell had to find a way to pivot during the pandemic. With Kulture indefinitely closed, she announced in July she was parting ways with Davis to concentrate on Pivot, a prepared-food and meal-delivery business created through her affiliation with the woman-led culinary network I’ll Have What She’s Having.
COVID realities presented a new set of challenges. While trying to attract business to Pivot, Burrell also was acting as primary caretaker for her elderly mother, who was recovering from a stroke she suffered in February.
When “Top Chef ” came knocking — joyous, game-changing potential for any chef — Burrell was conflicted. The brass ring was at hand, but she had her mother to care for.
“I contemplated not going. I couldn’t figure out how to go without having care for my mother in place,” she said.
Williams, whose restaurant pays homage to his great-grandmother, the culinary innovator and educator Lucille B. Smith, stepped in, offering to help with the logistics for her mother’s care while Burrell was away filming.
“He was so willing to help me achieve that goal. It is so special to me,” Burrell said. “He has the most beautiful heart.”
Contractually, Burrell can’t say much about “Top Chef ” before the show begins airing April 1. But if it’s like any other season, “Top Chef: Portland” should be full of delicious, riveting foodie drama and intrigue as chefs are put through grueling challenges.
Burrell said she came out of it a stronger, more learned chef. Her athletic discipline also helped her in the chef challenges.
“It was one of the most meaningful learning experiences of my life,” she said. “I already knew I could endure a lot, but it was a refresher on just how much I could endure.”
When Burrell returned from Portland, Williams suggested a business partnership. Early last month, Williams announced the creation of Lucille’s Hospitality Group with Burrell as chef and concept partner. One of the group’s first projects is Late August, Burrell’s first ownershipstake restaurant, set to open late summer at the Ion, the innovation district development in the former Sears at 4201 Main. Though Burrell is holding details of her Afro-Asian menu close to the vest, the restaurant will further her style of global comfort food with an emphasis on the foodways of immigrant cultures.
The new hospitality group also is intended to help fund the efforts of Lucille’s 1913, the nonprofit Williams created last year to combat food insecurity and develop employment opportunities in the city’s underserved neighborhoods.
In Burrell, Williams said he has found a perfect partner who shares his culinary and philanthropic goals. The fact that she is a Black female chef — like his great-grandmother, a pioneer who founded her own food corporation — is important to him.
“But really, she could have been a blue woman. It’s all about the talent,” Williams said of Burrell. “She’s a real working partner who knows what we have to do every day. She respects every part of the process. We are opposites. I’m chaos. She’s more systematic.”
Together, he said, they are ready to present Black food through a different lens.
“It’s what our lives are,” he said. “It’s all set through the window of food. This is our chance. This is her chance.”
‘Our time to shine’
Michelle Wallace, for one, can’t wait to see how Burrell’s chance plays out through her new culinary endeavors and on “Top Chef.”
“It’s a very proud moment for chefs — for women chefs, for Black women chefs,” said Wallace, who, as executive chef of Gatlin’s BBQ, is one of the city’s few Black female culinary stars.
After several tumultuous years marked by the Me Too movement that reshaped the food world and last year’s Black Lives Matter that shook American culture (and played out against a new pandemic landscape), the advancement of a Black female chef in Houston is significant, Wallace said.
“The world is finally seeing us. Yes, we are here. Yes, we’re doing good things. We’re just as creative, if not more creative, than a lot of other chefs who have gotten recognition,” Wallace said. “It is literally our time to shine right now.”
And Burrell’s time, she said. “I can’t wait to see what she does. She’s on the cusp of her brightest moment.”
Which, in Burrell’s world, means setting more goals.
As she eases away from Pivot and focuses on her new business partnership and its many arms, Burrell is mindful that she needs to invest in something important in her 2021 work equation: herself.
Her years of relentless selfpushing haven’t left much time for personal considerations. She’s open to the ideas of travel, new foods and a renewed focus on friends and family. A beer aficionado, she can see herself one day opening her own brewery.
“I’d like to nurture Dawn a little bit more,” she said. “I’m open to whatever comes to me. I know the things that bring me joy, and I want to have more of them.”
The woman who revels in all that Houston has to offer speaks with the same tongue as the workaholic who knows an important new chapter in her professional life is dawning. The new goal, she said, might be balance.
“This is the most important time of my life, and I want to be ready for it,” she said. “I want these moments to matter.”