On June 11, Resy’s Dream Team Dinners series makes an important stop in Atlanta with a collaboration that blends memory, migration, and culinary mastery. For one night only, Chef Demetrius Brown joins forces with High on the Hog host and food historian Stephen Satterfield to present a multi-course dining experience that honors the global story of Black food.
The pairing is more than a collaboration—it’s a meeting of minds, missions, and generations. “One or two of the dishes that [my great-grandmother] made for us growing up are going to be on the menu,” Chef Brown explains. “One is a macaroni pie, which is a Trinidadian staple. The other is a cassava pone—it was essentially her recipe, but I made a few minor adjustments to it.” The dinner, he says, is a continuation of his work at his pop-up-turned-restaurant concept, Heritage, where he explores the foods of Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas through a tasting menu format.
Brown, who currently co-owns Bread & Butterfly in Atlanta’s Inman Park, has long been weaving diasporic flavors into fine dining, often facing resistance from more traditional diners. “We’ve had people come in, look at the menu, and walk out,” he says. “It’s evident that we know how to cook, but we have to be more creative. We don’t always have access to the same ingredients.” Still, the mission is clear: reframe African cuisine as refined, intentional, and foundational.
That shared vision is what made Satterfield the ideal collaborator. “When High on the Hog came out, I was smack dab in the middle of creating Heritage and doing those dinners,” Brown recalls. “To see another Black person take the torch from Toni Tipton-Martin, Jessica Harris, JJ Johnson; and bring it to a broader population through a Netflix series is kind of groundbreaking.”
For his part, Satterfield has long admired Brown from afar. “His reputation in Atlanta is really, really sturdy,” he says. “He’s got an impeccable culinary mind, and the idea of pairing talent is something that’s really innate in how I think about food.” A former sommelier, Satterfield will oversee beverage pairings for the evening, pulling rums and wines from across the Caribbean and African diaspora to complement Brown’s menu.
“Food is migration, and migration is movement,” Satterfield says. “We’re really doing a Black diasporic conversation on the plate, and Demetrius’s food is more heavily oriented toward the Caribbean tier of that story, which is really exciting.” Together, they’ll explore not just ingredients, but the people, places, and legacies behind them—from Africa to the Caribbean, the American South, and beyond.
The dinner, according to Brown, will begin with traditional African staples and move through the historical journey of Black food in America—from enslavement to Emancipation, the Harlem Renaissance, and a speculative future. “With our dessert course, we’re going to tell a story of where we think food is going to go as far as Black people are concerned,” he says.
For both men, this event is about more than the plate. It’s about visibility, legacy, and impact. “You could love him or hate him, but what Gordon Ramsay did for British cuisine is what I want to do for African cuisine,” says Brown. “I want to show that African food can be refined, because we have so much variety in it.”
“Of course, you have places like Ethiopia where they focus on a lot of spice, and you have places like Western Africa where they use a lot of okra–but if you combine those two, you can come up with something completely different than any other cuisine in the world,” he continues. “I think I would like to bring attention to it and motivate other black chefs to do the same thing because there’s power in numbers, and I think we need it in the time we’re in now.”