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The Progressives: Shenarri Freeman

Writer's picture: boxton9boxton9
Dec 11, 20221 min read

Updated: Nov 10, 2023

Edible Manhattan/Edible Brooklyn, Spring 2022


By Julia Sexton


Part of our 2022 redesign, The Progressives is a department that I instituted and assign where we profile people in the food & beverage space who are shifting the needle toward a more inclusive, sustainable, and equitable future. Here, I profile Shenarri Freeman, chef of Overthrow Hospitality's Cadence, who is rethinking the soul food of her culture and personal experience with healthier, plant-based results.





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About Me

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I Was Supposed to Go to Grad School

Growing up in a large, loud family of 7, they use to call me “Pass Me The, Pass Me The” for the way that I’d try to doctor my dinner with whatever condiments were on hand. At about 8 or 9, I gave up on condiments and took control of dinner entirely, cooking out of a beat-up copy of The New York Times Cookbook that I still own, my little penciled-in annotations intact. I cooked for 7 people nightly, all throughout high school. By the time I was winding up college, I’d become a damn fine cook.

 

My father was a professor of American History. I figured I’d follow in those footsteps, teaching Dickens to 18-year-olds who were not at all interested. I gathered applications to doctorate programs, meanwhile, I took a job as a waiter in a busy catering company. The kitchen where I worked was perpetually understaffed—my cooking skills were quickly identified and I was press-ganged onto their crew. I LOVED it—the excitement, the creativity, the freedom, the trench humor, learning professional cooking techniques. There I stayed for several years while my graduate school applications gathered dust.

 

Cue me, later, a refugee from a crash-and-burn restaurant opening where I was not only the sous-chef, but also the loan application writer and babysitter for a chef/owner who had gone spectacularly off the rails. By then, I had a couple of herniated discs and no desire to stay in restaurants. I moved back to the world of words, and I’ve never looked back. 

 

Since then, I’ve been a restaurant critic, a national award-winning blogger, a food journalist, a travel writer, a columnist, a cookbook author, and the editor-in-chief of four Edible titles. I can’t wait to see what's next.

 

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