Chef Dawn Burrell returns to Houston with “Sound and Color” dinner series

Excellent chef former student Dawn Burrell has taken a break from the Houston restaurant scene. The former Olympian, who went from long jumper to chef, is known for her soulful cooking at kitchens like Houston’s Kulture, a tenure that led her to becoming a semifinalist in James Beard in 2020. She then served as chef-partner. from Lucille’s Hospitality Group, led by renowned Houston chef Chris Williams. But in July 2023, things took a rapid turn. Burrell announced her departure from the restaurant group that now runs Lucille’s, Rado MKT and Late August, the latter of which she was supposed to lead.

At the time of her departure in late August, Burrell expressed in a statement her gratitude for her friendship with Williams and her partnership with Lucille’s Hospitality Group, but noted that the opportunities to travel and collaborate with other chefs “took her into a different direction.” .” Now, Burrell tells Eater Houston that the business relationship just wasn’t right. “I decided I had to leave. The partnership was neither healthy nor viable. It was just better to separate,” she says.

Burrell is in a new phase of her culinary career — what she envisions as her colorful re-entry into the Houston culinary scene — and she’s doing it her way. This summer, the chef will launch a multidisciplinary dining series, Sound and Color, and she wants diners who participate to use all of their senses to understand and enjoy the experience.

Jennifer Duncan

Inspired in part by the Alabama Shakes song of the same name, Sound and Color will feature Burrell working alongside other chefs, musicians and mixed media artists. At each dinner, Burrell and his collaborators will change things up and introduce a few surprises, including a new secret location that is only revealed when diners get their tickets. The series premieres June 29, with Burrell’s good friend Dominick Lee set to helm the highly anticipated progressive Creole restaurant Augustine’s opening this fall. Burrell will also team up with Beard’s semi-finalist chef and Chopped champion Tristan Epps on July 12, followed by a collaboration with Second Ward Equal Parts Brewing on July 26.

Future dates and leaders will be announced later, but in July, Burrell says she also plans to collaborate with multidisciplinary artist Robert Leroy Hodge, as well as Janavi Folmsbee, a contemporary and marine conservation artist of Indian descent . Folmsbee is responsible for sensory facilities at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, including the Aquarius Art Tunnel.

Burrell says his goal for Sound and Color is for collaborators to present themselves in the way they want to represent their artistry. Cooks will present stories about their food or culture, showcasing a range of flavors and styles relating to particular themes. Comfort food will always be at the heart of Burrell, who says she plans to give diners a glimpse into her many interests and culinary mind. “I believe comfort food can be elevated on any platform,” she says. “It can be nicely plated and look beautiful, and it can still feel like a warm hug to you.”

Joseph Boudreaux

In many ways, this dinner series came out of a time of uncertainty. After her abrupt departure from Lucille’s Hospitality, Burrell traveled to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, for two and a half months, helping celebrity chef Marcus Samuelsson train his kitchen team for his latest restaurant, Marcus Addis. The experience was refreshing, Burrell said. She was working within a well-functioning kitchen ecosystem, preparing new and exciting dishes for her in a place she had never been. “I learned a lot,” Burrell says. “Marcus is a great person and a great support. I felt honored to be part of his (task force) team.

She returned to Ethiopia to help Samuelsson with the inauguration later that fall, and then, earlier this year, flew with Samuelsson to France for nearly two weeks as part of the James Culinary Diplomacy program Beard Foundation. There, Burrell’s seemingly disparate worlds of chef and Olympic athlete collided. She traveled to Paris, where the 2024 Summer Olympics will take place, and cooked for the U.S. ambassador to France. She later traveled to Lyon, where she spoke to various podcasters, athletes and future cooks about her sporting journey and career as a chef, and taught groups of immigrant women seeking careers in the culinary world how to prepare American dishes.

“Once an Olympian, always an Olympian,” Burrell said, adding, “It’s incredibly special to be a part of it again, and to participate in a different way is really cool.” »

Behind the scenes, Burrell was shaping the idea for her dinner series — events she hoped would allow diners to experience the vibrancy of Houston’s culinary and arts landscape in a different way. Alabama’s song Shakes – a song about rebirth and fearless emergence into a new, unfamiliar world, where the listener is convinced that “everything will be okay” – was its soundtrack, and Dominick Lee, the first chef featured in his next series, was his confidant. . “He’s always very helpful to talk to, and we’re always in similar situations,” Burrell says. “It’s easy to have a friend who’s going through similar things.”

The two have known each other for about a decade, first meeting at Austin’s Uchi, where Burrell worked and Lee performed. They collaborated with Chris Williams and Johnny Rhodes in a series of food apartheid dinners, held at different Houston restaurants, where they raised money for Trinity Gardens, a neighborhood that was impacted by lack of access to supermarkets and fresh, affordable food.

“Ultimately, I find her to be one of the most talented chefs I know,” Lee says. “She has a standard that comes from repeating work in a place like Uchi and being expected to present a very specific style and quality each time. She’s constantly having to build and move to a new space, and I think that’s exactly what she’s doing.

This phase for Burrell feels even more like a new beginning because now, like Lee, she tells her own stories about her life and travels through her food, he says. “It’s important that people can relive his work as themselves,” Lee says, adding that while Late August has a significant perspective, it wasn’t his. The Dinner Series, on the other hand, “lives and breathes based on how she handles it, and I think that’s an important difference.”

Jennifer Duncan

For now, as he approaches his first Sound and Color event, Burrell is focused on the future. The chef says the multi-phase series will lead to his first restaurant. She’s still looking for a space but has a name and conceptual theme in mind. “I just wanted to offer something that shared (what) I’m interested in and a broader picture of who I am as a person while (diners) wait for the restaurant.”

The goal is to launch her restaurant by the end of 2025, but Burrell says it’s a moving target — she’s in no rush. This summer, she grows, explores and tests her abilities. At the end of July, she will return to Paris to cook for the USA House, where all the American Olympians are supposed to stay, and she will continue to develop dishes for her new restaurant and get her “ducks in a row,” she says.

Her path to restaurateur, she says, is destined. “It will just be a different path because what is mine is authentically mine,” she says. “Now I have to do the work for my next phase and have confidence in my abilities. This is my new beginning.

Reservations for Chef Dawn Burrell’s Sound and Color Dinner Series can be made online.