In a cultural moment when the word “activist” is thrown around constantly, Ghetto Gastro founders Jon Gray, Pierre Serrao, and Lester Walker are genuinely deserving of the accolade.
Since establishing the Bronx-based collective in 2012, the trio has become a favorite of both Hollywood and the fashion industry. Case in point: earlier this year, Ghetto Gastro collaborated with Wolfgang Puck on the Governors Ball menu for the Oscars, while Rick Owens and Michèle Lamy have had them cater their Thanksgiving dinners. “Nowadays, we might have the best party of New York Fashion Week, too, and we’re not even a fashion house,” Gray says, laughing, over the phone from New York.
Yet the group has never lost sight of its original mission: social justice reform. During the pandemic, it delivered thousands of meals to people in need across the Bronx, teaming up with the nonprofit Rethink Food to create a service inspired by the Black Panthers’ free breakfast program. “Being raised in a community where you see the symptoms of oppression on a daily basis, you understand that the government and the powers that be can’t really be depended on,” Gray told Vogue at the time. “So, we were just like, ‘How can we take our privilege and our power to organize and connect that and just do the work?’ We call ourselves the Black Power Kitchen—a phrase coined by [Black Panthers’ leader] Stokely Carmichael—so we really wanted to lean into that history and culture, to take what our ancestors had done and reimagine and execute it.”
As the group translates that philosophy to its first cookbook, Black Power Kitchen, Gray tells Vogue about how the project came to life, and why it’s far more than just a collection of recipes.
Vogue: In a way, it feels strange to me that this is Ghetto Gastro’s first cookbook, but at the same time, you’ve followed such an unconventional path, it makes sense. What was the genesis of Black Power Kitchen, exactly?
Jon Gray: It’s crazy for us because it’s true that we’ve made a habit of going right when everyone else is going left, pushing against the so-called rules of the food world. So when everybody was like, “Do you think you want a restaurant?” It was a no. “Are you gonna do a book?” Again, the answer was always no. So when we first started talking about this project [after a publisher approached us], we knew it wasn’t going to be a straightforward cookbook. That’s how booksellers might categorize it, but we saw it as something different. We started jamming on it in 2020, and have worked on it for two years, but honestly, our whole lives are distilled into the printed matter of Black Power Kitchen.
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