Hot Now

There aren’t many things Chef Ashleigh Shanti hasn’t done in the food world. Since culinary school she’s cooked her way around the country, staging at McCrady’s in Charleston, the famed Blue Hill at Stone Barns, and even journeyed to Copenhagen, conferring at Noma, which was once regarded as the best restaurant in the world. She was the culinary assistant to Vivian Howard for all of her shows and public appearances, and even competed on Top Chef making it to the top 6 after 11 weeks of competition. In 2016 she was tapped as a Rising Star at the James Beard Awards, was crowned one of Eater’s Young Guns in 2019, and was listed as one of the New York Times’ 16 Black Chefs Changing Food in America. But this year, Shanti added two more major notches to her long list of culinary accomplishments; she published her first cookbook, Our South: Black Food Through My Lens, and opened her own restaurant, Good Hot Fish. 

What started as a popup at Burial Brewery, on the heels of her departure as head chef of Benne on Eagle, grew organically into something bigger. After spending most of her career in fancy kitchens around the world, telling the stories of other chefs, she found herself reflecting on her own. “I was finding my own voice and taking ownership of those stories,” she says. “Growing up in coastal Virginia, I worked at so many of these little fish camps along the beach, so good hot fish just felt right.” 

“I come from a very Southern family that’s kind of spread out all throughout the South,” she says. “My dad’s side of the family being from the Charleston Lowcountry, and my mom’s side of the family being from south western Virginia and the midlands region of South Carolina. So all of those places have weaved together to inform how I cook today.”

Scratch-made trout bologna sandwiches, shrimp burgers, and crispy catfish aromatize the air of her small, counter service restaurant. While recipes for hot collard and oyster dip with fried saltines, and grilled sorghum chicken on a stick fill the pages of her book.

“It’s really no frills eating, it doesn’t take itself too seriously, and I love eating that way,” she muses. “I’d been taking myself so seriously as a chef, and at some point it started to suck the joy out of cooking. Cooking the foods I grew up with for these pop-ups invoked joy! They were unfussy and used very few ingredients that were incredibly approachable and that anyone could enjoy. So I think that is what helped me land on Good Hot Fish in particular.”

Leather Britches Recipe

U-Haul Shrimp Cocktail With Prawn Crackers Recipe

Recipes reprinted with permission from Our South: Black Food Through My Lens by Ashleigh Shanti © 2024. Published by Union Square & Co. Photographs © Johnny Autry.