For Damaris Phillips, cooking is an expression of love, creativity, and imagination. She infuses each dish with Southern flair, adding a soupcon of sass and a dash of comfort to every bite.
Story by Cara Clark, Photos by Donnie Phillips
When Damaris Phillips steps into the kitchen — on a television set or at home — the atmosphere transforms into a whirlwind of color, laughter, and flavor as she works a cutting board with precision and flair. If you’ve tuned in to Food Network, the celebrity chef has likely popped onto your screen with Southern effervescence — blonde, bubbly, irrepressible. With the roll of the eye, the flash of a smile, the lilt of a laugh, and a feeling that anything is likely to happen with her on set, she brings a sense of the delightfully incorrigible to shows on which she regularly appears, including Beat Bobby Flay.
When Damaris works with food, it’s a feast for the senses, a celebration of life’s simple pleasures. The winner of the 2013 iteration of Food Network Star developed an outgoing nature to stand out as one of five siblings while growing up in Louisville, Kentucky.
For the saucy chef, “comfort food” takes on a whole new meaning. Food is synonymous with home and a deep sense of contentment — that all’s right with the world. It means more than feeding the body — it’s about nourishing the soul.
“My mom and dad cooked a lot, and there was a real feeling that there wasn’t a lot of extra,” she says. All of our needs were met, and a real feeling of peace and comfort came from having a stocked pantry.”
With a sizable family, dining out wasn’t the norm, but she derived the greatest sense of well-being at the dinner table with her beloved family.
“When I was young, mom was a brilliant woman with a lot of children and a limited budget, but she was able to plan really well so that you didn’t feel that. I remember that feeling when we had gone to the grocery store on a Saturday, and everything was put away. It just felt like there wasn’t a care in the world.
“That’s what food feels like for me — what a stocked pantry feels like or a freezer full of foods that I’ve put up through the summertime. It means everything’s going to be OK. We have what we need to come together to have a good time and take care of people.”
That feeling is deeply ingrained, and cooking for her husband or friends is always a soul-satisfying endeavor.
“I have a genuine feeling that the ability to feed people — and more than just the food they need but providing that feeling of comfort and community that makes them feel taken care of.”
Shaping a Chef
Damaris’ family ran a funeral home, which impacted her perception of the world, her inherent tendency to look to the bright side, and her fearlessness in embarking on an adventure — a path that led her from a comfy, secure job to a brightly lit, fast-paced celebrity.
“You see people on the worst and hardest and saddest day,” she recalls. “It reminds you that there is a life to be lived. It reminds you that we get this one shot at life, and we might as well have a story at the end of it. And my parents raised us to figure things out and to have confidence in ourselves.”
Damaris sees how her heritage — a mom from West Virginia and a father from North Georgia — has shaped the way she approaches ingredients. Her cooking reflects those influences: “a kind of Appalachian influence, but it’s by way of West Virginia.” She attributes her skill in large part to her mother’s patience in teaching her how to cook.
“My mom realized she was going to have to slow down a little, but once she taught us, we could do it. My dad was big on cooking, too. He also really wanted to eat the same things on the same day. We had hamburgers every single Saturday of my life growing up — every single one. I think it also helped with meal planning and with grocery shopping.”
That tradition included Sunday brunch — never a deviation from the meal plan — until one day … the English muffin. When the bread store had a deal on the English muffins, they showed up on the table and caused a kerfuffle.
“There’s a joke in my family,” she says. “Sunday rolled around, and there we were eating English muffins. I looked at my oldest brother, and he said, ‘When I came into this deal, we had biscuits and gravy every single Sunday morning.’
“That was the deal he struck. We laugh about it to this day — you can say when I came into this deal … and the whole family will know what you’re doing.”
As staidly determined as he was to have the same meals each day, Damaris’ father was equally determined to open his children’s minds to different cultures — and even foods worldwide. Tofu was often on the table at a time when it was uncommon.
“It was a very important thing to my parents that we were able to worship with all people — they wanted us to be able to see the commonality with people’s religions and to have a bond with that,” Damaris says. “On Wednesday nights, we would go to a Hari Krishna house in Louisville and eat vegetarian food. That’s not like a traditional upbringing in a small, Southern/Midwestern town.”
Damaris’s entrée into the entertainment world wasn’t a conventional one either.
“I didn’t feel like I had access to that world,” she says. “If I had been a phenom or somebody so wildly talented people couldn’t deny it, maybe there would have been people saying, ‘You can go to Julliard,’ but that’s not how it was. I had a practical sense that I should get a job and went to college for lots of different types of work.”
When she was 18, Damaris began working in restaurants or some form of hospitality — coffee shops, bakeries, restaurants, from front-of-house to cooking. That led her to Food Network where she studied on-air cooking and thought, “I could do that.”
She suddenly knew she wanted to attend culinary school — attending classes for half of the year and working in restaurants the other, gaining insights into the nuances of an array of cultural and regional food.
“I felt like you needed to work in restaurants in all these different cities to know what different cuisine looks like all over our country and better understand the food you’re making and the reasons you’re making it,” Damaris says. “I understand Southern cuisine better because I look at what is made in the Midwest or on the West Coast. It just made me better.”
Taking Center Stage
With her skills honed like the blade of a chef’s favorite knife, she also sharpened her focus to be one of those Food Network chefs, going to open casting calls for the first Food Network Star. One day, when she least expected it and had settled into a steady job with great benefits and an enviable work-life balance, she got the call. The steady rise to stardom seemed inevitable but not easy.
“I think you have to work your craft in a way that you love, and there’s no doubt it happens differently for literally every single person,” Damaris says. “What I’ve learned about all the people who are on the network or do entertainment in the food world is that they have worked their craft, and we all have different paths to that. But nobody has skipped the working on the craft.”
The audience responds to her light-hearted humor and unfiltered joviality. She also brings lively banter and a well-trained palate to judging tables, making it apparent why she’s become a favorite on-camera pro cook.
“I’m just being myself — being goofy or quirky or not thinking about how I’m coming off — just taking down my guard and being myself and finding that incredibly liberating,” says the self-described nerd. “I have the luxury of having a job that celebrates that. That is a real gift.”
That amalgamation of thoughtful and cheerful makes her celebrate her time with fans who enjoy the unfettered and spontaneous way she approaches life and the culinary world.
“My compass is typically pointed towards joy, not because I only want to experience joy, but because pain and grief will find us, and it is inevitable. But what you have to work for is joy. You don’t have to work to be upset; you don’t have to work to be sad. I get to be a reminder that people have the choice for joy.”
Following her parents’ example for the children, there’s no doubt she has it figured out. She’s even figured out how to transition to a vegetarian lifestyle. It was important to her when she and her husband, Darrick Wood, married in 2015 and committed to a vegetarian home.
“There was just no way that I was going to be in a relationship where we ate different things,” Damaris says. “I knew that very early on, and it was a real discussion that we had to have when we started dating. I realized we would never have turkey on Thanksgiving, and I would change a lot of meals that I had grown up with. It took some adjusting, but I decided it was no big deal.”
Setting up Supper Club
Damaris and her business partner, Chef Coby Ming, have worked together on and off for years and set about finding a way to celebrate the harvest of Kentucky and the growers and the farmers in the state. The result was The Bluegrass Supper Club, which began in 2019 and quickly transitioned from hot food to fabulous picnic baskets when COVID was a worldwide game changer.
“We also wanted to get to cook food made by myself and Coby and our two employees — something special and significant we could be part of,” Damaris says. “I genuinely love cooking, and I genuinely love the art and the creation of cooking with Coby. We’re just listening to music and making food that we know is going to make people feel special. It feels great.”
The picnic baskets are a tangible expression of Kentucky's seasonality, its artists and musicians, and the Southern vibe, with food that travels well and can be enjoyed in the most bucolic or glamorous settings.
“There is a real joy to eating outside,” she says. “Like so many people, we started immediately having outdoor picnics as soon as a pandemic happened, and we would go to a park and place blankets kind of far apart. Friends or family showed up and had a picnic with us, and we could see each other and share food. That’s where our idea for baskets came from. Eating in nature is a connector. It will ground you again. You slow down, and the food tastes better, and you will be more present. You will enjoy it more, and you will make a memory just as a byproduct of eating out. It’s been really fun to do.
For Damaris, cooking isn’t just about feeding the body – it’s about nourishing the soul. And with each meal she creates, she spreads a helping of happiness and warmth.
Learn more at bluegrasssuperclub.com.
