Top Chef Kevin Gillespie’s third act is about reclamation as he launches a Scottish and Southern influence restaurant in Atlanta.
Story by Su-Jit Lin
There are few celebrity chefs more easily recognizable than Atlanta, Georgia’s Kevin Gillespie. It’s the iconic big red beard, and the heavily tattooed arms, burly from years of working the line, hunting, fishing. The gruff façade that fades away as quickly as his brown eyes crinkle in smiles or open wide in earnest passion as he talks about the things that matter most to him.
And that list is long — food, obviously, and family, which is inseparable from the latter. It includes social justice, whether it’s about equality and respect for culture and heritage — including his own — or finding better ways to treat the planet and the creatures on it, from gratitude for the lives given to nourish us to finding more sustainable ways to feed many and do less harm.
A Bravo network Top Chef star, known for his restaurant Gunshow, Kevin’s story begins in Locust Grove, Georgia, about an hour outside of Atlanta, where he lives now.
“It was definitely a rural, mostly farming community, which isn’t necessarily the truth now, 42 years later,” he says. “But when I was a kid, we had no stoplights, one stop sign, one grocery store. It was tiny but very idyllic, where we could ride our bikes down Main Street.”
Or, more often than not, he would cycle to his grandmother, Geneva Gillespie’s, house, one of the biggest influences in his cooking career, and a part of his inspiration for his latest restaurant, Nàdair, which ties his loves and losses together with a Scottish influence.
“All of the Gillespies lived kind of on a single piece of land,” he reflects. “My parents lived on one end; Granny lived on the other; and everyone else in between, so growing up, it was kind of like having a bunch of siblings instead of cousins. We literally ate every single meal together unless we were doing something special. She was part of my life seven days a week until adulthood.”
He thinks he was around six years old when he started helping her out in the kitchen.
“After breakfast in the summer, we’d be banished outside and then come in at lunch. I love the outdoors, but I was a very pale child — I was not built for summers in Georgia,” he laughs. “I remember asking her if I could help cook so I could avoid going outside at midday, so I figured, if I helped her cook, I could stay inside in the AC, and she agreed as long as I agreed not to talk during her soaps.”
This plan of avoidance was successful for the summers he wasn’t in New England and a young Kevin mastered “learning how to properly bread country fried steak so breading wouldn’t fall off, when to turn fried chicken,” … and his granny’s molasses cookies.
Now that she’s gone, lost only recently, it’s those cookies that remind him most of her.
“Everyone says I make them the same, but I feel like it’s lost its luster,” Kevin says wistfully. “As a kid, that was my favorite thing I would make with her.”
It’s also one of the traditions he’s always held close to his heart. The other is his grandma’s New Year’s Day tradition, which he keeps Southern despite typically spending New Year’s at his property in Maine.
Every year, he says, his grandma would make what he called a “classic country spread” with ham as the only meat.
“She’d cure and smoke a ham, which I still do, and serve it with collard greens and field peas, cornbread and butter beans,” he shares. “It’s meant to be very modest.”
These days, it’s a bit more modest than he’d like. “Like many families of my generation, we’re suffering a major diaspora,” Kevin notes. “While my parents and grandparents did a great job of keeping families together, that’s not the case in my generation; we’re now spread across the whole country so we don’t have that connectivity. Most of the time lately, we gather more for funerals, unfortunately.”
And for Kevin, other reasons for mourning, too. For instance, his homage to home, Revival, shut down only a couple of years ago after eight wonderful ones serving Atlanta. Inspired by a conversation with his mother, who’d expressed a certain fish-out-of-water feeling when eating at his fine dining establishments, he opened Revival in Decatur, a city in Atlanta, Georgia, as a more accessible, everyman restaurant celebrating Southern family-style suppers.
In it, he revived old recipes important to his family and served them in separate rooms with the repurposed house’s near-original footprint, like keeping a living room and sewing room … just with tables and chairs added to it. The décor was personal; his family’s photos were displayed among bric-a-brac from Locust Grove.
All of this made it an even greater loss when in a matter of ten devastating days, it was burglarized and, as a result, sustained significant structural damage. Because when the thieves stole the safe, they broke the water line, which caused three days of unstoppable flooding, and cracked the main support beam that kept the building anchored to the 110-year-old foundation.
“What I didn’t think about when I opened a restaurant so deeply personal was that anything done there would feel like it was done to my family. When it fell down, it felt like my own house was collapsing,” he says, the ache of the loss echoing through his voice.
Not only were his own irreplaceable knickknacks destroyed, “there were significant downstream consequences that impact the community,” he explains.
“When they robbed it, they forced us to stop the Defend Southern Food project” — a non-profit program Kevin started to reduce food waste and hunger in his community, providing meals for more than 500 Maynard Jackson school students and their families five days a week. — “because that’s where we were making all the food. They stole food out of the mouths of needy children in our own community!”
The outrage is still fresh, but what’s stronger than the disappointment is Kevin’s hopeful nature — his dogged determination to reclaim what is lost. Hence his newest chapter, Nàdair.
“It comes from a Scottish saying, ‘way of nature.’ It’s a sentiment that for any living thing to thrive — people, plants, mountains, rivers — we all must thrive. To live a sustainable life that is thoughtful, intentional.”
And in the circle of life, it’s how he wants to begin his Act III.
Young as he is, with recent deaths in the family and his own battle with cancer, mortality and legacy have risen to the top of his consciousness.
While he is in remission, “I’m aging quicker than I should,” he confesses. “I don’t know how long I can be a chef anymore. And if this will be my last, I want to make sure that it’s the one thing had I not built, I’d regret it.”
That means embracing the Scottish culture that runs on both sides for Granny Gillespie.
“Granny spoke Gaelic; I can speak it a little, but it’s a part of my life I never shared publicly,” he says. “Because I’d spent my life hearing the tropes on how gross Scottish food was, and Granny, she lived in a world where being Scottish was akin to being a lower-class citizen. She was very self-conscious about it. It wasn’t until the last few years of her life that she came around.”
Through Nàdair, he’s finishing her journey of rejecting that shame by bringing modern Scottish wood-fired cooking to Atlanta.
It also means getting back to Defend Southern Food. The new space is big enough to sustain the mass cooking required to return to his fight against hunger, against stigma, and for his community. It’s not allowing that which is in his immediate world to suffer, so he sees it.
Nàdair, with its focus on giveback and working with local farmers, was recently awarded “Recommended” status by the Michelin Guide Atlanta 2024.
Nàdair is prepared to battle on another front, too, as Gillespie also gets back to his natural roots in nature.
“I’ve always loved (superstar chef Anne Quatrano’s) Floataway Café space because it sits next to a park that’s a reclaimed industrial area that’s been turned into a green space,” he says. “I found it peaceful … felt like, yeah, I could do this for a few more years, if when I look outside, I’m looking at a park, where it’s just birds and native trees, hear the wind rustling and birds chirping.
“Here, I can really turbocharge my work with Slow Food Atlanta, too, because Nàdair is hyper-focused on sustainability. My goal is to earn a green Michelin star, to become a model that sustainability is more than what goes on a plate, like making conscious decisions in design, building, recycling, upcycling, even stuff like routing rainwater to a cistern to water a community garden.”
And most importantly, here Kevin can reclaim what made him a Top Chef fan favorite: his passion for family, friendship, community, and culture, served with several sides of philanthropy.
