Allow Her to Reintroduce Herself: Chef Dawn Burrell Is Back (2024)

Top Chef alumna Dawn Burrell has been on a hiatus from Houston’s restaurant scene. The Olympian, who switched gears from being a long jumper to becoming a chef, is known for her soulful cooking in kitchens around the city, a reputation that led her to a James Beard semifinalist nod in 2020. She later served as chef-partner of Lucille’s Hospitality Group, helmed by lauded Houston chef Chris Williams. But in July 2023, things took a swift 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 from Late August, Burrell expressed in a statement her gratitude for her friendship with Williams and partnership with Lucille’s Hospitality Group, but noted that opportunities to travel and collaborate with other chefs were “leading [her] in a different direction.” Now, Burrell tells Eater Houston that the business relationship just wasn’t a good fit. “I decided I needed to leave. The partnership was not healthy, nor viable. It was just best to part ways,” she says.

Burrell is in a new stage of her culinary career — what she conceives as her colorful re-entrance into the Houston food 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 attend to use all of their senses to understand and appreciate the experience.

Jenn Duncan

Inspired in part by the Alabama Shakes song of the same name, Sound and Color will feature Burrell working alongside fellow chefs, musicians, and mixed media artists. Each dinner, Burrell and her collaborators will switch things up and feature some surprises, including a new secret location that is only revealed when diners secure their tickets. The series kicks off on June 29, featuring Burrell’s good friend Dominick Lee, who is set to lead the much-anticipated progressive Creole restaurant Augustine’s that will open this fall. Burrell will also team up with Beard semi-finalist chef and Chopped champion Tristen Epps on July 12, followed by a collaboration with Second Ward brewery Equal Parts Brewing on July 26.

Future dates and chefs will be announced later, but in July, Burrell says she also has plans to collaborate with multidisciplinary artist Robert Leroy Hodge, as well as Janavi Folmsbee, an Indian-born contemporary and marine conservation artist. Folmsbee is responsible for sensory installations at Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport, including the Aquarius Art Tunnel.

Burrell says her aim for Sound and Color is for collaborators to show up in the way that they desire to represent their artistry. Culinarians will showcase stories about their food or culture, presenting an array of flavors and styles that relate to special themes. Comfort food will still be at the root for Burrell, who says she plans to give diners a sneak peek into her many interests and culinary mind. “I believe comfort food can be elevated to whatever platform,” she says. “It can be plated nicely and be beautiful, and it can still feel like a warm hug to you.”

Joseph Boudreaux

In many ways, this dinner series came from a period of uncertainty. Following her abrupt departure from Lucille’s Hospitality, Burrell headed to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia for two-and-a-half months, helping acclaimed chef Marcus Samuelsson train his kitchen team for his latest hometown restaurant Marcus Addis. The experience felt refreshing, Burrell says. She was working within a well-functioning kitchen ecosystem, making food that was new and exciting to her in a place that she had never been. “I learned a lot,” Burrell says. “Marcus is a great person and great support. I felt honored to be a part of his [task force] team.”

She returned to Ethiopia to assist Samuelsson with the grand opening later that fall, and then, earlier this year, jetted with Samuelsson to France for nearly two weeks as a part of the James Beard Foundation’s culinary diplomacy program. 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 of France. Later, she visited Lyon, where she talked to various podcasts, athletes, and future culinarians about her athletic background and career as a chef, and taught groups of women immigrants seeking careers in the culinary world how to make American dishes.

“Once an Olympian, always an Olympian,” Burrell says, adding, “It feels 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 food and arts landscape in a different way. The Alabama Shakes song — one about rebirth and a fearless emergence into an unknown new world, where the listener is confident “everything will be OK” — was her soundtrack, and Dominick Lee, the first chef featured in her upcoming series, was her confidant. “He’s always very helpful to talk to, and we’re always in similar places,” Burrell says. “It makes it easy to have a friend who is going through similar things.”

The two have known each other for around a decade, first meeting at Austin’s Uchi, where Burrell worked and where Lee staged. They collaborated with other chefs in a Food Apartheid dinner series, held at different Houston restaurants, where they raised money for the communities in Trinity Gardens, a neighborhood that has been impacted by a lack of access to supermarkets and fresh, affordable food.

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

This phase for Burrell seems even more so like a new beginning because now, like Lee, she’s telling her own stories about her life and travels through her food, he says. “For people to be able to re-experience her stuff as herself is important,” Lee says, adding that though Late August has a meaningful lens, it wasn’t hers. The dinner series, in contrast, “lives and breathes based on how she handles it, and I think that’s an important difference.”

Jenn Duncan

For the moment, as her first Sound and Color event approaches, Burrell is focused on moving forward. The chef says the multiphase series will lead up to her debut restaurant. She’s still shopping 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 the broader picture of who I am as a person while [diners are] waiting 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’s growing, exploring, and testing her abilities. In late July, she’ll return to Paris to cook for the USA House, where all U.S. Olympians are expected to stay, and she’ll continue developing dishes for her new restaurant and getting her “ducks lined up,” she says.

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

Reservations for chef Dawn Burrell’s dinner series Sound and Color can be made online.