Ask most chefs where they learned to cook and you get a story about culinary school, or a mentor, or some line cook who showed them how to hold a knife. Ask Tiffany Derry, and the answer has always been her mother. On August 23, that answer gets a kitchen of its own.
Louisa “Cookie” Austin is stepping behind the line at Roots Southern Table for the first time, cooking the August edition of the restaurant’s monthly Soulful Sunday series. The event is called “Cookie Is Cooking!,” which tells you most of what you need to know about the tone. This isn’t a guest chef dinner built around technique. It’s Tiffany Derry’s mother making the food that raised her.
Cookie grew up splitting time between Port Allen, Louisiana, and Beaumont, Texas, and the menu reflects both places. Oxtails with gravy, smothered turkey wings, fried catfish, mac and cheese, and collard greens make up the savory side. Dessert is a croissant bread pudding with bourbon caramel and vanilla ice cream, which the release notes Cookie insists guests save room for.
“My mom taught me that food is so much more than what’s on the plate, it’s how you love people,” Tiffany Derry said in the announcement. “So many of the recipes, flavors, and traditions that inspire Roots started in her kitchen.”
Tom Foley, who co-owns T2D Concepts with Derry, put it more simply: this is the story that built the restaurant, finally showing up in the kitchen itself.
Soulful Sunday runs the fourth Sunday of every month at Roots, and past installments have sold out within days, so this one is unlikely to be different. Lunch runs from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. on August 23 at Roots Southern Table, 13050 Bee St., Suite 160, in Farmers Branch. Reservations are strongly recommended and can be made through rootssoutherntable.com.
Roots is part of T2D Concepts, the Dallas-Fort Worth hospitality group Derry runs with Foley, which also includes Radici, Roots Chicken Shak, The Landing, and Syrup & Sno.
