How Stephen Satterfield Pushed Me to Dig Deeper
Demetrius Brown is the chef and co-owner behind Bread & Butterfly in Atlanta, where he’s been on a relentless quest to delve deeply into Caribbean, African, and Afro-American culture, tradition, and cuisine.
On Wednesday, June 11, 2025, Brown will collaborate with Stephen Satterfield on a four-course dinner at Bread & Butterfly as part of The Resy Dream Team Dinners series. Get tickets here (terms apply).
“Who inspired you to cook?”
This is one of the questions people always ask me — and like many other chefs, my answer lies with a matriarch. In my case, my great-grandmother, Elizabeth Castle.
Originally from Trinidad and Tobago, she immigrated to Rhode Island in the ’70s, and we were very close. My twin brother and I lived with her in Providence from time to time, and when we moved to Georgia when we were four, we spent every summer with her. Her in the kitchen, cooking the dishes of her Caribbean heritage, is where my love for food started.
Still today, the thought of my great-grandmother’s house warms my heart and makes my belly rumble as the doors swing open to my memories of smoked fish, wafts of curry, and baking bread. Even the smell of basmati rice fully encapsulates me.
It’s incredibly nostalgic to me, so when I started Heritage Supper Club, a pop-up born during the pandemic in 2021, it’s those flavors I tried to capture and recreate in my own way. It was still the early stages of the pop-up when one night, my wife and I were on the couch at home, looking for something to watch on Netflix, when a new TV show caught our eye. Just the description alone drew us in; the name, “High on the Hog,” was second.
And that’s when I first discovered Stephen Satterfield’s work.
I was already a fan of Ms. Toni Tipton-Martin and Ms. Jessica B. Harris, journalists and historians that have pushed the conversation on Black foodways. And after watching that first episode of “High in the Hog” where Stephen is in Africa, walking the same dirt road as the enslaved hundreds of years ago (which almost made me cry), I’ve been a huge fan of his ever since.
Stephen has a way of capturing the memories and stories of the lost souls of the transatlantic slave trade, up to Emancipation and the Civil Rights era. He doesn’t shy away from the anguish and atrocities of our ancestors. His storytelling is so committed and thought-provoking that it’s a catalyst for conversation and change, and it is truly remarkable.
His storytelling is so committed and thought-provoking that it’s a catalyst for conversation and change.— Demetrius Brown on Stephen Satterfield
Watching that first episode was like an omen that the work I had just started with Heritage was the right path for me, that people might finally be interested in delving into Black foodways. And Stephen’s work inspired me to dig even deeper — at the time, I was still focusing heavily on the Trinidadian and Jamaican cuisines of my own heritage, but watching him draw these parallels between the food I grew up eating in America and the food of Africa really pushed me to look even further, to those who came before me.
I have him to thank — him and my great-grandmother — among many others, for what Heritage Supper Club came to be. And for the work I am currently doing at Bread & Butterfly as chef and co-owner, where we bridge the gap between France and the African diaspora. I can only hope that digging into my heritage and beyond will inspire future generations of culinarians and history-makers for years to come, like he’s inspired me.
As told to Noëmie Carrant, Resy’s senior writer and editor.
