Jennifer Booker

~Chef Jennifer Hill Booker has taken her Southern culinary heritage, her belief in healthy, seasonal foods and her classic French training to create a unique cuisine — Modern Southern Healthy Cuisine with a French Accent.

Chef’s cooking style is a modern reinvention of Southern cuisine that incorporates the traditional use of seasonal ingredients, important to maintain a healthy lifestyle, with French culinary techniques she learned from her training at the Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Paris, France.

Who is Chef Jennifer Hill Booker? She’s an African American woman of strength and character who can creatively meet life and culinary challenges with grace. Her passion for the culinary world knows no boundaries from creating new recipes, to teaching culinary arts, presenting live cooking demonstrations, keynote-speaking engagements and in the digital world where she engages with her online community. Her focused attention to detail came through loud and clear when she was a contestant on the Food Network’s Cutthroat Kitchen competition food show. Life experiences have given her a special sensitivity to sharing her joy of cooking with others including single, working moms and military families. She takes pleasure in teaching people to cook healthy and delicious food. With her extensive culinary endeavors as a professional chef, culinary arts instructor and cookbook author, Chef Jennifer Hill Booker is like having your favorite chef in the kitchen with you! She is an inspiration and role model for girls and modern women who are balancing life’s many challenges.

Chef Jennifer opened her first restaurant, Bauhaus Biergarten, in Springdale Arkansas the fall of 2022. This German inspired venue mirror’s her culinary experiences while living-and cooking in Germany. Bauhaus Biergarten offers authentic German and EU beers, German style sausages and Bavarian pretzels; all to be enjoyed in a picturesque outdoor beer garden.

Her first cookbook, Field Peas to Foie Gras: Southern Recipes with a French Accent. (Pelican Publishing, 2014) includes original recipes that will help you create healthy, delicious meals for your family. Using Southern upbringing and French training as the basis for culinary exploration in her second cookbook, Dinner Déjà Vu: Southern Tonight, French Tomorrow, (Pelican Publishing, 2017), uses one list of fresh ingredients to create two meals, one Southern and one French. Combined grocery lists provide time-saving tools for recipes from cocktails to desserts and everything in between. In her first illustrated children's book, Jelly Fries A Fish For Dinner, (Tallahatchie Tales, 2021), Chef Jennifer highlights the foods of the Mississippi Delta, through the eyes of her daughter Jenelle. Duke Eats Ants For Lunch, (Tallahatchie Tales, 2023), the second in her illustrated children’s book series, revisits the Mississippi Delta through the adventures of her nephew.

Chef Jennifer’s culinary path has not always been a linear one. She earned her Bachelor’s Degree from the University of Tulsa before graduating first in her class; eighteen months later, with an Associate of Occupational Science from Oklahoma State Institute of Technology. Extensive travel while married to a United States Army Officer pushed Jennifer to blaze a trail that fit her unique situation-a female African American chef, living abroad. As a result, her culinary company Your Resident Gourmet was born. During her time living in Germany, Jennifer honed her culinary talents by providing cooking classes for both military and German families. She was also able to fulfill a lifelong dream of attending Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Paris, where she once again graduated top of her class. Years later Jennifer finds herself once again blazing culinary trails as she wears many culinary hats as chef, cookbook author, reality TV personality, culinary educator restaurant owner and fierce advocate for food equity.

Chef Jennifer is the 2022-2023 President of the prestigious Atlanta chapter of Les Dames d’Escoffier International, a member of SlowFood-Atlanta and of Atlanta’s No Kid Hungry Atlanta Society. Chef Jennifer currently sits on the James Beard Foundation Sustainability Council. She is a Georgia Grown Executive Chef for the GA Department of Agriculture, the Culinary Explorer for the Georgia Department of Tourism and Travel and the founder of Southern Divas of the New South* Dinner Series.

Weaving her love of traditional Southern cuisine with her belief in incorporating healthy, seasonal foods and her classic French training, Chef Jennifer created a unique style of cooking that she terms Modern Southern Healthy Cuisine with a French Accent. Chef Jennifer shares this brand of cooking through her many guest chef television appearances, with original recipes in such publications as Waste Not Cookbook, Southern Living Magazine, Garden & Gun and Essence Magazine. During her Food Network debut as a finalist on Cutthroat Kitchen, Chef Jennifer was able to showcase her love of Southern cuisine with a French accent, and again when her family was featured on an episode of Andrew Zimmern's show, Family Dinner-found on Magnolia Network. Her website provides information about healthy eating, culinary trends, travel, and recipes that reflect her culinary point of view of Modern Southern Healthy Cuisine with a French Accent.

She spends her free time in her kitchen, garden, or the farmer’s market with her two daughters Jenelle and Regine and their KorgieJack, Pudge.