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Chainey Kuykendall is a sous chef at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. (Photo by Sandra Sellars © Virginia Museum of Fine Arts)
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Floris (Photo by Monica Escamilla)
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Afternoon tea at Floris (Photo by Monica Escamilla)
Chainey Kuykendall hasn’t been cooking for very long, but in just eight years, the ambitious executive chef — part of the team at the tearoom Floris, opened earlier this year at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts — has landed herself on the global stage. In 2022, Kuykendall participated in The Culinary Academy of France’s Best Chef Competition, for a chance to win Le Trophy Jean-Jacques Dietrich. She won the regional competition, sending her to France to participate with the first all-female USA & Canada Delegation, which took home fourth place.
Drawn to science and eager for a degree with practical applications, Kuykendall began her education as a chemistry major, but she says she quickly realized it wasn’t the right fit. She thought back to her childhood, when, as the latchkey kid of a long-distance truck driver and a waitress, she would entertain herself by doctoring packets of ramen, coaxing original creations out of affordable ingredients. She decided to pursue a bachelor’s degree in culinary arts and made her way from her hometown of Mount Airy, North Carolina, to Charlotte, where she attended Johnson & Wales University.
After moving around the East Coast, working at a country club and a seasonally inspired bistro in Massachusetts, Kuykendall settled in Virginia to be closer to family. When she saw that the VMFA was hiring, she felt drawn to the creative possibilities and secured a spot as the sous chef at the museum’s fine-dining restaurant, Amuse.
While cooking there, Kuykendall eagerly awaited the debut of Floris, and once the doors opened, she got the opportunity to create her vision on the tiered platters at the tearoom.
“I think sometimes the afternoon tearoom concept can be a little constricting,” she says, “but to me, it’s like an endless possibility to do a lot of little tiny bites of things and kind of warm people up to the idea of different kinds of cuisine that they haven’t had before.”
Now, at age 29, Kuykendall is back on the global stage as a regional finalist for the S.Pellegrino Young Chef Academy Competition, which is open to chefs under 30 who have been cooking professionally for at least one year. The U.S. regional finalists were chosen by a team from ALMA, the International School of Italian Culinary Arts, who assessed the chefs’ signature dishes and backgrounds. Kuykendall is among 10 finalists, and her dish, called “My Mother’s Garden,” pays homage to the eponymous plot of land and to the chef’s culinary heritage.
“The whole point of my dish is to represent my culture and my experience with the relationship of my mom and my grandmother,” Kuykendall says, “but it’s also about the seasonality and the locality of where I am now.” Kuykendall will represent Virginia through the inclusion of locally grown ingredients and by presenting her food on plates made by local potter Bear Ceramics.
Lechon manok-style roasted chicken thigh, seasoned with dark soy and calamansi juice, honors Kuykendall’s Filipino heritage, as does atchara, a Filipino-style papaya pickle that represents the vibrant flowers in her mother’s garden. At its core are confit new potatoes and a creamy buttermilk velouté, thickened with potato scraps. The potatoes, which Kuykendall says are the heart of the dish, signify the relationship between her mother and grandmother. After rocky early years, it was harvesting potatoes in the garden that brought the two women together.
Kuykendall finishes her signature competition dish with annatto seed and carrot oil to mimic the bright orange fence that surrounds the garden. And, revealing a bit of the chef’s subtle humor, she serves a nest of chicken skin tuiles in homage to the neighborhood chickens that plague her mother’s produce. In the ultimate act of revenge, diners are meant to smash the tuiles, sprinkling the crispy skins over the dish for texture.
Fellow chefs in the competition hail from restaurants such as New York’s Michelin-starred Eleven Madison Park, California’s pioneering The French Laundry and Chicago’s Indienne.
VMFA Culinary Director and Senior Executive Chef Cody Dickey, as his sous chef’s mentor, will accompany Kuykendall to New York and, if she wins, to Milan, where she’ll once again have the chance to represent the U.S. on a global stage. For the competition, which takes place Sept. 30 to Oct. 1, the chef will have five hours to complete 10 plates of her signature dish, which will be evaluated on technical skills, creativity and personal belief. The judges will choose one Grand Finalist who will go on to compete at the Grand Finale in Milan in 2025.
