BIO

I’m Byrd Evans, a private chef based in the Hudson Valley and New York City. I was born and raised in Louisiana, in a family where food was always central to how we cared for each other, celebrated and gathered. My cooking is rooted in the Creole and Southern food I grew up with, as well as my Lebanese family and the food I learned to make alongside my grandmother.

I graduated from the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco in 2011 and went on to train in Paris at Le Chateaubriand and Le Dauphin. I spent the next fifteen years in California, where I fell deeply into the rhythms of seasonal cooking, local farms and letting really good ingredients speak for themselves. I’ve also spent time living in Oaxaca and Tokyo, studying food and cooking, and some of my most lasting culinary education has come from home cooks and grandmothers in the places I’ve traveled.

For more than a decade, I’ve cooked in private homes for families, artists and public figures, as well as for retreats, dinners and gatherings of all kinds. Over time, my curiosity about what it actually means to nourish someone led me beyond the kitchen. I trained as an Ayurvedic Health Counselor, where I began thinking much more deeply about digestion, seasonality, balance and how differently each of us needs to be fed. I later earned a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology from CIIS, bringing the nervous system, emotion and the body into that same exploration. For me, it has all been about the same thing: how we take things in, what we do with them, and what truly nourishes us.

Food is one of the oldest ways we know how to care for one another. It holds memory, pleasure, culture, grief, celebration and belonging. I believe learning how to nourish ourselves and allowing ourselves to be nourished by others are among the most deeply healing practices we can cultivate.