“When I found out, I thought it was a mistake. I was shaking. There’s no way,” Chai Pani chef Sahar Siddiqi says of being named a 2023 James Beard semifinalist for best chef southeast. “These are phenomenal chefs. Just to be amongst them is huge.”
A first-generation Pakistani American born and raised in New York City, Siddiqi says she didn’t always know she wanted to be a chef. She attended the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park in hopes of becoming a food writer and even landed an externship at Saveur magazine in pursuit of a writing career. But her degree soon took a turn toward the kitchen, sparked by working at restaurants around Manhattan while she attended school and getting some real hands-on experience with recipes in the test kitchen at Saveur. Siddiqi realized she could cook, and cook well.
Siddiqi and her husband, Gabriel Johnson, who is the culinary manager at Houston’s restaurant, moved to Atlanta in 2018 and now live in East Atlanta Village with their young daughter. When she first arrived in Atlanta, Siddiqi staged (did an unpaid restaurant internship) for a number of restaurants in order to continue learning new techniques and cuisines.
“I staged at Cakes and Ale, Staplehouse, BoccaLupo, all the big names in Atlanta,” Siddiqi says. “And then I ended up working at Atlas under chef Chris Grossman for about a year, and, wow, that was amazing.”
Grossman is now the owner of critically acclaimed restaurant the Chastain in Atlanta’s Chastain Park neighborhood.
She sees her kitchen training at these Atlanta restaurants, and her time working for Grossman, as helping refine her fine dining cooking skills. But Siddiqi didn’t feel there was room for growth in fine dining or in corporate culinary jobs where there isn’t much variety in the food being cooked. It…
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