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This Dinner Pop-Up Is Shaped by the Plantation Where Ancestors Were Enslaved
Omar Tate’s Honeysuckle events get personal
You’re going to want to know Omar Tate, a chef on the rise as he gains momentum through his Honeysuckle pop-ups that have been held at places like Tom Colicchio’s Craft in New York and on Martha’s Vineyard — with a focus on equity and luminaries of African American culture.
Tate said that Honeysuckle “seeks to remove the framing of what soul/Southern food is.”
Saturday’s dinner at Plowshare Farms in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, was especially personal. “Honeysuckle was truly birthed when I went south in 2018 to find out who I was as an artist and culinarian,” he writes on Instagram:
In that travel, I found the plantation land where my ancestors were enslaved. Dr. Van de Vestine Jamison originally of Bucks County, PA moved to South Carolina in the 1790s to build his wealth upon the backs of my ancestors and now there is a town named after him as Jamison, SC. I will be presenting artifacts as sculpture from that land in South Carolina at Plowshare for this dinner as well as the dinner being informed by ideas around Dubois’s The Philadelphia Negro.
Kurt Evans joined Tate, who has spearheaded culinary projects like the End Mass Incarceration and Cooks for the Culture dinner series in Philadelphia.
Tate, who has spent the last decade in the restaurant industry, was most recently the sous chef with J.J. Johnson at Henry at the Life Hotel, the Pan-African New York spot that the Times’ Pete Wells listed among the best new restaurants of 2018. Before that, Tate spent time cooking in Philadelphia’s Russet and Fork, along with New York’s A Voce and Runner & Stone.
