Jon Gray is cofounder of Ghetto Gastro. He aims to shift social narratives by celebrating the culinary, blending a background in fashion to create immersive experiences, product design, and unique storytelling. From Co-op City, Gray’s mother and grandmother taught him about the arts and challenged him to innovate as a way of life. When a rebellious adolescence almost put him behind bars, Gray used the experience to imagine a greater vision for himself. Inventorying his passions and pastimes, he made Bronx-driven gastro-diplomacy his career and mission. In 2019, Gray delivered the TED Talk “The Next Big Thing Is Coming from the Bronx, Again.” Gray is a Civic Practice Partnership Artist in Residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 2021, he served as guest curator at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, where Jon Gray of Ghetto Gastro Selects featured an Afrofuturist theme.
Talk and Book Signing
Ghetto Gastro's
Black Power Kitchen
Sunday, Oct 23, 2022
2 p.m.
Phyllis Wattis Theater, Floor 1
Free
Join Jon Gray, Pierre Serrao, and Lester Walker of Ghetto Gastro in celebrating the launch of Black Power Kitchen, the radical culinary collective’s first cookbook. Ghetto Gastro uses food as a platform to spark critical conversations about race, history, food inequality, and how food—and knowing how to cook—provides freedom and power. The panel discussion, moderated by SFMOMA curator Eungie Joo, will center on Black culinary traditions, food, and art as tools for resistance. Books will be available for purchase and signing after the talk.
About the Book
Described as “The Joy of Cooking meets The Bible, Ghetto Gastro’s Black Power Kitchen is like nothing you’ve ever read before” (Financial Times). Part cookbook, part manifesto, this first book from the Bronx-based culinary collective combines seventy-five flavor-focused (mostly plant-based) recipes with immersive storytelling, diverse voices, and striking images that celebrate Black food and Black culture. The collection will inspire larger conversations about race, history, food inequality, and how eating well can be a pathway to personal freedom and self-empowerment. Written with James Beard Award-winning writer Osayi Endolyn, Black Power Kitchen does for the cookbook what Ghetto Gastro has been doing for the food world in general: disrupt, expand, reinvent, and stamp it with their unique point of view.
Event Schedule
2 p.m. | Jon Gray, Pierre Serrao, and Lester Walker of Ghetto Gastro in conversation, moderated by Eungie Joo
3 p.m. | Book signing by Ghetto Gastro
About Ghetto Gastro
Ghetto Gastro is the Bronx-born culinary collective founded by Jon Gray, Pierre Serrao, and Lester Walker. The group has defined its own lane, merging food, fashion, music, art, and design. Claiming both the beauty and grit from the streets with the aspiration and aesthetics of the finer things, Ghetto Gastro’s interdisciplinary approach celebrates the Bronx as a driver of global culture. The crew blends influences from the African diaspora, Global South, and the pulse of hip-hop to create offerings that address race, identity, and economic empowerment. Since launching in 2012, Ghetto Gastro has gone from hosting underground parties to spearheading large-scale brand campaigns and events with leading fashion designers, artists, and entrepreneurs. Their collaborators and partners include Virgil Abloh, Nike, Cartier, the Serpentine, The Museum of Modern Art, and many more. During the onset of the pandemic in 2020, Ghetto Gastro prioritized Bronx grassroots initiatives and mutual aid. In recognition for feeding their community, the group was nominated for the Basque Culinary World Prize. In 2021, Ghetto Gastro launched its namesake consumer goods brand of pantry items inspired by ancestral ingredients. The collective released a custom line of kitchen appliances, CRUXGG, across Target stores nationwide, and recently launched their cookware line with Williams Sonoma. Black Power Kitchen is their first cookbook.
Jon Gray
Pierre Serrao
Pierre Serrao is chef and cofounder of Ghetto Gastro. Serrao uses food as both an expression of culture-driven creativity and a tool to create health sovereignty. Raised between Barbados and Connecticut, Serrao worked in restaurants throughout high school, then graduated from culinary school and the Italian Culinary Institute for Foreigners in Piemonte. He worked at award-winning restaurants in New York, Barbados, and Italy, styling an approach to cooking influenced by ancestral practices and innovation. The desire to create a culturally sound and iterative expression of food led Serrao to join forces with Jon Gray and Lester Walker, rounding out Ghetto Gastro. Fueled by international travel, enthusiasm for learning, and sheer curiosity, Serrao explores ways to bridge the global pantry with creative entrepreneurship.
Lester Walker
Lester Walker is chef and cofounder of Ghetto Gastro. Walker brings unrelenting imagination, competition-ready technique, and skill at layering flavors to Ghetto Gastro’s iconic events, offerings, and storytelling. A native of the Bronx’s Co-op City, Walker discovered cooking at a pivotal moment in his teen years. New York City’s Careers Through Culinary Arts Program inspired him to pursue a career in food. Spurred by the speed, focus, and creativity of cooking, Walker worked up the fine-dining line in award-winning kitchens in New York, Washington, D.C., and Miami. Walker’s cooking merges the roots of NYC-based Black American foodways with the cuisines he studied professionally: French, Italian, Indian, and Southeast Asian. In 2012, he won Chopped on the Food Network. That same year, seeking ways to explore historic and modern Black culture through food, he partnered with Jon Gray, fellow Co-op City native, to launch Ghetto Gastro. With Ghetto Gastro, Walker aims to create art by intentionally pairing food with ideas that represent and celebrate where he comes from.
About the Moderator
Eungie Joo is curator and head of contemporary art at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where she organized SOFT POWER (2019), a group exhibition looking at the role of artists as citizens and social actors, and Shifting the Silence, an exhibition about the radical language of abstraction. As Keith Haring Director and Curator of Education and Public Programs at the New Museum (2007–12), she led the Museum as Hub initiative and organized the 2012 New Museum Generational Triennial: The Ungovernables. Joo is curatorial advisor to the 2022 Aichi Triennale: Still Alive, and has served as artistic director of the 5th Anyang Public Art Project/APAP 5 (2016); curator of Sharjah Biennial 12: The past, the present, the possible (2015); and commissioner of the Korean Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale, where she presented Condensation: Haegue Yang (2009).
The Ghetto Gastro Black Power Kitchen book tour is powered by Discord.