This year, them. is honoring the New York City-based chef and organizer Kia Damon as part of our annual Now List, our awards for LGBTQ+ visionaries. Since winning Chopped and serving as the executive chef of the now-closed Manhattan restaurant Lalito, Damon has gone on to found the Kia Feeds The People Program and co-found Auxilio Space — two non-profits that aim to combat food apartheid in Brooklyn. Below, Mayukh Sen, a James Beard award-winning food writer and author of the upcoming book Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America (out in November via W.W. Norton & Company), reflects on his friendship with Damon and her everlasting commitment to use food as a form of political expression.
Kia Damon was just 24 when she found herself handpicked to lead the kitchen of Lalito, a buzzy restaurant in Manhattan’s Chinatown. It was the fall of 2018. Kia had moved to New York from her home state of Florida that summer to work as a sous-chef at the now-shuttered establishment. In only a few months, she rose through the ranks to executive chef, a promotion that made headlines.
The glare of the press can be unforgiving, and its scrutiny can be especially ruthless to someone like Kia — a young, Black, queer woman from the South with no formal culinary schooling. But she was ready to handle it, remaining humble in the spotlight. Rather than lazily basking in fame, Kia kept a clear-eyed focus on her work, putting the needs of Black and QTPOC communities first.
In the years I’ve come to know Kia as a friend, I’ve observed her deviate from the script for success that so many ambitious chefs seem to follow. Instead, she’s forged a path that is entirely independent of the food establishment. The food industry is more discriminatory than it would like to admit, and it can often tokenize talents like Kia, treating her as a queer, Black, female mascot for the food world’s imagined progressivism without respecting her vision. Yet she’s refused to let these realities erode her self-worth. She left her job at Lalito in June 2019, alleging a discriminatory work environment, and the restaurant closed for good later that year. Kia then took her talents to the magazine Cherry Bombe, serving as its inaugural culinary director until she departed from her role there in early 2020.
Repairing broken institutions from within can often be thankless work, after all, and I watched Kia soar once she struck out on her own. Since her stint at Cherry Bombe, she’d win big on Chopped and serve as the host of Nike’s Athlete’s Cookbook video series. Kia has used such visibility to draw attention to causes that are dear to her. She began the Kia Feeds The People Program and co-founded Auxilio Space, both non-profits that seek to dismantle the food apartheid that still haunts Black, queer, trans, and Indigenous Americans. With such projects, Kia understands that she is working within a lineage of Black Americans who have used food as a tool of political expression, including Georgia Gilmore and the Black Panthers. She honors her elders, seeing her culinary practice as a continuation of their pursuits.
Considering Kia’s impact on others, it seems silly to dwell on what she’s done for me, yet the generosity she’s exhibited in our friendship reveals the sincerity that guides her work. We’d met at the end of 2018 when I visited Lalito, after having corresponded with each other on Instagram, and her warmth struck me immediately. I grew closer to Kia in 2019 — a demoralizing period for me as a professional writer due to an especially ugly episode of racism in food media. One night that December, as I was in the home stretch of drafting a book I’d spent my entire year working on, Kia volunteered to bring me groceries out of concern about whether I was keeping myself well-fed. She showed up with bagfuls of snacks — Ka-Me rice crackers with a jolt of wasabi, sticks of chocolate-dipped Pocky, and popcorn powdered with white cheddar that she’d grabbed from a bodega — that sustained me through that final push.
It was a simple but meaningful gesture; Kia seemed perfectly content to inconvenience herself for my well-being. I understood, in that moment, how deeply her politics are rooted in care. For Kia, feeding the people around her is a radical act. That commitment is just a natural extension of her compassion.
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