Top Chef was a significant experience for Hall. It marked a turning point in his career and an opportunity to share his skills and expertise with a national audience, invoking Alabama’s rich food and rich history existing in tandem.
“We have all the original recipes that everyone's using in ‘educated places,’” he uses air quotes, citing the culinary school to metropolitan fine dining pipeline. “[We use the same…] braises, reductions, cooking with liquor, cognac, butter… it’s just not always called that,” he says.
Not many people know that Alabama also boasts the only region in the country with as many as seven varietals of hog that produce different flavor breakdowns, Roscoe tells me. “No one talks about that—we don't have truffles, but who cares?” At the same time, Roscoe invokes Alabama’s social history: its role in Civil Rights and continued efforts toward social justice.
“These people went through so much in this state,” he says, citing Rosa Parks and other important figures. “It’s almost a 50/50 state; there's white people and Black people and they've actually learned to live with each other.” There is often talk of food as the great equalizer, the long table, a morally relative place to learn and exchange cultures. Roscoe pushes that concept a bit farther, suggesting that food should actually be familiar, hyperlocal, and community-minded.
Roscoe remembers moving back to Birmingham from New York City, where he incorporated everything he had learned from Momofuku at Urban Standard, a small but mighty coffee shop cafe in downtown Birmingham. Hall was serving up ramen noodles with buttered crab cakes, grilled watermelon salad and juicing up sweet corn, all-the-while pushing the limits of local southern cuisine out of a small coffee shop kitchen. While it’s now closed, Roscoe remembers how the creative spirit of Birmingham—and top notch local produce—made it thrive and paved the way for more innovation that we see in the city today.
Still, Roscoe has always been pushing the limits outside of restaurants. With fellow local chefs like Will Drake of Hero Doughnuts, Roscoe hosted “Knife Party Pop-ups,” setting up shop in secret locations around town and serving the best fresh, local produce that didn’t always find its way onto institutional menus: shishitos, okra, and green romanescos. Dishes were experimental and exciting, from collard greens with sweet potato chow-chow to kimchi pimento cheese and muscadine chicken liver truffle.
“Food should be a place where all races come to a restaurant and connect with at least an app or sound or a dessert or a dish,” he says. “It should all be a nod and a cooking method that they all know of that's familiar. Not salmon, rosemary, and new potatoes. It should be something that references a nod to where you are from, your region.” The idea that food experiences can be at once elevated and accessible, comforting and creative. It prioritizes the community and its needs.