[title subtitle=”WORDS Dwain Hebda
IMAGES Jade Graves Photography”][/title]
As much as Chef Jazz loves food and for as much as she represents the new generation of chefs leading Fort Smith into exciting new directions, it’s quite possible that she’s not even the biggest foodie in her family. That title may very well go to her ten-year-old daughter, Laila.
“She definitely wants to cook,” says Jazz. “Her main job that she wants to be is a veterinarian, but she does love the kitchen. She watches the same shows that I do, probably more.
“One time, I was cooking asparagus and she was like, ‘Mom, you’re overcrowding the pan.’ I said, ‘You know what? Just go do your work.’ And then I took some asparagus out. I was like, I did not want her to know that she was so correct.”
Jazz half laughs, half rolls her eyes over the culinary monster she’s raising, the child who once sniffed at not being able to get a burger cooked medium at McDonald’s or who for her birthday dinner requested lamb steak. It is, after all, a family thing, the latest in a long line of women in her family for whom food is their art form, their gift.
Even in her role today, as Executive Chef at Uncork’d in Fort Smith, she sees her kitchen crew as family (which they are to each other, grill cook Victoria Prescott and her mother, Kimberly Bell).
“It’s a whole family affair,” Jazz says. “It’s funny. Some days, I’m listening to them and I’m like, well, I’m going to go cook over here and I’m going to let them deal with their stuff.”
Chef Jazz loves these interactions, these family bonds if you will, as essential as the spice she sprinkles into her inspired creations. A food nerd to a fault, she’s spent years on the West Coast, in culinary school and burying her nose in books on cooking and food heritage. She expresses that accumulated knowledge and creativity with the people around her, both customers and staff.
“I had a chef who told me to get this dictionary; The Food Dictionary,” she says. “He was like, ‘Go through everything in there and learn what you can.’ So, I read that and I started getting more and more books and I would just read.
“At Uncork’d, they give me a lot of freedom to do certain things. So, every week, I actually have a special to where I’m able to do, basically, whatever. I’m really, really into the history of the food of African Americans. I try to learn my history and food is my interest.”
Chef Jazz (a nickname derived from her given name Jasmine Williams) split her time growing up between Arkansas and California. She attended Fresno State for her undergrad and began at the Art Institute in Hollywood for culinary school but dropped out to care for her mother. A job at a local restaurant and subsequent gigs at food trucks picked up her education where the classroom left off, and then some.
“I got into this restaurant called Urban Plate in San Diego,” she says. “That’s where I learned farm-to-table, cooking everything from scratch. And then just going through food truck circuits out there, I learned the cuisines and working in smaller spaces and everything.”
Along the way, Jazz learned to love the adrenaline-fueled environment of cooking commercially, from busy lunch rushes to the culinary choreography required in a food truck. She still uses what she learned there to run a tight ship in the Uncork’d kitchen, where she’s been since it opened.
“I’m actually calmer the busier we get. I feel like it comes down to me; if I’m calm, everybody else will be calm,” she said. “It never made sense to me to freak out or to throw stuff or get angry like they show chefs on TV. It’s just not for me. My thing is, if I go into a walk-in [freezer] and cry, if I scream or yell, I’m still going to have tickets up there. The orders will not go away. I cannot cry the food to-go. For me, I’m like, ‘Alright, let’s pick it up. Let’s get it.’
“But also, I’m on them; even on our slow days, I want that food to go out as quick as it can. I want you to have that same fire in you when we have one person in that restaurant as when it’s really busy. I am on them about that.”
Coming back to Northwest Arkansas after years in California, Jazz found it shocking how much had changed in the time she’d been away.
“It was amazing, to me,” she says. “It was nice that I was able to see events take place, food festivals. Shoot, all of the breweries that we have in Arkansas, like, I had no clue that we had so many breweries in this state. It was just really nice to see.”
Jazz finally made her way back home, determined to inspire similar growth in the food industry of her hometown as she had seen in other regions of the state.
“We still don’t have a lot brunch or some of that stuff in Fort Smith, but it is in Fayetteville. That’s why I am trying to bring it in,” she says. “We have brunch that’s been picking up at Uncork’d a lot, like almost double the business, now.”
Jazz isn’t just focused on expanding the time of meals but their content as well to move the local culinary scene forward. From new twists on old favorites to completely new concepts, diners have been treated to the full range of her creativity in the kitchen.
“A couple weeks ago, I did blackened catfish, right? It’s something that a lot of people know, but I did it in a cleaner way, in a really nice way,” she says. “I just try to show people how I can bring in stuff that people are used to from home, but also try to introduce different things. I had a special with pesto grits a couple of weeks ago and I was a little scared. I was like, ‘Aw man. I’m really adding basil pesto to grits? It’s probably blasphemy to some people.’ People actually liked it and they ate it, and they are actually starting to actually trust it.
“The stuff that I had in California, I could totally bring here, all of the different fish. Every week, I have a different fish. This one time, I had shark, but I put it with Alfredo. I grilled the shark and people would probably not normally eat shark, but people love Alfredo. You can’t go wrong with Alfredo. That turned people on to eating the shark. Now, they’re starting to trust that every week, they know there’s going to be something different.”
Chef Jazz knows a culinary tradition isn’t built overnight, but she is excited about what’s starting to take root in spots all over town. She’s proud to be a part of a movement that, she hopes, puts Fort Smith on the food map right alongside its neighbors to the north.
“When I moved back, I noticed a lot of people leave Fort Smith to go have a good time. So, my goal is to make it to where people come to Fort Smith just to have Uncork’d, just to try it,” she said. “Fort Smith is an amazing city and my goal is for people to come here and see Fort Smith and eat at Uncork’d and just have a different experience. That’s the ultimate.”
Experience Chef Jazz’s cooking for yourself at Uncork’d.
5501 Phoenix Avenue, Fort Smith, Arkansas
479.434.5000
uncorkthefort.com
