Mashama Bailey was named to the 2026 TIME100, and she says all she is doing is telling the stories of her grandmothers.
Bailey is chief executive chef and co-founder of The Grey, which opened in 2014 in a restored 1938 Greyhound bus terminal in downtown Savannah. She won the James Beard Award for Best Chef: Southeast in 2019, and in 2022 she became the first Black woman to win the James Beard Award for Outstanding Chef. The World’s 50 Best named her North America’s Best Female Chef in 2026, for her work preserving Southern and Black American food culture at The Grey. Kamala Harris wrote her TIME100 biography. The two met in 2024 on Harris’s campaign stop in Savannah and talked about collard greens.
She said her mother, her aunts and her grandmothers shaped her path into cooking, and that she learned mainly by listening to her grandmothers’ stories. “And all I’m doing is telling black stories,” she said. “I’m telling the stories of my grandmothers. I’m telling the stories of my friends and their family.”
She said the chef Joe Randall, who died recently, moved her focus off seeking respect as a Black woman chef and onto mentoring young ones. Randall founded the Edna Lewis Foundation, which Bailey now chairs and which gives scholarships to young people interested in storytelling, farming and cooking. The Grey runs as a teaching restaurant.
“I never really thought that I would be on this level,” she said.
