The syrup that Chef Torrece “Chef T” Gregoire showcased at the First Gentleman’s Pancake Breakfast on Sunday had been sap in a tree on a farm in the town of Pound a week prior.
That sap was turned into syrup on Thursday, Gregoire said, before she visited the Southfork Farm to pick up 15 cases, enough to serve 500 attendees at Virginia’s first pancake breakfast to be hosted by Adam Spanberger, the husband of the newly minted Gov. Abigail Spanberger.
“You can’t get any more fresh than this,” Gregoire said.
Gregoire, who has roots in the Caribbean, also calls Southwest Virginia home. She is from St. Vincent and the Grenadines, a small agricultural hub in the Caribbean, and grew up in Brooklyn before she adopted Bristol as her hometown.
“For me, it was the rolling hills. It feels like coming home,” she said. “The mountains just put me at peace.”
Gregoire, a decorated and respected chef, has consulted with multiple restaurants from Blacksburg to Bristol and is well-known for her appearances on Fox’s Hell’s Kitchen, season 14, and the Food Network’s Big Restaurant Bet. She opened up Ina + Forbes Restaurant in Southwest Virginia in 2019 as a tribute to her grandmother, who taught her to cook at a young age. Gregoire was forced to close the restaurant in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
She said it is an honor to be able to serve Appalachian food with a Caribbean twist, during an interview outside of a catering tent before kitchen service ramped up at Richmond’s Science Museum. Gregoire’s team of about a dozen cooks, chefs and waitstaff buzzed between two tents as they prepared and delivered steaming trays of breakfast food to hundreds of hungry Virginians.
“I felt like I was put on this earth to cook food and to be a champion for sustainability, and to showcase food always. Just to be here today is a huge privilege,” she said. “Adam [Spanberger] loves pancakes, but he’s going to get them with my twist.”
For Sunday’s pancake breakfast menu, Gregoire served five different kinds of pancakes with a play on bananas Foster at the center. Instead of bananas, she used sweet plantains in a rum glaze with a sweet caramel.
She also featured gluten-free fried chicken crusted with her signature “OG Crunch,” complete with peppers grown in Bristol. Honey from Mebane Manor in Dublin, which she infused with lavender, and a syrup made from blueberries from Southfork Farm in the lemon ricotta pancakes, were among the ingredients from Southwest Virginia.
Applewood smoked bacon, house-made chicken and herb sausage, scrambled eggs, roasted potatoes and fresh fruit with mint and champagne citrus dressing rounded out the menu.
The then-incoming Spanberger administration selected Gregoire as chef for the breakfast after attending an event at Old Dominion University where she cooked for the university president last fall. What the administration fell in love with, Gregoire said, was her chicken and the mac and cheese croquettes.
“That’s how they found me — eating the food. I was literally standing in line making a plate for Jay Jones,” she said. “I was like, ‘Alright Jay, this is how it’s done, let me show you how you’re going to eat this food.”
Gregoire had met the new governor a few times before she was inaugurated on Saturday. She said she respected Spanberger’s willingness to have tough conversations with voters — she pointed to a time when the governor listened while Gregoire told her about having to close her restaurant in 2020, and the unique needs of Southwest Virginia.
“At any moment, she could have been like, ‘You know what, I got to go,’” Gregoire said of that conversation. “She stood right there and she had these conversations with me.”
