The restaurant industry can be merciless. Maybe you’ve seen The Bear? Tortured cooks, personal demons, casual sadism.

Chef Tiffany Derry doesn’t watch The Bear. “It makes me anxious,” she says, standing in her newest restaurant, a chic and homey Italian spot in Grand Prairie called Radici. “No one will talk crazy to anyone in my kitchen. I tell everyone, be kind. And it’s a joke to the staff at this point, like, here she goes.”

If the poster child for turn-of-the-century foodie culture was Anthony Bourdain, the swaggering renaissance man whose 2000 memoir of hedonism and derring-do helped define the 21st-century chef, Derry might be the poster child for what comes next.

From ‘Top Chef’ to ‘MasterChef’

The daughter of a pastor, the 42-year-old Derry doesn’t cuss and rarely drinks. She has no tattoos. Dimples light up her face when she laughs, which she does a lot. She’s tall — a former athlete, who played basketball, volleyball, soccer, track and golf at her Beaumont high school — but she wields a soft power and the kind of easy grace that made her “Fan Favorite” on Top Chef in 2010, where she placed fifth. Serious about food, she is the opposite of a snob. She started her career at IHOP.

For the past several years, she’s been building a restaurant empire in North Texas, anchored by Roots Southern Table in Farmers Branch, which landed on a New York Times list of “50 most vibrant and delicious restaurants” in 2021, the year it opened.

Her rise has been perfectly timed for a foodie culture in soul-seeking mode. The adrenaline once demanded by culinary excellence came with a few too many battle scars. Burnout, substance abuse, mental collapse. Lest we forget, things didn’t turn out so well for Anthony Bourdain.

These days Derry is one of three judges on MasterChef, a Fox cooking competition hosted by Gordon Ramsay, who seems to have undergone his own transformation — from the pot-banging bad boy of Hell’s Kitchen to the kinder, gentler steward in stylish jackets who mentors home cooks on MasterChef.

“A true culinary icon of the South,” Ramsay said on this season’s first episode, introducing Derry, who stepped out of a shiny black car as fireworks blasted from the ground. She waved to the contestants, flashing those million-dollar dimples.

Derry’s story reflects an industry ready to change, and a city that must. For a long time, Dallas’ best chefs set up shop in downtown, near fancy hotels and tourist attractions, but Derry hit her stride in the booming suburbs, where rents are cheaper and parking easier to find.

The new Radici, her second iteration of that restaurant, sits in a sprawling family-friendly entertainment complex off the highway in Grand Prairie called Epic Central, whose attractions include a pickleball court, an indoor water park and a lake with dancing waters syncopated to music, like North Texas’ own Bellagio.

As she poses for a photo near the lake, an old classic pipes over the sound system. Derry does nearly 100 photo shoots a year, and her comfort shows. She’s at ease cross-legged on a bench, leaning against a tree in her chef whites and jeans. But between shots, she lets the music move her.

“Do you remember,” Earth Wind & Fire is asking, “dancin’ in September?” Derry nods to the beat, snaps her fingers. Behind her, parabolas of water spray the air.

All the drama of the chef stereotype — the excessive drinking, the emotional outbursts — are actually signs of insecurity, a war within. Derry has the natural confidence of a woman who earned her spot.

A childhood of shelling peas and hustling at IHOP

Tiffany Derry grew up near Houston, in Beaumont, a place that may be more Louisiana than Texas. Her grandparents came from Port Allen in West Baton Rouge Parish to work the jobs created after Spindletop blew a hole in the American economy, kick-starting the modern oil and gas industry.

“My mom is the best cook of her 10 brothers and sisters,” Derry says. A hairstylist by trade, her mom cooked Southern-style, but she had a curious palate. The first time she tried menudo, she came home and made it for the family.

Derry was enlisted to help with meals. She remembers shelling peas on the porch, one of her chores. Back then, she didn’t care for it, but now the memory strikes her as special. A country girlhood.

She’s the second youngest of seven. She landed her first job at 15 at IHOP. “I wanted my own money!” she says, laughing. She asked if she could be a cook, but the answer that came back was technically illegal, though likely common, even into the ‘90s. “No women allowed in the kitchen.”

She paid it little mind; rules are rules. She started as a server, but the cooks took a liking to her, taught her tricks. One day, an employee in the back of the house didn’t show up, and she took her shot. She whipped off her server apron, slipped inside the fast-paced choreography of a working kitchen and found her second home.

She eventually got hired for expo, short for expediting. She ran the ticket machine that held the orders: eggs over easy, waffles and hash browns. It’s a hard gig, timing the food to come out at once, but she was a natural. “This 16-year-old girl telling all the grown folks what to do,” she says with a chuckle.

Kitchens are stressful, and IHOP was no exception. Long hours, hard slogs. One day she came home to find her mother on the couch. “You don’t have to work this hard,” her mother said. “You got your whole life to work.”

But she loved the work.

The only woman in the kitchen

After high school, she went to the Art Institute of Houston, a culinary school. She remembers her class being close to evenly split between men and women, but when she entered professional kitchens, that shifted. She was often the only woman. One restaurant tried to put her on pastry, a station frequently run by women. Nope, she told them, she wanted to work the line.

Back in 2008, I interviewed chef Tom Colicchio, the New York restaurateur who became a household name as host of Top Chef, then in its fourth season. At the time, online chatter surrounded whether a woman might finally win the top spot (she did not), and I asked Colicchio why cooking had become such a macho profession.

“A lot of professions happen to be male-dominated, because women drop out at a certain point. It’s unfortunate,” he told me. “You’re working nights. You’re working weekends. It’s not conducive to rearing children.”

Derry did have a child, a 25-year-old son named Jaren, who got his master’s in sports communication and administration at San Antonio’s Incarnate Word. She also made her debut on Top Chef in its seventh season, where her one-two punch of culinary skill and good nature made her a breakout star. The following season, she came back for Top Chef: All Stars.

“People see her on TV, and ask, what she’s like?” says her business partner, Tom Foley, co-owner of their restaurant company, T2D. “I say, just watch TV. She’s not trying to be something she isn’t.”

The red dot of a filming camera can be unnerving, but Derry stayed cool and calm.

“My dad was a pastor,” she says. “Eyes were always on you.”

Finding her Roots

Derry’s name became a coveted one. In 2011, she was tapped as executive chef for a luxe spot on McKinney Avenue called Private Social.

“The dining room may be sleek and the cocktails suave, but by far the best thing about the glammy Uptown spot that opened in late September is Tiffany Derry’s cooking,” read a 2012 story in The Dallas Morning News.

Sleek, suave, glammy: not really her brand. Derry left Private Social in 2013, and it took a while to find a place that could nurture both her down-home feel and her sumptuous palate, maybe because she had to build it herself.

Roots Chicken Shak opened in 2017, thanks to the partnership with Foley, a lawyer who was ready for a change. A fast-casual dining establishment in the upscale food court of Plano’s Legacy Hall, Roots Chicken Shak sells duck-fat fried wings and the kind of fries that don’t need sauce (though they come with plenty). It’s a five-napkin meal with a location in Austin and franchises coming to Addison later this year and Grand Prairie in 2026.

Her talent found its ultimate expression in Roots Southern Table, tucked in a Farmers Branch strip mall. The sleek modernist design made a nifty contrast to its laid-back menu: comfort food like My Mother’s Gumbo and Texas Peaches and Duck-Fat Fried Chicken. Even appetizers that seem mundane turn out to be special.

“We should only talk about this corn bread,” said my companion on the night I dined there. And since my companion was former city columnist Sharon Grigsby, you know she had a lot to say.

Radici opened in 2024 in the same Farmers Branch retail cluster. Same open kitchen, same clean design and cement floors, with slightly different colors. The restaurants look distinctive, but they feel aligned. The design comes from Foley, a minimalist. He and Derry met in 2015 and hit it off: They loved food experiences, but they also wanted to make an impact beyond restaurants.

“We say she’s the creator in the kitchen, and I’m the creator in the conference room,” says Foley. Or, as Derry puts it, “He’s front of the house, I’m back of the house.”

The partnership proved a good one, perhaps best captured by a quote on the T2D website. “An African proverb, shared many times, says that if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

‘That’s chef’s favorite’

The Grand Prairie location of Radici, Derry and Foley’s fifth venture, opened earlier this year. On a Saturday in June, the place was full but not crowded, a casually multi-ethnic assortment of families and couples and at least one daughter with her 84-year-old dad, celebrating an early Father’s Day.

“Let’s have a toast!” said our charming waiter, DK, and I began the awkward explanation that actually, I don’t drink, but he paused me.

“You want the nonalcoholic option?” he asked.

This was unexpected, and welcome.

And so my father and I clinked glasses of ginger beer with a splash of Starry soda and grenadine, as we went to town on warm focaccia smothered in butter and garlic. I ordered the crab pasta, whose mix of garlic, lemon and butter with house-made breadcrumbs sounded novel.

“That’s chef’s favorite,” DK told me, and I can see why. I devoured half of the heaping portion, and brought the rest home to mom.

‘Something that felt like ours’

Last year, Derry hosted the Shef Food and Wine Festival on the lawn of Epic Central. The inaugural three-day bash featured a four-course dinner and something called a Grand Tasting Experience made by chefs Derry flew in for the weekend.

Kwame Onwuachi, another Top Chef breakout who’s opened restaurants in D.C. and New York. Tavel Bristol-Joseph, a Guyanese chef whose Austin restaurants scoop up awards. LA barbecue king Kevin Bludso, Chicago’s Erick Williams.

“I do a whole bunch of festivals, and I never feel like they’re for women or people of color,” says Derry. “I wanted something that felt like ours.”

There was a pickleball tournament, and a band from California. “When I say we danced, we danced,” she says.

About 150 culinary workers got a free pass to the event. Derry gave away scholarships to culinary school. The festival was so successful there will be another this fall, Oct. 24-26.

“You’re like a mini-Oprah!” I say, and Derry lets out a hearty cackle.

“Whatever,” she says, waving this away. “God has been good to me.”

Cooking is an act of generosity in the end. It can be a high-wire performance, a status competition, a hustle and a half, but it’s ultimately a service — to feed strangers, provide an experience they couldn’t have on their own.

There is an old saying that revenge is a dish best served cold, but success — and Derry has found plenty — is a dish better when shared.

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