Cherry Hill chef Nana Araba Wilmot is bringing her Ghanaian roots and French culinary training to ‘Top Chef’

Chef Nana Araba Wilmot’s career has taken her everywhere from top-tier French restaurants in New York City to dinner parties in Accra, Ghana. Now, the Cherry Hill-raised chef is taking her culinary skills to the 23rd season of Top Chef, Bravo’s high-stakes, elimination-style culinary competition.

Wilmot is the owner of Georgina’s Private Chef and Catering Co. and Love That I Knead, a traveling supper club grounded in Ghanaian cuisine. Her love for cooking was forged in her childhood home in Cherry Hill, where her parents and grandmother brought the flavors of their native Ghana into the house, and in kitchens in Philadelphia and New York City, where she learned the craft of restaurant cooking.

Now, Wilmot is a private chef and caterer who wants to put her own story on the plate. She’s taking on the competition in the newest season of Top Chef, which will officially hit screens next week, but is available early on streaming.

Wilmot was raised on the east side of Cherry Hill. She attended private school up until fourth grade, then graduated from James F. Cooper Elementary School, Henry C. Beck Middle School, and Cherry Hill High School East. She played lacrosse and joined the dance team and student government.

“Cherry Hill was always good to me,” Wilmot said.

At age 7, she started cooking with her grandmother.

Wilmot’s childhood memories are dotted with warm, lively dinner parties and Ghanaian events where smells of fried fish and Jollof rice mingled with the sounds of hiplife music playing on her dad’s stereo system. Within the walls of her childhood home, and the homes of her friends and family, Ghanaian life was kept alive through time-tested recipes and traditions. Seeing Ghanaian food outside of the home was rare.

“When I would leave the house, that just wasn’t what was outside,” she said.

“For us, it wasn’t like our food is for sale, it was for us.”

After graduating from Cherry Hill East, Wilmot attended the now-shuttered Art Institute of Philadelphia, where she earned degrees in culinary arts and culinary management in 2013.

She worked her way up in the restaurant world, starting with an internship at Time, the restaurant, whiskey bar, and music venue in Midtown Village.

“I really enjoyed being downtown and really just immersing myself in the vibe of the Philly food scene,” Wilmot said of her first foray into Philadelphia cheffing.

She got her first full-time job at Vintage, a wine bar and bistro near Time, and started catering on the side. Wilmot was working at Jose Garces’s Tinto and Village Whiskey when she accepted an offer to help Garces open a New York City outpost of his Spanish restaurant Amada.

“I kind of understood what Jose was doing and his style of food, which is really excellent,” she said. “He was also an ode to his grandmother and mother, so I understood that kind of wanting to see yourself in the food that you’re presenting.”

Amada’s Manhattan location closed after two years, failing to garner the buzz of Garces’s other restaurants. But Wilmot had fallen in love with New York. She moved on to her next job, learning the craft of fine dining under chefs Daniel and Marie-Aude Rose. Her stint at Daniel Rose’s Le Coucou was “incredible,” Wilmot said.

“I’d been in casual fine dining for so long, but this was the epitome of fine dining,” she said.

When Wilmot was hired in 2016, she became the first Black woman to work Le Coucou’s meat-roasting station. The experience was life-changing, but demanding, and Wilmot’s place as one of the few Black women in a white- and male-dominated industry left her self-conscious at times and, once, made her the object of outright hostility from a senior coworker, she told The New York Times in 2021.

Wilmot was preparing to move to Paris to work at one of Daniel Rose’s French restaurants when COVID shut down the world.

Like many millennials, Wilmot found herself stuck in her suburban hometown, career on pause, future uncertain.

To help “bring herself back to life,” Wilmot started cooking with her mom on Sundays. Wilmot would sit in their kitchen, watching her mom make soup or bread or rice, writing down family recipes that had long been passed down through memory.

Around the same time, Wilmot jokes that she enrolled in the “university of the aunties,” visiting with older women in her community to learn their Ghanaian recipes. Like her mother’s dishes, many of the recipes weren’t written down, but rather handed down verbally from generation to generation. Wilmot rose with the sun, watching the women bake bread and fry fish, and documenting it for posterity.

From her mom’s backyard, she hosted a social-distanced dinner party for restaurant industry friends.

The slowness of the pandemic forced Wilmot to rethink her life in restaurants, which she says are “not for the faint of heart, especially as a woman.” Did she really want to return to the chaos of a white tablecloth kitchen?

Wilmot decided to pour herself into Love That I Knead and Georgina’s. Love That I Knead has popped up everywhere from the Philadelphia Museum of Art to OSTUDIO, a community gathering space in Brooklyn. These days, Wilmot’s traveling supper club operates in New York City, Philadelphia, and Accra, Ghana. She sees herself as part of a new generation of chefs who want to see their own cultures reflected on the plate.

When it came to throwing her hat in the ring for Top Chef, Wilmot says she just needed to “shake it up.” It was a real “why not?” moment.

Though she can’t reveal much about the season, which takes place in North and South Carolina, she said her Ghanaian recipes fused beautifully with the flavors of the Carolinas, due in large part to the enduring impact of West Africans on the recipes and culinary techniques of the South.

“There’s still so many traces of African food, of my ancestors, that is here in the South,” Wilmot said.

Wilmot said Top Chef is “just the beginning.” She’s excited to make her family and South Jersey proud, and to “start the conversation” about food in the African Diaspora.

Top Chef returns on March 9 from 9 to 10:15 p.m. on Bravo. Early access to the season premiere is currently available on Peacock, Bravo’s YouTube channel, and video on demand. Beginning March 16, the show will move to its regular 9:30 p.m. time slot with episodes available the next day on Peacock.

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