Mateo Mackbee

The Philosophy The center of Mackbee’s cooking is not an abstract idea; it is a house with heat on the stove and people moving around it. "It was a very typical African American household, with my mom cooking and my dad on the grill. Cooking was a backdrop for everything." That sentence gives his work its scale: not performance first, but presence; not distance, but the daily nearness of food. Before Krewe, he was chef at Model Citizen in New London, Minnesota, a role he held until 2020. He also held the title of Executive Chef at AZ Canteen. Those positions sit behind the St. Joseph chapter, where his role since 2020 has been both co-founder and chef, and where he is also a leader of Krewe. the belief running through those facts is intimate and exact: food follows a life, then becomes the language of it. Mackbee describes one early image with the clarity of a kitchen memory that never left: "I have a very vivid memory of watching this man make these chickens dance and cutting scallions and making roses out of carrots … I kind of feel like … food was just following along behind me."

In Practice At Krewe, the dishes named most closely with him are direct and personal. The Shrimp Bisque is identified as his signature shrimp bisque and one of his favorite dishes, a dish tied to his own appetite as much as to his public work. The menu also carries recipes with a longer family horizon. Gumbo is one of his grandfather’s century-old recipes served there. Red beans comes from that same grandfather’s century-old recipes. Jambalaya, too, belongs to that family line and is served on the menu. Those details matter because they keep the work specific: not just a chef cooking from memory, but a chef naming which memories make it to the plate. Shrimp bisque sits beside gumbo, red beans and jambalaya as a map of what he chooses to keep active: favorite dish, family recipe, shared table, inherited method.

In Their Words Mackbee’s own language keeps returning to food as atmosphere rather than ornament. A pot on the stove is not a flourish in his telling; it is the condition of the room. A parent at the grill is not a footnote; it is part of how cooking became ordinary, constant and formative. That is why the image of chickens made to dance, scallions cut by hand and carrots turned into roses lands with such force. The memory is visual, but it is also about attention: watching someone turn raw materials into motion, shape and pleasure. In the work he has built in St. Joseph, that attention stays close to home.