Mashama Bailey cooks collards at The Grey with onion, olive oil, and smoke. She leaves meat out, keeps the pot close to a family lesson, and sends the greens to the pass inside a restored 1938 Greyhound bus terminal in Savannah, Georgia.
The Grey opened in 2014 in the former terminal, and Bailey’s work there later drew James Beard attention, including the 2019 James Beard Award for best chef of the Southeast (Mashama Bailey).
Mashama Bailey The Grey: from New York to Savannah
Bailey was born in the Bronx to David and Catherine Bailey, the eldest of three children, with one sister and one brother. Her childhood moved south before it returned north: Waynesboro, Georgia at age 2, Savannah at 5, Queens at 11.
She attended grammar school at Charles Ellis in Savannah and spent many summers at her grandmother’s in Waynesboro. Bailey learned to cook from her mother and grandmother. The greens are smoked without meat, a method that lets onion, olive oil, and smoke carry the pot.
After Francis Lewis High School, Bailey attended Sullivan County Community College, where she studied physical therapy and later switched to social work. Early in her career, she worked at a homeless shelter in Brooklyn. To trace the maker’s line, follow the moves in order: Bronx, Georgia, Queens, then the kitchen.
The schools, mentors, and New York kitchens
Bailey enrolled in Peter Kump's New York Cooking School and, after graduating, began her culinary career at Aquagrill in SoHo. She studied in France. She started there as an intern in 2001. At Aquagrill, she worked with fish and learned the discipline of the station. She later worked at David Burke and Donatella and at the Oak Room in the Plaza Hotel.
Anne Willan, the teacher and writer, became one of Bailey’s mentors. Willan told Bailey not to pursue culinary writing and to continue cooking in restaurants. The advice kept Bailey bench-side, where a kitchen tests ideas at prep, pickup, and the last table.
In 2010, Bailey was hired at Prune on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where she was quickly promoted to sous-chef. She worked there for four years under Gabrielle Hamilton (Mashama Bailey). John O. Morisano later recruited Bailey from Prune to Savannah, bringing a cook trained in New York into a Georgia building with its own civic memory.
Southern Port City cooking at Mashama Bailey The Grey
Bailey’s approach at The Grey has been described as Southern Port City cooking. Savannah is a port city that receives, sorts, and adapts. Bailey grew up between Georgia and New York, then trained in restaurants that prized consistency; the plate carries both movements.
Onion gives sweetness; olive oil carries the greens; smoke supplies memory without requiring meat. To understand Mashama Bailey The Grey as method rather than title, start there: a Southern signal, adjusted by the hands that cook it.
At The Grey, Southern cuisine sits beside French technique. Bailey uses her training in restraint, sequence, and heat control alongside what she learned from her family. A familiar dish can land with a different weight when the method changes, while enough of the original form remains for the eater to recognize.
The 1938 terminal and the weight of the room
The Grey occupies a restored 1938 Greyhound bus terminal in Savannah (The Grey). The former terminal was built in 1938 and brings movement into the dining room: arrivals, departures, waiting, return. Bailey’s cooking sits inside that architecture as a daily answer to what kind of hospitality the building now holds.
The Grey was named Eater’s Restaurant of the Year in 2017 and one of Food & Wine’s best restaurants of 2019.
The room belongs to the work. Service moves through a building made for transit, while Bailey’s kitchen works with ingredients that hold Southern memory.
Recognition, television, and stewardship
Bailey’s James Beard Award in 2019 as best chef of the Southeast placed her in a national conversation that had already begun around The Grey. The award followed The Grey’s earlier attention from Eater and Food & Wine. Read the awards as markers, then return to the station work that made them possible.
She was a featured chef in the sixth season of Netflix's Chef's Table and appeared as a guest on season 14, episode 6 of Top Chef. The craft stays local and repetitive: prep lists, pickups, staff training, and the decisions that determine whether a dish keeps its shape on a busy night.
Since 2017, Bailey has served as chairwoman of the Edna Lewis Foundation. Bailey’s Southern cooking is part of a lineage shaped by Black women whose work was often treated as tradition before authorship. Bailey’s role with the foundation places her inside the stewardship of that history, while The Grey gives her a public kitchen in which to keep testing what Southern food can carry.
The Grey Market, The Yard, and the next plate
Bailey and Morisano opened The Grey Market in Savannah on October 15, 2018. The format drew from Southern lunch counters and New York City bodegas, two kinds of places where speed, memory, and appetite meet without ceremony.
At The Yard, Bailey’s cooking comes by way of a picnic-style luncheon every Saturday. Bailey and Morisano host it, and The Grey's Yard serves whatever Bailey feels inspired to prepare for seven dollars flat. The price gives the public a practical way to eat Bailey’s cooking.
Bailey’s work now reaches beyond Savannah. In 2022, she and John O. Morisano opened Diner Bar off the lobby of Thompson Austin. The Saturday lunches at The Yard, the ongoing service at The Grey Market, and the way Diner Bar extends Bailey and Morisano’s partnership outside Savannah are the next visible pieces of work.
