Roots Southern Table

Duck fat at the center of the plate

Duck fat gives the chicken its signal before the room sees it. Tiffany Derry, co-owner and partner chef of Roots Southern Table in Farmers Branch, Dallas, has made that gesture one of the clearest readings of her work here. The dish sits beside My Mama's Gumbo, shrimp and grits, skillet cornbread, Seafood Gumbo, Cheddar and Jalapeño Cast-Iron Cornbread, and Red Rice with Shrimp, a set that keeps Southern memory close without leaving the plate in the past. Derry's route to this room runs through The Art Institute of Houston, then International House of Pancakes, where she moved from server to cook to management. That sequence matters. It put the dining room, the line, and the obligations of oversight into the same apprenticeship. She later entered Top Chef season 7 in Washington, D.C., returned for Top Chef All-Stars season 8, and held both chef and owner responsibility at Private Social in Dallas from 2011 to 2013. At Roots Southern Table, where she has been co-owner and partner chef since 2021, the public profile is less useful than the through line: service learned from the floor, timing learned from the line, and a point of view built to hold across more than one restaurant.

Southern resourcefulness, worked cleanly

The method at Roots Southern Table begins with the food Derry has described from her family's Southern table: seasonal eating, canning, preserving, and using the part of the pot another kitchen might leave behind. Potlikker is not a flourish in that memory. It is a measure of attention. The menu divides its language between Down Home Roots and Modern Roots, but the pass treats the two as related disciplines. My Mama's Gumbo carries chicken, Zummo's Sausage, shrimp, blue crab, file, and herb rice. Duck-fat fried chicken comes with biscuits, hot sauce, and candied rhubarb. Shrimp and grits turn into fried balls with cheese, hot peppers, and tomato sauce, while vegetables hold their own space through dishes such as chargrilled cabbage steak, greens, succotash, creamed corn, and mushrooms with turnips and fried basil. The sourcing stays local where the kitchen states it, with Texas red fish, 44 Farms New York strip, and Zummo's Sausage named on the plate. The discipline is not nostalgia. It is choosing which memory needs crispness, which one needs acid, and which one should stay slow.

A room built for return

The room is modern and clean without losing warmth, the kind of space where the counter, the pass, and the tables all seem to carry part of the welcome. Service here is described in terms of conversation as much as delivery, and that suits the food: fried chicken for the center of the table, gumbo that asks for a spoon, cornbread arriving with the weight of a shared habit. The noise can rise, especially when live music enters the room, but the register stays close to family rather than spectacle. Derry and Tom Foley founded the restaurant with a language of coming home to loved ones, and the room follows that idea without turning it into theater. Clean lines, rustic warmth, and a lively floor give the kitchen enough air to cook food that is familiar but not casual in its thinking.

The nomination stayed with this address

Roots Southern Table received a James Beard Foundation Awards Best New Restaurant nomination in 2022, and that distinction belongs to this Farmers Branch address. Derry also carries a Best Chef: Texas nomination from 2022, alongside a broader career that now includes judging on MasterChef since 2025, Tiffany Derry Concepts, T2D Concepts, and Roots Chicken Shak. The next movement is already inside that spread of work: more rooms, more teams, and the same insistence that Southern food can carry pleasure, discipline, and memory at once. At Roots Southern Table, that argument still arrives most plainly as duck-fat fried chicken.