Before there was a restaurant or a reservation list, Chef Demetrius Brown was a young boy watching his great-grandmother sort dried beans at the table. No recipes. No formal lessons. Just quiet, intentional care and the kind of detail that now shapes everything he now brings to Bread and Butterfly.
His Atlanta restaurant may have started as a French bistro, but it’s evolved into something deeper: a place where technique meets memory, and where the African diaspora is honored through food. His “Dream Team Dinner” in collaboration with Resy traces the culinary journey of Black Americans post-Emancipation from the Northeast to Texas plate by plate.
The Resy Dream Team Dinners are a series of special events pairing trailblazing chefs with their dream collaborators to celebrate how inspiration fuels innovation in the ever-evolving culinary world. For one night only, each chef-collaborator duo comes together to host an intimate, multi-course dinner featuring dishes that reflect their unique culinary backgrounds and visions for the future of dining.
The dinner is about more than food, it’s about movement, legacy, and reclamation. Dishes like Macaroni Pie nod to both his grandmother and James Hemings, the enslaved chef behind Jefferson’s famed Mac and Cheese. A deconstructed Coq Au Vin flips French cuisine on its head using African ingredients. Even oysters, often left out of the “Black food” conversation, are given historical context and center stage.
Born in Rhode Island and raised between there and Atlanta, Chef Demetrius brings a unique perspective to Southern food. “I didn’t even have a biscuit until I was a teenager,” he laughs. He wasn’t raised on the classics and that distance let him approach Black food with a fresh, global lens. “Caribbean and African food just feel more flavorful, more varied. More… alive.”
Music and art shape the menu too, with nods to Lupe Fiasco’s Drogas Wave and work by artist Ayana V. Jackson. And the collaboration with Steven Satterfield? Effortless. “He just got it. From the first conversation, he understood the vision.”
His advice to other chefs? Be solid at the craft first. “People want to be the next Gordon Ramsay, but you have to be a good cook first. A good steward of the arts. Learn the rules before you try to break them.”
More than anything, he sees his work as memory-making. “I’m not here to make good food. I’m here to make memorable food.”
The dinner may be over, but the mission continues. At Bread and Butterfly, every dish is still rooted in care for history, for community, and for the people being fed.
