Chris

Chris Morgan grew up in McLean, Virginia, but built the foundations of his cooking on the West Coast — first in San Francisco, where he cooked at Judy Rodgers’ legendary Zuni Café and then helped open a restaurant alongside an early mentor, before stints in Los Angeles and Portland and a spell at the California Culinary Academy. He returned to the Washington, D.C. area in 2013, where his family has deep roots. In D.C. he was a sous chef at Jeremiah Langhorne’s acclaimed The Dabney, ran the kitchen at McClellan’s Retreat, and became head chef across Nathan Anda’s Red Apron Group — the butchery-driven operation that made him a specialist in whole-animal cookery, a background that explains his easy command of an unglamorous, collagen-rich cut like lamb neck. After working alongside Gerald Addison at Parts & Labor, the two became co-executive chefs of Compass Rose in 2017. Later that year, with restaurateur Rose Previte, Morgan and Addison opened Maydan: a live-fire restaurant whose menu travels from Tangier to Tehran and Batumi to Beirut. To build it, the team toured Morocco, Tunisia, Georgia, Lebanon and Turkey, cooking in home kitchens and town squares and carrying those flavours back to a wood-burning hearth. Maydan landed near the top of Bon Appétit’s best-new-restaurant list in 2018, was a James Beard semifinalist, and earned a Michelin star in 2019. That immersion in Turkish and Eastern Mediterranean cooking is precisely what this dish draws on. Season 1 of America’s Culinary Cup marks Morgan’s arrival on the national competition stage; he reached the final three.