Buffalo Food: Darian Bryan marking mark in city and on TV

By Janet Gramza
(Image above: Darian Bryan, second from left, on “Next Level Chef with Gordon Ramsay. All images in this story courtesy of Darian and Jessica Micha Bryan).

There’s a moment on Episode 9 of this season of Fox’s “Next Level Chef with Gordon Ramsay” that perfectly captures Chef Darian Bryan of Buffalo.

Bryan, one of nine chefs still standing on the 16-episode series that ends in late May, had just survived a tense elimination round that sent another chef home. When Ramsay congratulated him, Bryan bowed and replied, “Much love. Evriting rait.” Then he grinned and added, “That means everything is all right.”

His translation was a joking reminder that when he first came to Buffalo in 2012, he was just an immigrant kid who spoke Jamaican Patois, wore colorful Caribbean clothes and rode a bicycle in the snow to apply for jobs.

“People were like, ‘Who is this clown?’” he said. “It was like culture shock. People didn’t want to hire me because I couldn’t speak proper English.”

Fourteen years later, Bryan is famous in Buffalo as the Jamaican chef who cooks for the Buffalo Bills, owns two restaurants and a catering business, wears trademark fedoras and custom-tailored chef coats and cares as much about his adopted city as he does his island homeland.

Now he’s representing Buffalo and Jamaica on an international competitive cooking show that spotlights his culinary skills and creativity, sense of humor, confidence and desire to inspire.

“I want to show people in Jamaica and globally that for people who look like me and talk like me, anything is possible,” he said.

Bryan can’t share any spoilers, but he’s still standing after 11 of 16 episodes in the series, filmed in Ireland last fall. So he’s still vying to win the whole thing, which comes with a $250,000 prize and two years of mentoring by Ramsay.

But either way, it’s clear he is taking his culinary dreams to the next level and expanding the Chef Darian brand.

Bryan and his wife and business partner, Jessica Bryan, are about to open a third restaurant, Reserve Steakhouse by Chef Darian, in the historic Eckl’s @ Larkin building in Buffalo. The city’s Larkinville neighborhood is also home to his two other eateries, The Jerk Hut (casual Jamaican lunch) and Bratt’s Hill (upscale Jamaican fine dining) and his catering business, The Plating Society.

They also have a new breakfast product in the works that will bring Bryan’s homemade Jamaican porridge to supermarket shelves, diners and hotels. Called Staple and Spoon, it will offer an instant alternative to oatmeal that Jessica describes as “incredibly delicious, Caribbean porridge that feels like a warm hug.” 

The Bryans have also founded a charity, the Chef Darian Bryan Foundation, to support non-profit fundraisers, grants for young chefs and community needs in crisis situations, such as the racist mass shooting that claimed 10 Black lives in Buffalo on May 14, 2022, and the hurricane that devastated parts of Jamaica in late 2025.

“I want to take care of my country and be a leader in my community,” Bryan said.

Starting with a ‘work ethic, a dream and faith’

So far he has achieved everything he hoped for when he came to Buffalo at age 20 with “a work ethic, a dream and faith.” He grew up in rural Jamaica far from the cities and resorts tourists associate with his island homeland.

“Everyone thinks of Jamaica as a beach with a pina colada,” Jessica Bryan said. “But Darian grew up in the country, what Jamaicans call ‘backahbush,’ and what they call country is what we might call a jungle.”

His home area, dubbed Bratt’s Hill, had no electricity or running water. His mother ran a roadside stand grilling chicken, pork and goat meat from livestock they raised. She taught her son to cook, clean and sew along with his five sisters, he said.

In 2012, Darian and younger sister Tiffany moved to Buffalo to join their elder sister, Sherece. His goal was a restaurant job that would pay for cooking school. But he said he was rejected by many restaurants, even a Jamaican one and a burger spot that had a “Help wanted” sign on the door.

He persisted, calling restaurants daily asking for dishwashing jobs to get a foot in the door. After a few weeks, he said a manager at Denny’s on Delaware Avenue “got sick of me calling and said, ‘OK, come for an interview.”

Prepared to wash dishes, he was thrilled to be invited to train in the kitchen, learning to prepare foods he had never tasted. He was awed by the selection of foods available in American supermarkets and the offerings on Denny’s menu.

“I didn’t know the difference between bacon and ham, and I’d get them mixed up,” he said. “They would ask me for country-fried steak and I’d drop a crispy chicken in the fryer instead.”

His solution was to “learn, learn, learn.” He practiced flipping eggs at home and rode his bike to Wegman’s to buy bags of carrots and onions just to practice slicing them.

In fall 2012 he entered Erie Community College’s Culinary Arts program as “the student who couldn’t afford a uniform or my own set of knives.” But his instructor, “Chef Jackie” Bamrick, saw his drive and bought him his first culinary textbook. He used it as a bible, determined to master every technique. When his bearnaise sauce kept breaking, “I did it over and over and over, every second, until it was perfect,” he said.

By the time he earned his associate’s degree, he was a manager at Denny’s and accepted at Buffalo State University for a bachelor’s in hospitality. He said Bamrick called Chef Mark Hutchinson, owner of Hutch’s restaurant, and told him, “You need to hire this guy.”

At Hutch’s, he would show up three hours before his paid shift to watch the pastry chef prepare desserts or help the head chef make sausage. He set up his station hours early “just so I can have a smooth night.”

“People thought I was doing it to be Hutch’s pet,” he said. “I’m like, ‘I didn’t grow up to be no man’s pet. I want to learn.” Within a year, he was promoted to sous chef, a remarkably rapid advance for a new chef in the world of fine dining.

Jessica joins the team

He met his future wife at a “Bridge Brunch” ECC held for graduates going on to Buffalo State, where Jessica Micha was a senior and student leader.

A self-described “spicy” young woman who dressed in business suits she found in thrift stores, she said she eyed the dessert spread at the brunch and remarked to a friend, “I wonder if those pastries taste as good as they look.” Bryan overheard her and replied, “They better taste good. I made them.”

The two chatted and ended up having their first date the next day. On their second date, she drove to his apartment to pick him up and he asked her to come in. When she hesitated, he said he needed a few minutes to finish ironing his shirt and sewing a rip in his pants.

“I didn’t know how to do either,” she said. “I was like, ‘Oh, shoot. I need to marry him. So that’s it, we matched!”

Jessica had grown up in Binghamton as an all-star girls’ softball pitcher who went to Buff State on an athletic scholarship. But she arrived there with a torn rotator cuff and decided to put education before her sport. She said her parents weren’t happy, but “It felt like freedom to me. I fell in love with Buffalo, fell in love with activism and fell in love with life.”

She worked at Child and Family Services and the federal department of Housing and Urban Development while earning her master’s in non-profit management and finance at Buffalo State, while Bryan worked at Hutch’s and studied for his BA. They moved into an apartment near Hutch’s, where Jessica said, “We survived on staff meals.”

“We tell people Hutch’s raised us,” she said. “I would eat their jambalaya for breakfast, lunch and dinner.”

They married in July 2017 at Buffalo’s Ellicott Square building “because I love history,” Jessica said. They had their first child, Darian II, in 2018 and their second, Nina, 14 months later.

In early 2018, Bryan helped open a café in Hamburg, where he met the late Buffalo Bills cornerback Vontae Davis, who asked him to be his personal chef. Soon Bryan was cooking for a dozen other Bills players, including quarterback Josh Allen. His Bills gigs last season included the party Allen threw for his wife, actress Hailee Steinfeld’s 29^th birthday and pregnancy announcement.

As his reputation grew, Bryan was approached by the food service vendor for Mattel Fisher-Price to overhaul its company cafeteria. He took the job and improved the food so much that “people wanted to go to work to see what’s on the menu,” Jessica Bryan said.

“Darian would do jerk chicken cookouts for the employees, and there was a cult following for his cornmeal porridge,” she said.

At the end of the year, Mattel’s then-CEO, Chuck Scothon, credited Bryan with increasing employee attendance and improving the company culture. Scothon announced that in thanks, “We are giving Chef Darian’s kids Christmas on Mattel this year,” Jessica said.

“That will always stick with me, that my husband can make a difference with food and love,” she said.

Bryan saw Fisher-Price job as “a dream job” because he worked work 7 a.m. to 2 p.m., had time with his family and catered dinner parties and corporate events on weekends. He named his catering business The Plating Society and held pop-up events in unique settings like beaches, parks and farms.

“We did like 10 pop-up dinner parties in two years and every one of them sold out,” Jessica said. “Darian would create the menu, and I would create the marketing.” She said she would get so anxious once an event sold out that she had to step away and let him take charge. “We work well together because we each contribute something different. But when we work together, there’s nothing we can’t do.”

Covid-19, Tops and resets

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020, Jessica worked from home as a financial analyst for HUD, a demanding job crunching national numbers for Covid funding. After months of overtime and lost sleep, she said HUD “gave me a $2,000 check and no promotion.” She decided to leave her eight-year career in government and use her gifts to support her husband’s business goals.

During Covid, Darian cooked delectable meals at home “and had the wife take amazing photos and post them on social media,” he said. The posts grew their followers on several platforms and they began getting more catering jobs.

As business grew, they looked for rental space for The Plating Society and found it through Howard and Leslie Zemsky, who were developing the Mill Race Commons building in Larkinville, where Bryan built out two fully equipped kitchens to prep meals for the Bills and other clients.

The Plating Society still “pays the bills” that allowed Darian to pursue his next goals, opening a Jamaican restaurant, The Jerk Hut, at the former Filling Station in Larkin Square, followed by his fine-dining establishment, Bratt’s Hill.

They were just getting started in the restaurant business when a white supremacist armed with assault rifles stormed the Tops Market on Buffalo’s predominantly Black East Side and executed 10 Black people. Bryan was among the store regulars who “almost” went to shop there that day. A change of plans led him to go to the Elmwood Market instead, but he knew many of the victims – and that his skin tone would also have made him a target for murder.

“I think about that every single day,” Jessica said. “And as soon as it happened, my husband was like, ‘We’ve got to do something.’”

Besides robbing 10 lives, the hate crime closed the main source of fresh food for a community already considered a food desert, creating a crisis that led World Central Kitchen to deploy its meal tents and produce giveaways there for two months until the store reopened.

WCK founder Chef Jose Andres asked the Bryans to lead the Buffalo response. They dropped everything to assemble volunteers and cook hot meals for thousands of people for several weeks, receiving $8 per meal to just cover their costs. They also held their own pop-up fundraisers, selling Chef Darian’s Rasta Pasta and Jerk Chicken plates to raise $20,000 for the victims’ families.

Last year, they also created a Jamaica Relief Fund to help the island rebuild in the wake of Hurricane Melissa. Bryan said he established the Chef Darian Bryan Foundation to help non-profits hold fundraisers for important causes “without breaking their budget on food.”

The Bryans’ support for their community has been met with support for their businesses, which now employ 40 people. They said they can seat 75-plus people at Bratt’s Hill on a sub-zero Saturday in winter to dine on oxtail ragu, lamb ribs or seafood risotto. And when families of the Buffalo Massacre victims hold special events, Bryan said, they come to The Plating Society or Bratt’s Hill.

Reaching for the next level

Now their Buffalo fans and thousands of social media followers are cheering for Chef Darian on Fox’s “Next Level Chef,” where he’s been killing it in every kitchen – basement, middle and top, whose levels reflect the quality of the available ingredients, tools and equipment. During filming, the chefs were “mic’d and on camera all day long,” he said, and when he was featured, he made sure to strut his stuff and portray a quality Jamaicans call “boasty.”

On Episode 9, which aired April 2, the teams had to cook with draft beer. “I’m going for the stout,” Bryan told the camera. “It’s strong, bold, flavorful – just like me. Delicious!”

So far on the show, of 27 chefs introduced on the January 29 premiere, Bryan has excelled through 10 episodes (and the departures of 17 fellow chefs) and won high praise from Ramsay and the two other celebrity chefs, Richard Blais and Nyesha Arrington.

Ramsay and Arrington called a shrimp mac and cheese dish Bryan created “incredible” and “stunning.” While Bryan was cooking it, his team captain, Blais, told him, “You’re in control — as you always are.”

Jessica Bryan said she hopes her husband’s performance on the show will teach people “to stop putting him in a box as ‘the Jamaican chef’ or ‘the NFL chef.’ He is classically trained and passionate about Italian food and French food, and he can cook anything. He chooses to serve Jamaican food because he loves his people and his culture.”

Bryan said the experience of cooking alongside Gordon Ramsay widened his goals. “I want to open more restaurants, I want to be a TV person like him,” he said. “He has 80 restaurants and so many TV shows. And just being in his presence and seeing how flawless he is was so inspiring.

“I’m a big fan of his,” he added. “And now, he’s a big fan of me, too.”

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The show can be seen on Fox TV (WUTV, Channel 29, in Buffalo) on Thursday nights. It is available for streaming on Hulu the next day.

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Janet Gramza has more than 30 years experience in journalism and is a veteran of The (Syracuse) Post-Standard and The Buffalo News.

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