Jamisen Booker
Chef de Cuisine at Maisie’s Green Brae.
A Chef Who
Wastes Nothing
When Jamisen Booker competed on Chopped, the assignment was to cook with what most kitchens throw out — shrimp shells, pickle brine, the odds and ends that usually hit the bin. He figured out how to create a great plate with them anyway. That’s the short version of how he thinks. Nothing in a kitchen is truly scrap if you know how to look at it.
He came up the long way. A Charlotte native with no culinary school behind him, he worked from fast-food lines to fine-dining kitchens one station at a time — prep, sushi, line, demi, and up. Along the way he trained under Greg Collier at Leah & Louise, then ran kitchens of his own at The Asbury, Weathered Souls Brewing, and Mimosa Grill. He’s cooked at the NCRLA Chef Showdown and returned three years running to the Bayhaven Food and Wine Festival. He calls what he makes “new age Southern” — rooted in this region, unafraid of the wider world.
That description is part of why he fits here. Maisie’s Green Brae was built on the idea that two food traditions can share a table — Southern and Scottish, cooked like they were meant to. A chef whose own food already lives at the seam of old and new was never going to be a stranger in this kitchen.
The rest of the fit is in how he works. Jamisen keeps learning; the self-taught cook is still the student, after the next technique, the next flavor, the better use for what’s already on the counter. He runs a kitchen the way we’d want ours run — mentoring the cooks under him, building a line that holds up on a full Friday night, minding the people at the stove as closely as the plates leaving it. And the waste-nothing conviction that carried him onto national television isn’t a gimmick. It’s a discipline, and a kind of respect — for the ingredient, the grower, the animal, the dollar.
We brought him on because who he is already belongs here — the Southern cooking, the lifelong learning, the zero-waste ethic, the steady hand with a team. This is the kind of fit Christine and Karl Schaefer built the place for.
He’s part of the pack now. That’s good for the pack. It’s better for the table.