2023 The Face of Local Flavor
Chef Celeste Creations
Chef Celeste Gill, a Detroit native that finds instant gratification in providing delicious and healthy foods to her community, is the face behind tasty cuisine. She owns two Chef Celeste Bistros, and opened Taylor’s Old Post Office Café in Slaughter. Besides creating flavorful dishes to unite people, she teaches cooking classes at the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison and volunteers at local schools.
“That goal is to give them a viable skill so when they come out, they can get a decent wage and make a decent living,” she says. “Change some of their ways and not go back in.”
Chef Celeste loves to teach people to explore ingredients they might not like. During a cooking class where they made salads, someone mentioned they didn’t like spinach. In the end, the person who didn’t like spinach enjoyed the dish.
“A lot of the time, it’s not that you don’t like something,” Chef Celeste says. “You just haven’t found the way that you’d like it prepared.”
When she was a child, Celeste loved cooking and playing with different foods and flavors. At the grocery store, she would ask her family to buy certain ingredients so she could enhance her knowledge of flavor profiles.
“I like my food to be clean so that way everyone can come and safely eat without worrying about it,” she says. Celeste makes healthy, clean food by not cooking with butter. “Most things, you’re not going to miss the butter. My most popular dish, the Shrimp and Grits, doesn’t have any butter or any cream.”
Chef Celeste has her own cooking show on Eat This TV called My Louisiana Kitchen, and season three is out. People looking for new recipes or wanting to see the face behind Chef Celeste Bistro can watch on Youtube or at EatThisTV.com.