Inside ‘Top Chef’ Alum and Fritai Owner Charly Pierre’s Big Year

It’s been a big year for Fritai chef Charly Pierre.

This year marks the third anniversary of Fritai, which he opened on the edge of New Orleans’s Treme neighborhood, the oldest Black neighborhood in America. Pierre started the Haitian restaurant as a stall in the St. Roch Market in 2016; in Haitian cuisine, fritai generally refers to fried plantains, pork, or dumplings sold by street vendors, food he looks forward to on his regular pilgrimages to Haiti to see friends and family.

The year 2024 also marked the first time Pierre was a vendor at French Quarter Fest, Bayou Boogaloo, and, most importantly, Jazz Fest. And then there was the little matter of his appearance as a contestant on Top Chef: Wisconsin. On Thursday, September 19, Pierre is hosting a Top Chef reunion dinner at Fritai, cooking alongside fellow Season 21 contestants Manny Barella and Kévin D’Andréa, two chefs he grew close to during the filming. The five-course dinner will intermingle flavors from Pierre’s Haitian cuisine, Barella’s Mexican heritage, and D’Andréa’s French training.

Randy Schmidt/Eater NOLA

“It’s good to take stock,” says the 35-year-old chef, a James Beard Award semifinalist for Best Chef: South in 2023. “We’re always pushing but don’t always give ourselves the credit for what we’ve done. I think this is the first year I feel we really understand the ins-and-outs of the restaurant business. How things work.”

After weathering storms both literal and figurative, from Hurricane Ida in 2021 to the COVID pandemic and the city’s economically fraught summers, when tourism is typically at its slowest, Pierre feels like the page has turned. “The city is plateauing into a kind of normalcy. So now we figure out how we deal with that,” he says. This summer wasn’t as dire as last, but sales are still down since Fritai stopped serving lunch, which it paused while Pierre filmed Top Chef. He plans to ease back in by starting weekend brunch service in October, then lunch.

Pierre had done food shows, like Chopped, before. But Top Chef was the ultimate challenge. The call to appear came in 2022; filming began in Milwaukee in 2023. The season debuted on March 20, 2024, and Pierre lasted through the fifth episode. Ironically, he was sent home the same episode — “Supper Club” — during which he won his first and only Quickfire Challenge. Using ingredients from the Dane County Farmers Market, contestants were to cook a dish incorporating one of pioneering Madison chef Carson Gulley’s famed sauce recipes — Pierre happened to pick the Creole sauce.

David Moir/Bravo via Getty Images

“My favorite dish that my mom used to make was her Creole chicken,” Pierre said during the episode. “That dish is still on my menu; it’s not a dish that’s ever going to come off.” Pierre’s mom passed away about 15 years ago, and he has dreams about her talking to him about his success, he said on the show. “And look what I’ve become. I know she’d be so proud of me.”

In the end, the Quickfire win wasn’t enough to save him after a team loss in the elimination challenge. “I’m a chef so I’ve done a lot of nerve-racking things in my life. This was the most nerve-racking thing I’ve ever done, by far,” Pierre says. He was sent home for overcooking his fish, according to the judges, partly a response, on his part, to prior criticism about undercooking fish. “I cooked in the Haitian way, and they saw that as frying it too hard. I’m not at the French Laundry, although I know how to cook that way. But I was modeling it after what I cook here,” he says.

“There are things I messed up on, that I can clearly see now,” says Pierre. Still, he thinks the most talented contestant, the person who deserved to win, won.

Randy Schmidt/Eater NOLA

After Top Chef aired, it was back to the real world — and his home life in New Orleans — for Pierre. Working his booth at Jazz Fest the last weekend in April and first weekend in May, with a three-item menu of grilled shrimp pikliz, crab macaroni and cheese, and toasted corn “ribs” cut off the cob, Pierre did two-and-a-half months of sales in two weeks. “That money is in our stockpile. It helped us survive summer,” he says.

Pierre had been angling for a Jazz Fest booth for years; previously, he had done food demonstrations at the world-famous festival, which can see up to 100,000 ticketed attendees per day. He was asked to do French Quarter Fest, a free, annual festival held two weeks before Jazz Fest, in 2023, but the timing wasn’t right. “This year, although I knew it was a lot, I was in,” he says.

While the first few days of French Quarter Fest were “a bit of a shit show,” Pierre says, by the end of the festival, the team had its systems down. They figured things would go smoothly at the Jazz Fest Fairgrounds a few weeks later. Then the first day threw them a curve. “They told me I couldn’t use my fryer with the line they had available,” Pierre says. He rented an approved fryer and had it express shipped for the next day; after its arrival, things became “easy breezy.” By the time Bayou Boogaloo rolled around, the smaller neighborhood festival felt like slow motion compared to what he had achieved at the other two.

Fritai

The three festivals brought in almost six figures in sales for Fritai. “It was worth all the planning and effort,” Pierre says.

As the busier fall tourism season looms, Pierre is staffed up and ready. He recently hired a female cook for the line. “I’m happy I got another woman in the kitchen,” he says. She worked overnight shifts at Rally’s, the fast-food burger chain with several New Orleans restaurants. “She’s strong. She’s got what it takes,” says Pierre.

While he’d love to open another restaurant in New Orleans, Pierre doesn’t think it will look like Fritai. “I’d love to go fine dining with a French Haitian place. But it took us four years to find this space,” he says. “We’ll invest when it’s the right time. I need to be patient.” His business partner Eva Chereches, the realist, keeps him level-headed in decision-making. And he gets advice regularly from fellow New Orleans chefs, among them Nina Compton (Compere Lapin), Alon Shaya (Saba), Serigne Mbaye (Dakar NOLA), Prince Lobos (Addis), and Lisa Nelson (Queen Trini Lisa).

Taking care of his team is paramount to Pierre and Chereches. “Our check averages are not crazy high. We have to figure out ways to keep our people paid without overworking them,” says Pierre.

One thing he’s not patient about is his upcoming October nuptials. He’s marrying film stylist and designer Christine M. Hamilton, a Baton Rouge native, who he proposed to the day before he left for Top Chef. “Our ceremony will be small, just family, but then there will be two parties. And we’re going to Italy. I’m most excited about the wedding,” he says. “I just can’t wait to get married.”