Timon Balloo Is Cooking His Story Into Every Plate at The Katherine in Fort Lauderdale

THE KATHERINE | $$$$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM

By Eric Barton | Sept. 10, 2025

AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.

The first time you sit down at The Katherine in Fort Lauderdale, the menu feels familiar until it doesn’t. A plate of clam chowder fries appears, a mash-up of San Francisco sourdough nostalgia and bar-snack indulgence, the kind of dish that could only come from someone raised between cultures and determined never to color inside the lines.

“That one is me and my wife together,” chef Timon Balloo told me. He grew up in the Bay Area eating chowder in bread bowls; she loves fries. The rest is marriage, in edible form.

Balloo has always cooked like this, pulling from memory and heritage to build something new. Born to Chinese-Trinidadian and Indian parents, he grew up with flavors colliding on the table. As a kid, he leaned toward the Chinese side, learning the rhythm of yin and yang in food—the balance of sweet, sour, salt, and acid. That lesson stuck. Even today, his cooking starts with those fundamentals, though the expression has broadened into a global shorthand: jerk spice alongside a Thai-style fried rice, za’atar rubbed into beets, clams getting cozy with potatoes and aioli.

Marissa + Timon Balloo credit Michael Pisarri

Marissa and Timon Balloo, credit Michael Pisarri

Like most chefs with range, Balloo trained the old-fashioned way, in other people’s kitchens. He cooked for Michelle Bernstein, learned seafood discipline from Allen Susser, and carried European rigor from time working abroad. For years he was the guy translating other chefs’ visions. Then came the moment of recognition—Sugarcane Raw Bar Grill in Miami. There, Balloo put a dish on the menu that became his calling card: Duck and Waffle, a savory-sweet, playful plate that announced he’d found his voice. “It forged my ideology in the kitchen,” he said. In other words, it was him on the plate.

That voice has matured. The Katherine, named after his wife’s middle name, opened in 2021 as both a business and a family project. Balloo runs the kitchen, Marissa manages the front, and together they’ve built a restaurant that feels like home. It’s not fancy dining and it’s not the safe middle ground of South Florida strip-mall restaurants either. It’s personal. Fort Lauderdale, once the province of chains and tourist traps, has long ago grown up to recognize that. “Diners are asking for more authentic flavors and stories,” Balloo said.

Marinated jerk beets

What makes his food different isn’t the novelty of fusing cuisines—that word, “fusion,” makes him flinch. For Balloo, the difference between fusion and confusion is honoring the roots of each dish, the techniques and traditions that birthed it. He wants the grandmother of whatever cuisine he’s drawing from to be proud. That’s the line he walks, and when he nails it—as in his morcilla fried rice with truffle and wild mushrooms, or in that plate of chowder fries—you see how all the backgrounds in his life can share one table without fighting for space.

Clam chowder fries

Crab croquettes

Off the line, Balloo keeps it simpler. He has two daughters, and the dish that wins at home isn’t a chef’s creation but a thrown-together one-pot mac and cheese, made from leftovers and improvisation. That, too, is part of the story: food as comfort, as family, as improvisation when the fridge is nearly empty.

Honey sriracha sesame wings

Balloo doesn’t talk about ambition in the way some chefs do, with plans for empires and TV slots. His is a quieter pursuit—of identity, of relevance, of cooking food that makes sense for the moment. His journey has taken him from San Francisco dim sum halls to Miami hot spots to this intimate Fort Lauderdale room where chowder meets fries. What ties it together is not geography or cuisine, but a chef steadily learning how to put his story on the plate.