CHEF PROFILES | MISSISSIPPI

Chaz Lindsay Came Home to Jackson to Build One of Mississippi’s Best Restaurants

By Eric Barton
Photos by Denny Culbert
April 24, 2026

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.

Chaz Lindsay grew up in Belhaven riding his bike past the old markers of a Jackson childhood: the grocery store deli counter, the soda fountain for orangeades and chili burgers, the neighborhood places that gave a kid a sense of the world before he had much of one. He grew up, he told me, “riding my bike everywhere, came home when the streetlights came on, everybody knew everybody,” in a part of Jackson where life was close-in and familiar.

Now he’s a chef, running one of Mississippi’s best restaurants, Pulito, which just happens to be right down the road from where all that happened. It wasn’t an upbringing ensconced in fine dining. It was one deep in Belhaven.

“We didn’t have a ton of restaurants, but there were a few staples,” he said. “Mostly, though, we ate at home. My mom was an incredible cook, so that was kind of the center of everything, holidays, celebrations, just regular nights. ”

Lindsay was a Mississippi kid doing ballet, playing in a rock band, and wanting to cook, which was not exactly the standard assignment for a boy growing up there. “I think just feeling like I didn’t totally fit in,” he said. “I definitely had moments where I felt like a disappointment or just kind of out of step with what people expected.” That kind of thing either teaches a person to disappear or to get comfortable being seen. In Lindsay’s case, it seems to have done the second.

Lindsay

He started cooking at 15 years old at Pizza Shack in Jackson. Then came the Culinary Institute of America, then the sort of kitchens that don’t let a young cook keep many illusions about how good he is. Lindsay worked at Craft, Colicchio and Sons, and Eleven Madison Park, and he talks about those years less like a chef polishing a résumé than somebody still half amused by what he saw there.

“My first night at Eleven Madison Park, I honestly didn’t fully grasp what I’d walked into,” he said. “I didn’t understand the level of it yet.” Then came the moment he still remembers best: “Nancy Reagan walks in, and I remember thinking, okay, wow, this is something. And then on her way out she stops and says, ‘That’s amazing, thank you all so much, and say no to drugs.’” It’s a kitchen story, which means it has everything it needs: panic, celebrity, exhaustion, and one line weird enough to survive the years.

Then came Italy, which seems to be where the style got stripped down. “My time in Italy probably had the biggest impact on how I cook,” he said. “That’s where I really learned about seasonality and just letting ingredients speak for themselves.” A lot of chefs say some version of that after cooking abroad. Lindsay came home and built a restaurant where the lessons he learned show up on the plate.

Cantaloupe

El Paso added something else. “I picked up a lot of techniques and flavors there that I still use,” he said, pointing to things like a hazelnut salsa macha on beets. That influence gives Pulito some lift and keeps Rowan’s, his newer place across the street, from feeling boxed in by any one idea of what his food is supposed to be. The Italian thread is there, but so is the border, and so is Mississippi.

Pork and ricotta meatballs

Quail

That’s part of what makes Pulito work. Lindsay came back to Jackson and opened a restaurant in Belhaven Town Center, close enough to his own childhood that the whole thing carries a faint full-circle hum. On paper, the place checks impressive boxes. It has become one of the state’s most talked-about restaurants. It earned Michelin Recommended status in the Guide’s American South coverage and ended up on The Adventurist’s list of Jackson’s best restaurants. But those are the tidy ways of measuring something. The more telling one is that Pulito feels like it belongs exactly where it is while still pushing against what people once expected from dining in Mississippi.

Chaz Lindsay Pulito Osteria Jackson Mississippi

Lindsay likes to talk about another back-to-the-beginning detail too. He used to ride his bike past Shady Nook. “And years later I ended up purchasing it and turning it into an events space. That full-circle moment really stays with me.”

Lindsay at Pulito

Now his days start around 7:30 with emails, books, and calendars before he starts moving between Pulito and Rowan’s. “My two favorite times are either early, when it’s quiet and I’m the only one in the dining room for a minute and I get a moment of solitude,” he said. “Or the complete opposite, the peak of dinner when the music’s up and everything’s moving.” That feels like a fair way to understand him too. There’s the quiet kid biking around Belhaven, taking it all in, and the chef in the middle of service, running on noise and timing and nerve.

Mushroom lasagna

Chaz Lindsay Pulito Osteria Jackson Mississippi Caesar

Lindsay on the line

As for Mississippi, he talks about it the way people do when they believe in it. “It’s in a really good place, comfortably progressing,” he said. “There are a lot of people doing interesting work and trying to push things a little.”

He went away, got very good, came home, and built one of the best restaurants in the state a few blocks from where he grew up. Not as nostalgia, but as proof of what a place can become when one of its own comes back sharper.