TENNESSEE | CHEF PROFILES

How Chef Sam Jett Is Returning to Appalachian Roots at Audrey

AUDREY | $$$$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM

By Eric Barton | Sept. 9, 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.

When Sam Jett talks about growing up in Tennessee, it sounds less like a hometown story and more like a road atlas. Born near the Ocoee River, raised in pockets of Memphis and Nashville, with family farms outside Knoxville and south of Chattanooga—he has, as he puts it, “lived in or explored every corner of this state.”

That restlessness, the constant moving, taught him how to adapt, a skill that later suited him perfectly for the restaurant business, where a team can change overnight, a menu can pivot with the season, and the only guarantee is that nothing stays still for long.

A lifetime lighting up homes with tail lights also gave Jett a kind of built-in culinary compass. Every corner of the state taught him something different—Memphis barbecue culture, the home-cooked traditions of Jefferson County, the resourcefulness of Appalachian kitchens.

Now, as he takes over the much-talked-about Audrey in Nashville, all those influences converge. He’s not just inheriting a restaurant with an Appalachian ethos; he’s shaping it into the most personal expression of the food he grew up with.

Through all of his moves, food was the one constant. Jett remembers mornings in his grandmother’s Jefferson County kitchen, rolling biscuits, frying pork tenderloin, and watching her feed an entire family with the kind of direct, unfussy cooking that defines Appalachian food. His mom’s meatloaf and mac and cheese set a bar he still measures against. Even his father got in on it, competing in Memphis in May with a barbecue team charmingly called the Fossil-Fueled Porkers. Those memories, Jett says, gave him a foundation: “I was so thankful for such a childhood, surrounded by the most loving people who are just happy to provide for us.”

After culinary school in Charlotte, he headed to Husk Nashville in 2013, joining Sean Brock’s team for the much-anticipated opening. By then, Jett already had a decade and a half of cooking behind him, but he willingly went back to the line. The gamble paid off. Two years later, he was chef de cuisine at Ashley Christensen’s Death & Taxes in Raleigh. Soon enough, the gravitational pull of Brock’s projects brought him back to Tennessee, where he has since become a fixture of Brock’s restaurant world.

Now he steps into the role of executive chef at Audrey, a move that coincides with Southall Farm & Inn assuming operational oversight of the restaurant. For Jett, it feels both like a continuation and a pivot. “It feels good to carry the torch forward,” he says. “Now, I feel that it’s important to refine everything we touch. We are serving Appalachian food, and if the food wasn’t harvested in the mountains, it was harvested here.”

That’s more than marketing language. Jett describes his approach as minimalism rooted in memory. He wants every dish to feel as immediate as his grandmother’s tomatoes, eaten still warm from the vine. “Reduce the fuss, make it taste great, keep it hot or cold, and serve it straight away,” he says. That means menus that change month to month, dictated by the seasons, shifting from peak-fresh produce in summer to cellared and smoked ingredients in the lean months of winter.

The partnership with Southall makes that philosophy even sharper. The resort’s farm gives him direct access to produce, grains, and an apiary program he’s particularly excited about. “There is such a cool little ecosystem they have created with the bees and native flora,” he says. He’s already imagining what can be done with the plants cultivated there, not just in the kitchen but in Audrey’s food lab.

If his résumé shows him as a chef, his last six years running operations at Audrey showed him the other side of the business. That perspective, he says, may matter even more than knife skills. “Chefs often forget that the most important parts of restaurants rarely involve the actual food,” he says. “The smile you receive when you walk into a building or the warmth you feel from your server will impact the guests’ taste of the food as much as the cook.”

Audrey’s future, in Jett’s mind, is tied directly to Nashville’s. The city’s dining scene has exploded over the past 15 years, with national groups pouring in and Michelin finally paying attention. Jett welcomes the competition but worries about local favorites getting priced out. What will set Audrey apart, he believes, is its sense of time and place—cooking that doesn’t just nod at Appalachia but fully claims it.

“It isn’t just Appalachian-inspired anymore,” he says. “We are serving Appalachian food.”