Chef Bill Smith wins the SFA's Craig Claiborne Lifetime Achievement Award

Chapel Hill’s revered chef Bill Smith finally got his due Saturday when he was given the Craig Claiborne Lifetime Achievement Award at the annual Southern Foodways Symposium in Oxford, Mississippi.

As Southerners would say (and mean it in the best possible way): Well, bless his heart. It’s about time.

Smith, who retired in 2019 as the chef at Crook’s Corner, has done a lot more than cook and put dishes like shrimp & grits, Atlantic Beach Pie, and honeysuckle sorbet on the culinary map. He has long been a social justice activist, too. In recent years, he has raised money and found help for Latin American immigrants facing deportation, particularly the men and women who worked in his kitchen.

The Southern Foodways Alliance, the organization based at the University of Mississippi’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture, gives the award each year. At the symposium, which returned to a smaller but in-person gathering Oct. 15-16, the organization kept the plan to honor Smith under wraps (but most regulars guessed).

Retired Durham chef Ben Barker, who received the honor with his late wife, baker Karen Barker, in 2012, made the presentation, but became so overwhelmed by emotion, he couldn’t read his own remarks. Smith himself, who had been prepared in advance, couldn’t get out more than a few words of thanks as he faced a standing ovation, holding the artwork made by Blair Hobbs that’s traditionally crafted for each winner. Smith’s, appropriately, featured his favorite beverage, a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon.

It fell to Zaire Love, an SFA filmmaker, to really sum up Smith’s impact with a video that stretched from his early years as a stage performer to his Chapel Hill culinary career, starting at La Residence, where he worked with the late Bill Neal and Moreton Neal, to his work at Crook’s Corner after Bill Neal’s death, where he managed to keep Neal’s dishes while building on his own love of Southern-inspired cuisine.

Look After from Southern Foodways on Vimeo.

Love even managed to get footage of Smith on a white horse, in honor of one of his female ancestors who once rode a white horse covered in red paint to campaign for the abolition of slavery.

“The most extraordinary thing about Bill—he has put his head down and done whatever work needed to be done,” said Melissa Booth Hall, the SFA’s managing director.

“His food was always extraordinary, and what was so extraordinary was how humble and classic it was. But he also put his head down and put his time and his money and his body on the line for causes he cares about. In this moment, when it has become incredibly clear that being an extraordinary chef doesn’t mean being a good person, Bill is an extraordinary person who happens to be a top-notch chef.”