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Jon Gray is co-founder of Ghetto Gastro. He aims to shift social narratives by celebrating the culinary, blending a background in fashion to create immersive experiences, product design, and unique storytelling. From Co-op City, Gray’s mother and grandmother taught him about the arts and challenged him to innovate as a way of life. When a rebellious adolescence almost put him behind bars, Gray used the experience to imagine a greater vision for himself. Inventorying his passions and pastimes, he made Bronx-driven gastro-diplomacy his career and mission. In 2019, Gray delivered the TED Talk “The Next Big Thing Is Coming from the Bronx, Again.” Gray is a Civic Practice Partnership Artist in Residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 2021, he served as guest curator at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, where “Jon Gray of Ghetto Gastro Selects” featured an Afrofuturist theme.
Pierre Serrao is chef and co-founder of Ghetto Gastro. Serrao uses food as both an expression of culture-driven creativity and a tool to create health sovereignty. Raised between Barbados and Connecticut, Serrao worked in restaurants throughout high school, then graduated from culinary school and the Italian Culinary Institute for Foreigners in Piemonte. He worked at award-winning restaurants in New York, Barbados, and Italy, styling an approach to cooking influenced by ancestral practices and innovation. The desire to create a culturally sound and iterative expression of food led Serrao to join forces with Jon Gray and Lester Walker, rounding out Ghetto Gastro. Fueled by international travel, enthusiasm for learning, and sheer curiosity, Serrao explores ways to bridge the global pantry with creative entrepreneurship.
Lester Walker is chef and co-founder of Ghetto Gastro. Walker brings unrelenting imagination, competition-ready technique, and skill at layering flavors to Ghetto Gastro’s iconic events, offerings, and storytelling. A native of the Bronx’s Co-op City, Walker discovered cooking at a pivotal moment in his teen years. New York City’s Careers Through Culinary Arts Program inspired him to pursue a career in food. Spurred by the speed, focus, and creativity of cooking, Walker worked up the fine-dining line in award-winning kitchens in New York, Washington, D.C., and Miami. Walker’s cooking merges the roots of NYC-based Black American foodways with the cuisines he studied professionally: French, Italian, Indian, and Southeast Asian. In 2012, he won Chopped on the Food Network. That same year, seeking ways to explore historic and modern Black culture through food, he partnered with Jon Gray, fellow Co-op City native, to launch Ghetto Gastro. With Ghetto Gastro, Walker aims to create art by intentionally pairing food with ideas that represent and celebrate where he comes from.
Osayi Endolyn is a James Beard Award–winning writer whose work explores food and identity. She’s been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Time, among others. Endolyn is co-author, with Marcus Samuelsson, of the national bestseller The Rise: Black Cooks and the Soul of American Food. She’s appeared on Netflix’s Chef’s Table and Ugly Delicious, and Hulu’s The Next Thing You Eat. A California native and former resident of the South, she lives in New York.