Kitchen savant Chef Maverick swaps her LA lifestyle for an Atlanta base

The South Central product and celebrity chef—cannabis and regular style—was a city treasure. Now she's entered the bicoastal phase of a career she plans to be worldwide

Simply thinking “Chef Mav” transports me to another time—a period when time was plentiful and the legal weed business was flush.

That’s right, this taste memory is from the pandemic.

In 2020, my then-employer WeedWeek had me produce a 420 gift guide. I wrangled all of the THC-infused food that manufacturers could be sent to me. It was a shitload of edibles and I stayed high as a Georgia pine for the three weeks of gift guide assembly. 

As I made my way through the range of delicious sweets and even a cannabis wine, one brand stood out: Chef Mav. It wasn’t one I’d heard of before, but the Mav Sauce raw honey, spinach and herb pesto, and—especially—Chef Mav’s barbecue sauce were—as the fam back home says— kickin’. That these products were organic—soy and gluten free—was a terrific bonus.

That tangible memory led me to reach out to Chef Maverick this spring, for inclusion on a piece I wrote about celebrating Juneteenth with cannabis. Since then I’ve learned that Maverick Kelly is an athlete-turned-entrepreneur with a wild range of living experiences. And she’s the author of Sauced Up, a cookbook published last year. A Tennessee State University grad with a BA in software engineering, she’s resided in a lot of America. Mav considers herself an Angeleno even though I caught up with her right on the heels of a move to Atlanta. 

The conversation that follows eventually touches on some raw reasons for this move. They are reasons that are too-little discussed. 

When Maverick and I connected via Zoom, she was nailing down deets on a big event, an LA Christmas party for 200 people. As are all of my West Coast Sojourn Thursday conversations, the following has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

So what’s the big move?

I just moved to Atlanta. I kinda got tired of LA and saw an opportunity to come here and be able to invest in myself a little bit more. The cost of living there versus here, and what I can do with less money in this state. To be bicoastal—that’s the plan. I’ll just be going back and forth for business, for different things. Right now my home base is in Atlanta, but I still have business in LA and all over.

I’m just trying to elevate right now, and this is the strategic move for me to do that.

What a time to be catching you! I’m glad. I love breaking news. Let’s talk more about why you left Los Angeles later. But I want to go back to the first time I became aware of you. It was during the pandemic and you sent me sooo much stuff. And there’s this funny thing I wanted to ask you. When I tasted it, I could kinda tell a black person made it.

[Laugher]

Is that a thing. Could that have been something I have tasted?

Yeah, definitely. I put a lot of soul in my food. I don’t want to be that chef who’s like—every time you go into a restaurant—they be like, “Unh-uh, my food’s way better.” But I’m that person. I don’t know if my palette is that difference or whatever, but I haven’t tasted anyone who has food like mine. Or are able to accent flavors and stuff like I do. It’s just that… I’m good at seasoning. That’s my thing: flavor.

What’s your background? Are you trained?

I’m actually self-taught. I started cooking when I was five years old, in the kitchen with my aunts and grandma. I was always very inquisitive, asking my mom like, “Ooh, can I taste it?” I was always just helping. Then I pretty much watched enough to start cooking for myself when I was an itty-bitty kid.

Photo by Jane Vick

As I was growing up, my family always asked me to cook. I’d go to my friends houses and we’d be hungry after basketball practice, and I’d be like, “Oh, I can cook some food!” We’d all pitch in our little couple of dollars to get some stuff and I’d make [dishes] like spaghetti, peach cobbler… I’m like 13, 11, 12, you know.

Is this happening in LA? Where is this?

I grew up in LA. My family is from the south. I was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, but my mother, I consider her like a nomad. She will just get up and go, at any point in time, to another city. So I’ve lived in a lot of places.

I moved to LA when I was four or five. I was there until I was 16 and at that point I moved to Atlanta. After Atlanta was Nashville, Tennessee for like 15 years after that. I was in Evansville, Indiana for a while—less than a year in Indiana. Then I moved back to LA.

Growing up I spent my childhood in LA. A lot of this stuff happened in LA. South Central area. King and Normandie. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the area or not.

Yes I am.

I went to Audubon Middle School and Crenshaw High when I was there. Normandie Avenue Elementary School.

[Laughter]

You know. I grew up in the ’hood.

[Laughter]

You’ve lived all of these different places. Do you feel like you’ve picked up a little bit from all of these places?

You definitely pick up different food things in different places. You experience food in different areas, and everybody cooks different—every region is different and has different types of food. Being in Tennessee I had a lot of Southern barbecue and stuff like that.

I dunno, I just learn a lot from the things I eat. When I was in college I worked several serving jobs. As a server, people ask you all of these questions, like, What’s in it? We had to taste everything and be able to describe it and sell it, basically. With that, I was able to go home and recreate stuff, because I know what’s in it—but I’ll put my twist on it. That’s basically how I elevated my skill set.

My travels have definitely given me a leg up. It’s given me an opportunity to be more well versed in different types of food. When people ask me, What’s your specialty? I say I cook everything, but it’s because I really do. I’ll cook Asian food, I’ll cook Indian food. I’ll cook soul food, I cook Korean food sometimes. My Italian food be hitting—all of the time.

I’ll make something and then we’ll have it out at a restaurant and my fiancée will be like, “It just don’t taste the same. What’s the difference?” I don’t know. I’m just able to take things that I’ve seen and tasted and learned and run with it.

You can taste your travels in your food, I believe. When did you decide to go out on your own and when did you get introduced to cannabis cuisine?

I’m really into fashion and styling people, so when I went back to LA I was really interested in celebrity styling, personal shopping, and things like that. I started working with a celebrity photographer. One of my cousins going through my pictures saw some of my food pictures and said, “Yo, this food looks fire. What is this?” I was unemployed and staying with a friend and just trying to get comfortable in Los Angeles.

Literally the next day he was like, “My friend needs a chef. Can you make dinner for her tonight?” And I was like, whatever. Sure. It’s money, I cook. That’s easy. I made a pretty good amount of money that night, just putting together a four-course meal. And they were like, Wow—this shit’s good. That gave me the idea that I could be a private chef.

I’d avoided the food industry because I felt that, as a chef, I wouldn’t be able to make the money I want to make. My style and my tastes and the things that I want in life require a lot of money. [Laughs] I’d worked in the restaurant industry my whole life. Those cooks who didn’t make much of anything, their whole lives working 70, 80 hours a week to basically make $17-$18 an hour. It’s not me. But as a private chef—a celebrity private chef—I’ve been able to make my own rates. It’s been very profitable, in addition to the cannabis stuff.

That was 2017. That’s when I decided to be a private chef. I hadn’t been professional until then. I went to school for computer science. I have a bachelors in software engineering. I did that because technology was booming at the time and I’d always have a job and always make six figures. I really was good at it, and it was kinda fun, but it wasn’t something I was excited about.

Photo by Jane Vick

I didn’t realize that food was something I was really passionate about until that point, when I started marketing myself as a private chef.

When I was in LA I was really able to discover myself and what I really loved, and that’s feeding people, interacting with people, putting together elaborate experiences, high-end dinners. That’s something that I’m really into, that I’m really good at.

You know I have to ask who you’ve worked for.

I can’t say everybody, but I’ve done some stuff with Angela Rye. I did an event for Pineapple Express, their dispensary grand opening in Hollywood. 2 Chains is like a part owner in that dispensary. There were like a hundred and fifty people. That went really well. I’ve done a lot of things for some cannabis brands, one being Raw Garden. I did a 10-course cannabis-infused brunch. It went really well.

Celebrity-wise, Mara Brock Akil, she’s a director/producer. I’ve catered for her a few times. I mean, I can’t remember everybody… Dude from P-Valley, I catered for him, for his birthday once. Some athletes, people in real estate, just different people.

Tell me about the shift to cannabis. Had you always dabbled in it? Was there a learning curve? Tell me about that transition.

I started smoking late. I was like 32, 33?

How old are you?

[Laughs]

I’m 38.

You look good.

I may not look it, but I’m 38.

Go on, I’m sorry.

I’ve had a pretty hard life. And one of my friends introduced me to it and said, Just try this. Honestly, it was life changing, in helping my anxiety and my depression. I didn’t realize it at the time, I just knew it was really helpful.

When I moved back to LA I was more consistently into cannabis at this point. I would be getting edibles and things from dispensaries. I was also going through some health stuff, trying to figure out what was wrong with me. I think it was 2016-17 when I was diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease and multiple sclerosis. And I found out I had allergies to a lot of things: gluten, soy, dairy. A lot of environmental allergies: Trees, weeds. Some nuts and different things. Because I was eating edibles, there was nothing I was comfortable eating.

I already knew that I make good stuff. I do everything—I feel like I do a lot of things well. As somebody who’s always had an entrepreneurial mindset, I wanted to create something one day and have my own business. I just wanted to figure out my lane and there’s a need in the market for an edible that’s exclusively soy free, gluten free, and organic.

My doctor was adamant about no gluten, no soy. Make sure you’re eating no processed stuff. And there was nothing available at the time, for me. I also saw a lot of people were doing brownies, cookies, gummies, but there was no food. I feel like people get tired of just the sweet stuff—the cookie stuff—and you might want to get creative with it.

I’m the type of person who gets bored and I like to be able to do different stuff. I thought cooking with with cannabis would be pretty lit. At the time shows were coming out on TV, like that one show that 2 Chainz was hosting. Cannabis food shows. I was like, there’s all these cannabis food shows coming out, but there’s no food type of products. That’s when I put out Mav Sauce. Cannabis-infused sauces because sauce is one of the things I’m really good at. It’s one of the things I’m always tasked to make when I’m with other companies. I wanted to have a line of cannabis-infused sauces that were exclusively gluten-free, soy free and vegan.

That’s what blew me away, the sauces. I think I had the barbecue sauce, but what others did you make?

My initial sauces were just the spinach and herb pesto. I had the Memphis Sweet Barbecue Sauce, ketchup, mustard, and I had a balsamic vinaigrette. But now it’s evolved into much more. What I have now is my jerk barbecue sauce and I have a vegan chipotle aioli. I have sweet chili sauce, I have some garlic-basil-tomato pasta sauce. I still have my pesto and vinaigrette, sriracha catsup, and I’m going to put out a Korean barbecue sauce also.

It’s all about flavor. You put some stuff in your food and you don’t have to smoke it. And it tastes good. A lot of people put out stuff and it tastes trash. It will just get you high. The goal of my stuff is to make sure that shit tastes good as hell. You forget that it’s cannabis, then all of a sudden you feel good, too. You feel good ’cuz it tastes good, then you feel good because it hits.

What’s the most misunderstood part of being a cannabis chef?

People think I do only cannabis infused dinners. I do everything. I do food first. They’ll be like can I get a meal like, regular? And I’ll say yeah.

Is androgyny part of your brand?

Yeah.

How does that fit in and when did you realize you could make that a thing?

That’s just me. It wasn’t something that was intentional. That’s just who I am. I tapped into this androgynous side of myself in, like 2015. Kinda jokingly, but like… I’ve never desired to be a man. There are certain LGTBQ folks—lesbian specifically—that are studly, that are, oh they wanna be a dude. I just like masculine clothes. I’m not into men at all, but I like to embrace certain feminine qualities about myself, particularly my face. Every other female wears makeup, why couldn’t I? [Laughs] Just because I like to shop in the men’s department, you know?

I started doing my nails last year. It started as a birthday thing. I thought, “That would be kinda cool, to have some rock star-type nails.” Then realized that it was actually therapeutic for me because I have anxiety and tend to bite my fingers and when I got my nails done I didn’t bite my fingers at all. It became part of my therapy. I loved getting my nails done because I can be creative and express my individuality through my fingers.

It’s always been about being an individual. That’s what “Maverick” is all about, somebody who’s a radical thinker, who’s thinking outside of the box. Something you can never contain. You can never put me in a box, because I do so many things. I look different. I’m different from everyone else. It’s not like I try hard. It’s just who I am.

Androgyny is just something that I realized is me. I like putting on makeup, I like wearing baggy jeans. I like getting my nails done, but I’m still a real nigga. You feel me?

Uh-huh.

It’s just an aesthetic.

And it’s being real. Did you name yourself Maverick or did someone else call you that?

It was kind of a thing that I named myself, but at the same time I was talking about it with someone I was working with… I mean, my government name? It’s cute, but it don’t fit me. So I was talking to this photographer I was assisting at the time. “Yeah, I was just thinking about ‘Maverick’ and came across the definition.” I said it and he said, "That’s you! Done—from here on out you’re Maverick.” And I was like, Bet. It’s done. It just fit.

Photo by Jane Vick

Where did you go to college?

I went to Clark Atlanta my freshman year. I had a basketball scholarship. I was recruited for basketball. I didn’t want to play Division 2. I aspired to play professional and play overseas. So I transferred to Tennessee State my sophomore year to play Division 1, but I wanted to stay at a Black school. I played there and graduated from Tennessee State.

What can a regular person do to up their cannabis cooking game?

Get an infusing machine. Something like an Ardent or a Levo. That will help with the process of actually fully decarbing and infusing the oil, which will make it a better experience than trying to do it on your own. Also, knowing the percentage of THC in the flower that you use will help you be able to accurately dose. I feel like people at home don’t ever know how many milligrams are in what they’re making. They just sort of dump it in and hope for the best. But if you know the percentage you can figure out how much to use.

Are you looking for different strains if you’re cooking than when smoking?

Sometimes, yeah. Just like wine, you can pair the flavors of cannabis with what you’re making. Say you’re making an apple pie and you find an apple pie strain. Or a caramel apple. Those strains—like when you infuse wines—those terpenes and the flavor profile of the cannabis will mesh well with the dish that you’re making. 

You can be specific with infusion if you want, but you don’t have to be. It’s not going to make a huge difference. It’s like wine and when you pair wine with a dish—say it’s pasta with red sauce—you know red wine pairs better than white wine with that type of dish.  

I want to talk about leaving LA. Were you working downtown? Is that where your set-up was? 

I had an event space, a penthouse downtown. I was using that for private events and dinners. People can rent it out, for events. I wanted to have a space that wasn’t my house, and I didn’t want to have to find a commercial location. So I found a penthouse.

How did you feel about the state of downtown over the past couple of years?

It’s wild downtown. A lot of people can’t handle it because it’s dirty. It’s a lot of crazy people and stuff happening all of the time. But I was rarely outside in it. The things happening outside wasn’t necessarily affecting me personally. Obviously driving through all of the crazies, the homeless, the piss, the shit—that’s kind of annoying. 

But I lived in South Park, which is a little bit better than more north and east. It was a little bit better, a little bit quieter, but my space was at 8th and Spring, so it was in the middle of all the crazy. I’m used to it, I think. So it didn’t affect me that much.

I was in the Arts District, so I’d have to walk through Skid Row. It was an adventure, every time. Mostly I was asking because you’ve left LA. I get the sense that the move was monetarily driven as much as anything, but as an Angeleno do you feel like it’s in a good state right now?

No, actually it’s not. It’s crazy. I’m honestly glad I left. I was always pro-LA, my whole life. I left at what I thought was my pinnacle, my evolution in high school, right after my freshman year and I was playing basketball at Crenshaw. I had just won the city championship. As someone who grew up hoopin’ and had hoop dreams of playing professional it was sad to me that I left LA. I had no choice, my mother had moved.

LA was home, I was trying to get back. I came home every summer that I could. It was great to me. But then after I moved back I realized everything had changed. Like, the demographics changed. There’s more Hispanics than African-Americans, heavily, and then the interactions I would have with some of the Hispanics and other cultures were not always positive. It just made me hate being around those types of people.

Oh shit!

To be honest. It had a lot to do with the people around in the city. In addition, as an entrepreneur who’s trying to get involved in bigger things, scale my business, get licensing, manufacturing and all that stuff, you need money for that and it’s very hard to get funding. For someone like me, for some reason. My overhead was very high, which during Covid worked for me, because I was making a lot more money. Can’t really say a lot on it, but I made a lot more money during Covid.

I know a lot people who were doing a lot better during Covid, but go on.

Acquiring an event space and having my own apartment, I doubled the rent and doubled the expenses of a normal person. With rent being over $10,000-plus a month, you’ve got to have a certain amount of money coming in to grow and invest in yourself and you can’t do that, especially if sales have gone down and the cost of living is going up. The cost of food is going up, the cost of ingredients is going up. You can’t save enough to really elevate on your own.

My thought was to come somewhere I could get more support—in the Black community, if I can be honest. I do have an intention and the thought to open a restaurant here. Specifically something that caters to people with allergies like myself, who eat like I do. I have the desire to open up a lot of restaurants in the United States because there’s a need for gluten free—but good food that’s real fire, that’s not this bland shit that’s out here.

This is a moment of reset for me.

You know, some people are going to take the thing you said about Hispanics and make it seem like you’re anti-Latino.

I’m definitely not anti-Hispanic at all. And if you feel that way, that’s cool. I feel like there are a lot of Latinos that are anti-Black. That’s cool—you do you. But I don't hate Hispanics at all. I don’t have anything against them at all. I feel like I receive more support from a community of people who look more like me. I’ve been back in LA since 2016 and I don’t have the support I need, from any demographic. [Laughs]. I feel like there’s more support here for people of color who look like me.

I can only speak from experience. You can be upset with my comment if you want to, but you don’t have to live my life and be disrespected on a daily basis. And treated with obvious bias, in several situations—not just me, but my fiancée as well. Take it how you want it, but that’s my experience.

I’m not a person who’s racist toward others, but I experience racism and discrimination literally on a daily basis in LA. That was my experience and it wasn’t positive. I had some positive experiences with Hispanic cultures and I do have some Hispanic friends. One of my really good friends Marla, she’s Hispanic. I talk to her quite often. I have a lot of love for her. But like I said, it just didn’t make me feel welcome to consistently experience some sort of hardship in interactions.

Look for a follow-up interview with Maverick when we introduce the Conversation Wednesday podcast!