Chef. Storyteller. Keeper of Heritage.

I cook to keep memory alive. Every dish I create is a conversation with the ancestors, the ones who carried seeds in their pockets across the Middle Passage, the ones who turned scraps into feasts during Jim Crow, the ones who fed entire communities with cast iron skillets and collard green wisdom.

My name is Bella Jones-Martinez, and I'm a chef and food historian dedicated to preserving, celebrating, and innovating within African American culinary traditions. From the Lowcountry to the Mississippi Delta to the Great Migration kitchens of Chicago, and yes, even to the Afro-Puerto Rican foodways I was never taught.

Rooted in Black Southern Foodways

I grew up in Chicago, raised on my Mississippi grandmother's collard greens, cast iron wisdom, and Sunday suppers that felt like church. She taught me that food is prayer. That you can say everything you need to say with your hands in a pot and the gospel on the radio.

Her kitchen was my first classroom. Neck bones simmering for hours. Biscuits made by feel, not measurement. The sacred rule of the cast iron skillet: hot, and never, ever washed with soap. She taught me that Black Southern food isn't just cuisine, it's resistance, it's resilience, it's the story of a people who took the worst and made it sing.

That foundation, Black foodways, is the heart of everything I do.

The Other Half of the Story

But I'm also Afro-Puerto Rican. That heritage was a silence in my life, I never knew my abuela, never learned her recipes, never tasted the sofrito and sazón that should have been as familiar to me as pot liquor and cornbread. For years, I didn't realize what was missing. Then one day, I tried to make sofrito from a recipe I Googled, and I burned it. The smell of scorched cilantro filled the room like grief.

That's when I understood: part of my Blackness had been hidden from me. And I needed to reclaim it—not to replace my Southern roots, but to honor the fullness of who I am.