David and Tonya Thomas
American chefs, restaurateurs, and food historians
David and Tonya Thomas are American chefs, restaurateurs, and food historians who work in Baltimore, Maryland. The couple has owned several restaurants.
David Thomas won a 2018 episode of the television food competition series Chopped and then won a 5-part "Champs Challenge" series in 2020.
Early life
David Thomas was born in Baltimore and raised in Jamaica, Queens, New York. His grandmother is Blackfoot and Thomas spent weekends at her 13-acre farm in Howard County, Maryland.
Career
The Thomases opened Ida B.'s Table in 2017, naming it for activist and journalist Ida B. Wells, in a building that also houses The Real News Network, a non-profit that is an investor in the restaurant. The couple had originally planned a "reinvented, elevated" soul food restaurant, but after meeting with Jessica B. Harris, who asked them, "What makes you think soul food needs to be reinvented or elevated?", they refocussed on a concept of "African-American cuisine informed by its history." The restaurant is in downtown Baltimore on Holliday Street. In early 2020 they left the restaurant.
Previously they owned Herb & Soul, a farm-to-table restaurant in the Parkville neighborhood of Baltimore.
In 2017 the couple were featured in an episode of Heritage Radio Network's A Hungry Society.
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This entry incorporates text from “David and Tonya Thomas” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.