By: Maggie Horton
After a long day at the pool, a 12-year-old boy heats up a frozen corndog in the microwave.
While he waits, he flips through the channels and lands on Ina Garten’s cooking show “Barefoot Contessa.” As he’s watching, he has an epiphany.
“I thought I can do that if I can get somebody to buy the ingredients for me, and they did. So, I kind of started to figure it out that way,” said Jonathan Harrison.
Little did he know that 18 years later he would be competing on a cooking show.
Harrison, from Columbiana, Alabama, was a contestant on the first season of Gordon Ramsay’s “Next Level Chef.” Ramsay is another chef that Harrison grew up watching.
“I was shocked when I found out he was going to be on the show just because of how big a deal Gordon Ramsay is. We have been watching his shows for as long as I can remember but, I was also not surprised because I know how good of a chef he is,” said Jaselyn Harrison, Jonathan’s younger sister.
Harrison competed against 14 other contestants of varying skill levels for a grand prize of $250,000.
Harrison’s modern cooking with a Southern flare earned him a top 10 spot on “Next Level Chef.” However, his Southern shrimp-and-grits resulted in his elimination because they were too salty.
“On the show Jonathan was always an ally and friend to everyone more than a competitor. He always focused on competing against himself, and improving his techniques,” said Amber Rebold, one of Harrison’s competitors.
Rebold said she can see Harrison hosting his own cooking show in the future because of his warm and energetic personality and his cooking abilities.
“Being on the show, I learned a lot about myself and gained a lot of great contacts and friends,” Harrison said.
He is considered a home chef because he does not have any formal culinary training. Most of his early knowledge of cooking came from watching Ina Garten, which gave him a good southern base.
However, Harrison credits the expansion of his cooking knowledge to the friends he made in college.
“I grew up in a really small town, but at Auburn I met a diverse group of people. I had friends from Guam, Hawaii and people with different backgrounds than my own. I learned their food ways and how they ate,” Harrison said.
During his time at Auburn University, Harrison worked as a bartender at Island Wing Company. This experience highlighted his love for entertainment through food. Harrison graduated from Auburn with a degree in journalism.
Fast forward to 2020, and Harrison started hosting driveway dinners for the residents of Columbiana, the county seat of Shelby County, which Harrison considers to be the most conservative county in Alabama.
Harrison’s driveway, filled with folding chairs and cards tables, became the town’s most popular restaurant during the initial lockdown. Friends, family and neighbors gathered to socialize and eat Harrison’s bread pudding, pasta and long braises.
“I was feeding so many people no matter who they were or where they came from, and then I realized I can expand people’s horizons through my cooking,” Harrison said.
For one of his driveway dinners, he made Chinese food. Attendees asked him how he made it taste just like the Chinese food at the restaurant.
He told them he used oyster sauce and MSG, and the cheapest place to buy those ingredients is at the Asian grocery store.
“At that point, you’ve got to interact with an immigrant, and it makes you interact with someone who looks differently than you, and maybe believes differently than you. Then when something like an immigration ban comes along, you’re like hold up no, these people are just trying to live their lives,” Harrison said.
In this way, Harrison has found a way to build and strengthen community and, as he puts it, practice radical empathy through food.
Harrison considers his mission to be bringing the world to the South and bringing the South to the world. He creates his own recipes by thumbing through old Southern cookbooks like “White Trash Cooking” and adding his own modern flare.
Some of his favorite things to cook include McEwen and Son’s grits, bread pudding and red wine braised short ribs. However, Jaselyn prefers his biscuits, Conecuh Sausage gravy and pasta recipes.
For now, Harrison continues to cook in his free time. He is holding down a nine-to-five as an on-site coordinator at 4-H Youth Development Center, which is funded by Auburn’s Alabama Cooperative Extension System.
However, he has not given up on his dreams of working in food media. He said he hope to have his own cooking show or work in recipe development under a well-known chef.
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