Erika Council Is a 2024 F&W Best New Chef [Video]

Biscuits have always shaped Erika Council’s life. The first time she tried to bake a batch as a child, she burned them pretty badly. (Her grandma graciously ate them anyway.) But Council is persistent. Over the years — via trial and error, researching out-of-print cookbooks by Black authors, and consulting family recipes — she figured out how to make her own phenomenal, flaky biscuits. That led to her opening Bomb Biscuit Co., a perpetually slammed breakfast and brunch restaurant in Atlanta, where towering biscuit sandwiches gleefully defy all known laws of gluten structural physics — and where you’d better order the cinnamon roll before they sell out.

Council has a formidable culinary lineage: Her maternal grandmother ran a church kitchen, and her paternal grandmother opened the iconic soul food restaurant Mama Dip’s Kitchenin Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in 1976. As a kid, she worked at both, but as a young adult, she pursued a …