An Interview with Chef Boo
Chef Boo is a queer, trans, South Asian chef who is on a journey to open Bar ABCD in Philly. They are a first-generation desi from Jersey who grew up eating cuisine from all over the diaspora. This spring, Chef Boo cooked for a Fishadelphia event that brought community organizers together over a meal of Indothai curry clams and masala potato balls. Following the event, they sat down with Fishadelphia's Bitter Kalli to talk about seafood stories, cooking philosophies, and being your immigrant mom's prep cook.
BK: Could you tell me about your relationship with seafood?
CB: As a Bengali, we love our seafood. Growing up in New Jersey, it was easy to get seafood, but it was difficult to get good, fresh seafood. So my mom had to make a lot of [substitutions in her cooking]. If I could never have meat ever again, and I could only have seafood, I would be happy. There is also no doubt in my mind that whenever you get something fresh, it just tastes outstandingly better. When I went to India for the summer and I was staying with my grandmother, she would go to the fish market every single morning and grab a couple of fish, and fry them up, and we would have that for breakfast. It was so good. I love seafood in every single way: scallops, fish, anything. I'll try anything once, because I think it's important to taste bad things, too.
BK: Do you have any favorite seafood dishes from childhood?
CB: Ilish maach is the main thing I can think of, but you can't really get that in the States. It's an incredibly bony fish. It's insanely bony. And the thing is, as you're becoming older, the aunties kind of judge you on whether or not you can have ilish maach on your own. It's like a coming of age thing. Can you break it down on your own and have the fish without piercing yourself?
BK: How would you describe that dish? What is it made of?
CB: It's made with shorshe bata, which is mustard seed sauce. You heat up the mustard seeds, you let it come to temp, then you blend the crap out of it. And it creates a beautiful, very intense mustard sauce.
If I think about [favorite dishes] from a younger age, my mom taught me how to break down crabs. We would go to the all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets. We always had our routine, and we always ended with crab legs. My mom and I would just show up and destroy them together. She taught me how to do it.
BK: What's your favorite seafood to cook right now?
I love shrimp. I love it and hate it, because I used to be the prep cook for my mom. My mom used to work from home on Fridays, and then cook from 4 to 11 p.m., so we would have food for the rest of the week. So I peeled and deveined many a shrimp.
Chef Boo's Indothai curry with clams.
BK: Would you say that being a prep cook for your mom helped you become a chef?
CB: It made me appreciate cooking, but she would never let me touch the stove. I was always the prep cook. And also, my mom would cut her fingers a lot. Immigrant moms, they love to have just one knife that is not sharp enough, and then cut in their hands, which is a very good process, I have no issues with that methodology of cutting. However, you cut your fingers quite a fair amount if you're not careful.
I also started watching cooking shows growing up, it was the family friendly [television content]. It's not going to cause a fight, we could all watch a cooking show together.
BK: How did you emerge into the kinds of culinary work that you're doing right now? Like sharing food with the community, doing events, and planning for your bar to open.
CB: I was [organizing] QTPOC-centered events in Philly for a long time, mostly pre-COVID. I did that for seven years, so I was in with the community, knew what spaces to go to. My favorite part of an event is when people are finally there, just interacting. It's a lot of fucking work to put on events, and it is not fun all the time. It is sort of thankless. Organizers have to deal with a lot of nonsense, and people love to have comments when they don't know anything about the process. So you have to have thick skin and have your own [sense of] self. I think having that experience was incredibly important for me to recognize what it means to be a chef in the community, to understand all the pieces of it. That's why the bar has a very specific perspective. It grew out of being here for ten years in Philly. I was in tech for ten years, so I have a very weird trajectory. I've lived a lot of different lives, but I'm thankful for all of those lives, because it's brought me to something that I now feel like I am more aligned with.
BK: Tell me the story of how you moved from community event organizing to doing more food work.
CB: [When] I was doing events, we would have coffee shop hangouts all the way to, like, a 400 person rave. The gamut was wide, and I just learned a lot from that. I've also been in kitchens—anytime I was unemployed in tech, I would go [work as a] line cook. I knew that I had to build my skills.
To me, the bar is not just the food. That can be nice, it's a good thing. But the bar is a bar. People just want to have a good drink, people want to vibe. I'm here to make good food that feels kind of homey, but [still] feels like, I can't make this at home. Like, it feels nostalgic, it feels good. And I do focus on veggies quite a bit in my cooking, and having other products in there that are not just meat-based.
Ultimately, I want it to be a place where people in the community feel like they can come and just interact, and see the same familiar faces. I want it to be a place where queer organizations can come, and they’ll stop hanging out online, and they'll hang out in person.
BK: Can you talk about why it's important for people to not just hang out online? What’s the significance of an in-person, queer social space?
CB: I think a lot of people nowadays, when they think about queer community, they just [mean] their friends. And that's not community. Community is people you don't like, people that you kind of dislike, there are your exes, and that's okay. I still want people I don't like to have food, shelter, water, healthcare. In person, you have to have those conversations. You have to get okay with being a little uncomfortable.
BK: In your bio, you introduce yourself as a queer, trans, Bengali, South Asian chef. How have those identities informed your practice in the kitchen?
CB: For me, what is important to know about food is that there are some rules, and also there are no rules. That’s the great think about cooking. With cooking, you can play. As long as you get the correct components, the salt, fat, acid, heat, you can actually play a lot more. And I think playing is part of being queer and trans. Like, when I make my Indo-Chinese peanut noodles, that, what is happening there? That's a crazy sentence, right? I'm aware of that. But I know peanut butter noodles are great in African cuisine, in Thai cuisine, but Indians never use it. I’m spicing it properly, using the right noodles, but I’m adding an Indian tarka on top. So that's queering and transing whatever that dish is. And that's how it shows up, I would say. I'm not bound by a lot of the French culinary rules.
In my years of watching cooking shows, the main thing that I've always heard from all of these judges is, what is your point of view? I want to be able to see that dish and say, oh, that person, that chef made it. Being a queer, trans person, you have to go through a lot of ego deaths to get there. But it means you have a personality. It means, hopefully you're trying to be your most authentic self. And I think that does show [in my cooking]. Like, one of the dishes is my mom’s kathi roll. And my mom is very quick to say that it's not hers. That's okay, but it has most of her components, and a little bit of me. And she says it’s good. [It’s about] riffing on what came before you.
Chef Boo's menu for their Spring 2026 event with Fishadelphia
BK: How would you describe your cooking philosophy?
CB: I always describe my food as trashy-fancy. This is something my partner and I were just talking about last night, because I want to make the homey food that everyone can get, the accessible food. And I also want to respect the fact that sometimes I want to do it up a little bit. And the queer community is a part of all those things as well. I know there's going to be contentions and not everyone will like everything. And that's fine. I'm trying my best.
I want to make consistently good food, and have the team around me be consistent. Being in the kitchen should be about learning. I don’t want drones in my line. I want people to recognize every time you're putting down a piece of chicken, putting down shrimp, whatever it is, it's a new dish. And I want them to feel what it looks like, listen to the food. Someone on the line [recently] was like, how do you know when it's done? And I said, you hear it. And I was like, that's not a real instruction. Okay, It's ninety seconds, and that's usually what chefs say. But it is listening, it is paying attention, it's a whole body experience.
As a person has worked in tech for ten years, I know there is way more skill in the service industry than in tech. Being in the service industry is a skill unto its own, and it should be seen as just as valuable as anything else. Everyone should be treated with just as much respect.
BK: How can people support you and the work you're doing?
CB: They can follow my Instagram and come to my events. I’m planning to have a fundraiser for the bar at some point. But ultimately, my version of collective freedom is that we are all trying to do the things that we actually want to do. And we can all communally support each person's dream to make that happen. Y’all have your own dreams, and I would want to help out with that too.