A Peek Inside YARDY WORLD, and the Snack Mix That's Making Us Salivate
“I want to build a brand that's comparable to Kellogg's or Nabisco because I think that people are ready for more.”
Out: Barbie World. In: YARDY WORLD. I jest… ish, but one really need not even try to deny the rise of DeVonn Francis, a food world superstar and the chef/founder of YARDY WORLD, which he describes as a culinary studio reimagining food through snacks, events and activations. I’ve followed Francis for some time now — his work at Bon Appétit, his dinner parties (which the LA Times called “redefining hospitality”) and even sampled his snacks at the Farrow & Ball x Christopher John Rogers Launch Event last September. But it was a recent post of his that caught my attention and made me think, “I wanna chat.”
“I have been working on developing my snack brand for the past year,” the post began, which featured a carousel of the text from the caption, beginning with a selfie of Francis (he knows his audience). “I work on it at odd hours, a little bit every day. Figuring out flavor, manufacturing, sustainability, where it will be sold, etc. On January 1st, I made our first delivery to our very first hospitality client! Now you can find the snack mix at Babel Loft on their new bar menu. Starting off the year with this achievement feels like a good omen for what’s to come. My dream is seeing the snack mix at more bars, restaurants, and hotels around the country. So consider this my open call to hospitality brands and individuals at said bars, restaurants, and hotels! If interested in carrying this product, let’s talk!”
I immediately felt that familiar tinge of inspiration brought on by witnessing a creative in their business bag. That is to say, watching a creative person mid-hustle, shooting their shot in an attempt to widen the scope of possibilities for themselves. I both marvel at and celebrate this tenacity of spirit. As such, I sought out Francis to chat about his work, which began in the kitchens of Estela and Altro Paradiso while attending Cooper Union in New York City.
I've never had the opportunity until now to interview you, and I've always wanted to! I'd love to start by finding out what your road to food was. I don't necessarily mean professionally, but maybe more like your road to loving and understanding and excelling at the art of food?
I was such a homebody growing up. I was always the creative artsy kid. I didn't really play sports, and on weekends my mom and I would just sit in her bed and watch cooking shows. I got so much joy from watching Ina Garten, Martha Stewart, Giada De Laurentiis — all the girls creating not just meals, but these really beautiful tablescapes, and also this fantasy of, like, “Jeffrey's coming home and he's going to want his favorite chicken dish.”
I know that’s right!
There was something about the fantasy of domesticity and being able to prepare something that someone really loved that was really compelling to me. And also, my dad had a restaurant when I was growing up, and it was very much so a family-run business. It was all hands on deck — me, my mom, my dad, my brother, my sister. He bought this sort of hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant that had closed down. I remember the first time we went into it, it was dusty, it was greasy and there were just boxes everywhere. He turned it into a full-blown restaurant. That was a really formative experience to me because food for me has always essentially been a translation of the act of love. It was my dad’s aunts and uncles cooking for him in Jamaica that then reminded him of being home and he wanted to create that experience for people where we lived, so it was sort of passing on that tradition of feeding people and giving people something to remember your culture by, which is oftentimes food.
It's my understanding from so much of the media I consume around the restaurant industry, such as The Bear, that maintaining a restaurant is as much an act of love as it is an act of service. And as you mentioned, you started in the industry very young. Was it there that you were first exposed to the high-stress environment of the food world?
It's interesting because for all intents and purposes, my dad's space started off as a counter service place. I think that one distinction I like to make between my own background and history and other people who went to Le Cordon Bleu or the Culinary Institute of America — those who have fast-tracked their lives into the restaurant business — is that in Jamaica, as an island, the idea of restaurants is pretty new compared to the rest of the world. There aren't necessarily Michelin-starred chefs and they're not necessarily indoctrinated in those same systems that you find in Paris and in these bigger cities. It's very much someone in a house making food or it's a stop-off on the side of the road, or a small shop where you go to get a cup of soup or something. It's a very small operation.
For me, the heightened level of intensity didn't really come until I moved to New York. The first restaurant that I worked in that was a high-paced place was Estela. I was working as a busboy, then I became a waiter, and I would go to the market with [head chef and founder Ignacio Mattos] some mornings when I started. There’s a lot of expectation and pressure to get it right, because especially in a place like New York, people hold food and restaurants to such a high standard. And at the time, my boss Ignacio was already building a name for himself. And I think that one thing that The Bear gets right is those episodes where [Ayo Edebiri’s character Sydney] is going from place to place trying all this different food and she's typing on her laptop and all these places are closing. The anxiety of not getting it right is the anxiety of not having a job and not having work for the people who are there. So not having a full restaurant is scary in that way because the expectation is that if people aren't coming in, then my food's not good. All that to say that I pulled myself out of that system very fast because I wanted to find a pathway that wasn't just about being stressed all the time. I wanted to do private cheffing a lot, and I never really wanted to have a proper restaurant; I wanted something else. I never knew what it was until time passed and I had more experience under my belt.
How did you navigate creating a path for yourself, especially when your aspirations weren’t as linear as starting a restaurant?
I grew up in a household that was very much rooted in the philosophy that in spite of the fear, we're going to do the thing. I watched my dad go from not having any cooking experience to having a restaurant that the whole neighborhood really loved with lines out the door during lunchtime for jerk chicken and fried this or fried that. So I always grew up with this sort of confidence around pursuing a project. My parents always supported me in whatever endeavor I wanted to do.
Why New York?
I originally moved to New York because I got into an art school. And I think that when it comes to finding my own path in food, working at a place like Estela was really good for me. I was 19 or 20-years-old when I started working there. And that restaurant is a cultural place. It's not that just anyone's coming in; it was Ralph Fiennes and Obama and all these different famous people. Also, all the magazines were writing about it: The New Yorker, The New York Times, GQ — everyone wanted a piece of what that was. And I've always been just a very chatty and curious person, so I had no issue going up to musicians or Bon Appétit staff writers and being like, “What are you doing here? What's going on?” I made it a point to make friends — also because I had nothing to lose. No one knew who I was. So the worst that could happen is someone would say no. I've always had that kind of philosophy when it comes to any endeavor; the worst thing that could happen is that someone says “no” to you and you go to the next thing. I think that's translated through every single type of hospitality or culinary project I've ever done. You’ve gotta keep trying until you get the answer you want.
Amen. And one example of that was when you went on Instagram recently and posted about YARDY WORLD and were saying, “My dream is seeing the snack mix at more bars, restaurants, and hotels around the country. So consider this my open call to hospitality brands and individuals at said bars, restaurants, and hotels!” Can you talk about that: why shooting your shot is important and how it's been effective for you?
I've had the privilege of growing a really incredible network over the past four years. There’ve been so many interactions that have started with Instagram. I think that sort of audacity to say “I'm going to do what I want” has always been my practice — not to say that it's without its own faults, but I think that I've always wanted to use my platform. And I think this comes from growing up watching cooking shows. It was in those moments sitting with my mom in bed being like, “Oh my God, these chefs are amazing, but why are there no Black queer people being represented in these shows?” And so for me, when I started to do this work, my North Star wasn’t necessarily just making really incredible food — even though that is a part of it. My North Star is making sure that I can function as a template to younger Black queer people in the same way that these celebrities were my heroes. And because the stakes were more than just what I wanted, it pushed me to keep going and be like, “I'm not saying it just for me. I'm saying these things online because I want someone else to feel like their experience is reflected in the type of work that I'm doing.”
And I’d been working really hard! I'd been knocking on all the doors. Prior to that post, I had done Selena Gomez’s cooking show on HBO. The Netflix documentary I was in, High on the Hog, had just come out. I had all this sort of incredible press to back the work that I care about. So I was just like, “What do I have to lose? Everything that I've worked to accomplish up to this point is emblematic of the type of integrity that I have. And I think that anyone who's watching me can see that, and there are probably people in my network who want to support that.” So it felt like there was just something bigger at stake with the work that I was doing, and I wanted to share that with other people too.
You mentioned that bigger stake and feeling as though the work you do is bigger than just you, and I imagine that can be something of a burden that many of your peers don’t grapple with. What do you do to alleviate that burden when you're not working? How do you decompress?
So many things! I think that taking care of my body has become such a huge part of how to unburden myself because first and foremost, I notoriously am addicted to work. It took me a really long time to realize that in order to do more work, in order to be able to recognize what my capacity is and respect the vessel that I am in, I have to take care of myself. Again, optically, it's nice to be like “DeVonn's doing all these things on Instagram” and it seems like success is happening, but I feel like I've also had to kind of recalibrate my idea of what success is because at the end of the day, I'm just one person. I can only do so much and I have my limits, so being able to be more in tune with that by doing fitness stuff has been really great.
I'm also really into music and film. All of my friends are incredible DJs and have incredible parties throughout the whole city, so I'm always going out and dancing.
In fact, when I was in art school, I was studying performance, so dance and performance and movement are a huge part of how I understand myself in space and just decompress. And I've been getting into more film and TV just because I feel like there's such a through line between a cooking show and what storytelling through film does. I feel like a good TV host should understand what the sort of history and the zeitgeist is of what's happening right now. The Bear is a great example of this: It's sort of tapping into this consciousness around how people on social media now aspire to be a really badass chef, but maybe don't necessarily understand the underpinnings of people interacting with other people that happens in The Bear where this character is going through this thing, this character is dealing with depression, this character is defaulting on these loans. There's so much going on there, so I feel like TV and film have really helped me learn how to be a better storyteller, too.
So talk to me about YARDY WORLD, which is not one thing; it's many things. To start, how do you define YARDY WORLD?
I like to call YARDY WORLD a culinary studio because I think that really what I've learned is that the summation of my work as a portfolio is more so about finding creative and intentional solutions to problems within the culinary or hospitality industries. And I've been really lucky to get so many different projects that come into my inbox. Some of those look like doing events, but right now I'm doing this project with the governor's office. They're doing different lectures and talks around the food system in New York and how that works, going to prisons and schools and really assessing how food happens, and I get to be a part of that. That's something that’s happening that's new. The snack brand is obviously a big one for me right now. And we're actually leaning more towards YARDY WORLD focusing on that because there's a way that we can really tackle important supply chain issues by dealing with something that is product-based versus thinking about one-off dinners. YARDY WORLD is a culinary studio where we get to tackle these different challenges and think about ways that people can engage with food that feel fun, insightful and beneficial, and that have to do with exploring diversity and different ways of understanding how food happens in our lives.
How did you land on a snack mix, of all products? It seems like there are countless directions you could have gone in.
I grew up in the snack aisle. Snacking felt like comfort food. It felt like something that ties everyone back to their childhood. You always have your favorite snack in a bag with you when you're traveling. There's such implicit comfort around having that small thing with you for when you’re like, “Oh, I need some fuel” or “I just need something that's kind of sweet right now.” I wanted to make something that reflected an experience that I think everyone across the board has. I think that feels like a really nice way to think about folding in something that everyone can enjoy and understand versus it being like we're sitting down and having a dinner, which I think is a very specific and sometimes a very isolated experience. Snacks are just great.
So actually trying the snack is really, in some senses, Phase Two. Phase One is people online seeing the snack, and one of the great things about YARDY WORLD is the branding. Can you talk about constructing an aesthetic that builds out the world beyond the taste?
I had the pleasure of working with two really great designers who really built out YARDY WORLD as a brand. The logo that they designed is based on this southeastern Nigerian ancient writing system called Nsibidi.
We took all these really beautiful archival drawings and created a logo in a typeface system that goes along with those things. It's interesting because that writing — this is super nerdy — but that writing is the basis from which the Bauhaus basically stole that text set and turned it into their own writing form, but didn't ever credit where it came from. We wanted to flip that idea on its head and go back to the roots of that typography and that sort of writing language to re-root it in indigenous African culture in the same way that because of the transatlantic slave trade, there are African people in Jamaica; it’s because of that same sort of dynamic of translation with people coming over to a new place. We wanted to create something that would re-engage with this text as something that's powerful and also for our people — as obviously a lot of Jamaicans are of Nigerian descent — but also refresh it, so the colors on the website are yellow, black and gold, but we've redone it in a way that feels a bit more contemporary while still very much so pulling from the Jamaican flag and thinking about the aesthetics of nationalism in general. What does it mean to feel like you're from a place? What does it mean to also feel like you're a century beyond how something started? I think that a lot of my inspiration for the website and how it looks comes from some of my favorite fashion designers. I think about other kinds of Caribbean fashion designers like Martine Rose or Rachel Scott of Diotima, or I think of Grace Wales Bonner — fashion brands who are really thinking about the future of the Caribbean and not just that we have to follow tradition; that we can actually be that contemporary voice that brings it to the next phase so that it becomes nationally recognized and known and also can play along with these things that we would describe as expensive or exclusive or chic in the same way. We wanted to fashion the brand in that manner.
Now, I know a lot of people love your spice rub. It's currently sold out on the website. Is there any chance of a restock?
It's funny: I didn't know until we sold out that people loved it. The short answer is yes.
Okay, we'll keep our eyes peeled! Before I let you go: I'm a big believer in manifestation, and so in the same vein as you going on Instagram and putting it out there to any hospitality groups that want this snack mix, what do you want for your future? What do you want for this brand that you're building and that there's so much traction behind?
I feel like the next phase for me is building a brand that's comparable to Kellogg's or Nabisco because I think that people are ready for more. Telfar is a good example of this. It's this sort of ode to working class culture around how we market and talk about fashion. And also thinking about how, even though Telfar created something that is so New York, there's something about it that everyone loves. Even pulling in the Real Housewives of Potomac to be in that one shoot, it’s really cool to see something so proliferated into all these different spaces of culture and TV and media. And I think that's my goal: to create a brand that's big, that's mega.