COLUMBIA – After being included in the Grand Finale Chef’s Tasting at the Columbia Food and Wine Festival in April, and the Black Expo South’s Taste of Black Columbia in June, Andrew Gajadhar placed second in his region in the national Celebrity Chef, Carla Hall’s ‘Favorite Chef’ competition sponsored by the James Beard Foundation in July.
The Favorite Chef competition, Gajadhar says, offers a culinary adventure for chefs, aspiring cooks, and culinary enthusiasts.
“It’s a chance for culinary experts, professional chefs, and home cooks to compete for a $25,000 prize and a one-on-one cooking experience with Hall. The winner is also featured on the cover of Taste of Home magazine,” Gajadhar said.
The public votes to select the 2024 Favorite Chef in the online competition.
“The contest celebrates a chef who embodies passion, determination, and creativity,” Gajadhar said.
He said it’s a chance to showcase not only his culinary talent, but to gain recognition for his work.
“Not every great chef comes from a school,” he says. “Some of the greatest chefs in the world never went to a school; they’re just somebody’s mother or grandmother sitting in their living room knitting a sweater, but when they get in the kitchen, it’s game on.”
So it is in the Gaj Kitchen.
Folks in Blythewood know Gajadhar as the man who videos the various town hall government meetings and posts them on the town’s website. He’s also active in local theater productions, and participates in other local events such as Blythewood’s recent Doko Ribfest. Gajadhar says his success at the Ribfest last spring inspired him, bringing a lot of positive feedback and long lines at his food tent throughout the day-long event.
Gajadhar earned a master’s degree in psychology after first studying engineering, and says it was in 2020 that he began to work his way through a culinary degree curriculum on his own, cooking with formally trained chefs along the way and taking feedback from the critics that he says are most important: they are people who eat.
But he says his life experiences – from growing up as a military brat in Europe to embarking on his own travel adventures after his service in the Marines to his interactions with diverse friends and family – have also played a key role in his understanding and appreciation of foods around the world.
It’s with this varied foundation that Gajadhar began his career as a private chef. His love of sharing his food creations with others drove him to create a “pop-up kitchen,” a cooking setup under a 10 x 10 tent in locations around the Blythewood/Columbia area, often cooking and selling a completely different kind of food each time.
He says he’ll typically post his location and menu on social media a few days in advance. It could be anything from East-West Indian dishes to smash burgers with homemade sauces to an exotic fish taco bar to tortellini with cauliflower steaks.
“All these things are simple things, but they can be elevated,” he says, “and people have just been, well, eating it up.”
He recently offered a fine dining event – a 10-course meal for $100 a person, served at his home – a unique experience aimed at taking it to the next level with fresh ingredients, wines paired with each entree, and meticulous attention to details in every aspect of the dining experience.
“That weekend’s event showcased what I do best,” he said.
On July 18th, Gajadhar will be one of the premier Chefs included in this year’s Palmetto Palate event, sponsored by the South Carolina Farm Bureau, at the South Carolina State Museum.
“Food has always been the common denominator that brings people together,” Gajadhar says. “And I take joy in cooking for people and seeing their reaction and giving them something unique that they otherwise might not have had the occasion to enjoy.”
More information about Gajadhar’s culinary offerings can be found on his Facebook page, The Gaj Kitchen.
