Poole's Funeral Home

She found the comfort she sought in food. “Both my parents are incredible cooks, neither professionally, but they made food a big part of my life,” she says. “When I moved away, without thinking about it, I reconnected with the things that made me feel at home.”Her culinary journey began at school where, with friends chipping in, she’d throw dinner parties. “I would explore things that I wanted to learn about and got very comfortable cooking,” she says. It also gave her the confidence to start working in restaurants at 19, where she worked for future James Beard Award-winner Andrea Reusing. She built her skills, studied local foodways, and climbed up to executive chef.The ambitious chef had a fork-in-the-road moment. At a time when Southern fare wasn’t as acclaimed as it is today, she sensed something special happening in Raleigh’s food scene. “I looked up one day after thinking about, ‘Oh, I’ll move to New York, or I’ll move to San Francisco one day and keep going down this path,’ and I realized that my work was in this community,” Christensen says.So, a decade ago, instead of heading to one of the country’s culinary capitals, she opened Poole’s in Raleigh—a modern diner where she refined comfort food classics without losing the comfort. Within five years, she’d opened three more restaurants: Beasley’s Chicken+Honey, where she serves Southern fried chicken; Chuck’s, her burger joint; and the cocktail spot Fox Liquor Bar. In 2014, she took home the coveted Best Chef: Southeast at the James Beard Awards. And in 2015 she added Death & Taxes, the woodfired restaurant in a building that had previously housed a funeral home and banks.We sat down with the acclaimed chef at the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen to talk about the decision to stay in Raleigh, developing her cooking style, the misconceptions about Southern food, and what has happened the last decade to elevate the ...