Gregory Porter, the irrepressibly soulful jazz singer and songwriter, long ago proved himself at home in our multiplatform age.
In 2019, as he was working on what would become a Grammy-nominated album, All Rise, he also started a podcast, The Hang with Gregory Porter. (His guests in Season 2 have included Elvis Costello and Priyanka Chopra Jones.) Now he's poised to released a six-episode cooking show, The PorterHouse with Gregory Porter, Presented by Citi.
Porter isn't a celebrity fumbling around the kitchen, like some others who'll go unnamed here. Back in the early 1990s, he moved from his hometown of Bakersfield, Calif. to the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn to work as a chef at his brother's restaurant, Bread-Stuy. "The kitchen was actually my home before I ever stepped onstage," Porter says in a trailer for the weekly series, which premieres next Wednesday on the YouTube channels of Zagat and The Infatuation.
The show, filmed in Porter's home kitchen in Bakersfield, capitalizes on his fluid ease as a chef, along with the spirit of warmth and generosity that comes through in his songs. Episode 1 features a dish with deeply personal associations: beef borscht, which made a strong impression during his first tours of Russia. (His wife, Victoria, is Russian, and he drew in part on her family recipe.) As the show trailer reveals, some episodes of the show will feature his son, Demyan, as a resident taster.
Porter, who has often spoken (and sung) about his mother's service as a pastor in Bakersfield, will devote one episode to the issue of food insecurity, spotlighting a local ministry and soup kitchen operated by his brother Dionne.
New episodes of The PorterHouse with Gregory Porter will post every Wednesday from May 12 through June 16. One day after the final episode, Citi will present a virtual cardmember event: a Q&A with Porter, followed by his first full concert performance in over a year. (Citi cardmembers can register for that event here.)
For more information about Gregory Porter, visit his website.
