Chef Adé Carrena is an award-winning culinary artist, storyteller, and entrepreneur who bridges West African and American Southern food traditions through the lens of healing, heritage, and identity. Named North Carolina Chef of the Year and crowned a Food Network Chopped Champion, she is celebrated for her ability to transform food into a language of memory, reclamation, and belonging.

Through her spice company iLéWA Foods, Adé partners directly with women farmers in Benin and Ghana, building ethical supply chains and bringing single-origin spices to tables across the United States. Her culinary practice extends through DouNou, where she creates immersive dining experiences that blend food, film, and scent into stories of diaspora and resilience. Her acclaimed dinner series, “What the Tongue Remembers”, invites guests to explore identity, grief, and ancestral comfort through reimagined dishes rooted in the global African experience.

An award-winning documentary filmmaker, Adé’s film “Bite of Bénin” explores culinary inheritance, migration, and the search for home. The film—honored with multiple People’s Choice and Best Documentary Short awards—anchors her storytelling practice in truth, tenderness, and reclamation.

As Culinary Director of Triangle Central Kitchen (TCK), Adé designs programs that repurpose surplus food into nourishing community meals while offering culinary education, workforce development, and entrepreneurship training. Her work at TCK redefines what a kitchen can be: a space of restoration, opportunity, and shared humanity.

Across every medium—whether through a film frame, a teaching kitchen, or a plate passed hand to hand—Chef Adé Carrena carries a singular message:
“Food is both archive and act of liberation.”
Her artistry invites us to remember where we come from, to honor those who fed us into being, and to imagine new ways of being whole, together.