Chef Ryan Allen, executive chef of Barrister’s in Gastonia, first turned to photography at the beginning of the pandemic. He sought a creative outlet that would help him escape from the stressors of life in the restaurant industry during the shutdown.

“It was first just the way of me releasing my anxiety, depression — all the new feelings from Covid and all that,” Allen says, “But the more I saw opportunity in it, I saw that I could really step away from cooking and give a lot back to the community that supported me and other chefs.”

The pandemic put executive chefs like Allen in a position where not only were they managing their own financial burdens amid the pandemic, but also those of the restaurants where they worked. While Allen says he’s not leaving his current position at Barrister’s anytime soon, he believes his future is in art.

 

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A post shared by Ryan Allen (@friedchickensandwich)

He started with skyline shots. During the 2020 protests, he hopped on his bike to join the demonstrations and capture images. He posted them on social media, including his Instagram page with the handle @friedchickensandwich. He found encouragement from his colleagues and followers, and his audience slowly grew until he noticed a comment telling him to check his DMs in response to a post about NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, digital art that comes with exclusive ownership.

The message was from a woman working with Bojangles on a campaign to highlight North Carolina artists, auctioning off Bojangles-inspired NFTs. She asked Allen to be a part of the campaign.

“It was just the luck of [getting] @friedchickensandwich on Instagram finally paying off,” Allen says.

As the only photographer among a group of digital native artists, Allen was uncertain what his piece would look like. As he stared at an empty Bojangles box on his table, he noticed how the ends folded in, and came up with the idea of building the box into a chicken and photographing that.

“I built a robot chicken to symbolize how I see food service right now, and artists, and anyone even like you — like someone that’s based on customer relationships,” he says of the piece. “We often are looked at as like machines, like we all come together to make this one big entity. Especially Bojangles workers right now — people are always stressing about not being able to get their Supremes in time or why this is taking so long. But they don’t really see the human behind that line, working as hard as they can.”

You can see the NFT, titled Southern Folklore, here.

As he’s moved into the NFT world  and continues to focus on his art, Allen says he’s found a community that’s embracing him. He hopes to make a transition out of the kitchen, perhaps even this year, to focus full-time on photography and give his staff the chance to step into the roles he believes they deserve. Yet stepping away from the kitchen doesn’t mean Allen will step away from the hospitality industry. In fact, he seems his next role as important to ensuring the restaurant world evolves in the best way it can, and believes the best way for chefs like him to advance the industry is to step out of the kitchen and shape our local food supply as well as work to ensure advancements, like automation in restaurants, don’t harm workers.

“I obviously will always have ties with food,” he says. “I will always be back and forth in between it, but I’m just really kind of into trying to tell the story in North Carolina.”

 

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