by Jared Misner

Adjoa Courtney (Chef Joya) at the 2023 StrEATs Neighborhood Cookoff. TM Petaccia/UP

Adjoa Courtney grew up a weird kid.

As a 7-year-old born and raised in the heart of America’s Dairyland in 1990, Courtney was the unthinkable: a vegan.

“Being vegan then was alien,” Courtney says now, laughing at a cafe in Huntersville. “We didn’t even call it vegan then. We called it ‘vegetarian.’”

Doctors had diagnosed Courtney’s dad, Anthony, with pre-diabetes and gave him an ultimatum: change his diet or start taking insulin. Anthony, not one for medication, chose the former, and the Milwaukee-based family gave up meat, dairy, and eggs right then and there. And, as Courtney tells it, so began the trials and tribulations of being the weird kid at school.

If Courtney once despised being different from her friends, she now embraces it as one of Charlotte’s – and perhaps the country’s – most well-known vegan chefs. Going by Chef Joya, she’s amassed a following of 142,000 people on Instagram and 41,000 on Youtube through videos of her “veganizing” popular soul foods like Salisbury steak, liver and onions, and Mississippi pot roast. She has gained such an enthusiastic online following that she’s just published her fifth vegan cookbook, Baby, It’s Just Vegan, based entirely on follower requests.

“That’s where the name came from,” Joya says. “It’s just vegan! It’s not hard. It’s not a science project!”

Chef Joya filled the entire cookbook with audience requests: pasta salad, meatballs, fried chicken, fish sticks, spaghetti, and a whole section on “game day” snacks. For a self-described chef who doesn’t cook from recipes, hates measuring, and never cooks exactly the same dish twice, creating five cookbooks with precise measurements might seem a difficult task — but the weird kid at heart just goes with it.

“I have a whole disclaimer (in my cookbook): These measurements are not accurate. Use your soul to cook, use your ancestors to cook,” Joya says, her two-inch long, bedazzled gold fingernails shrouding her mouth as she laughs.

It was not always going to be like this, Courtney sitting here in a Christmas-in-July-themed cafe going by Chef Joya, talking about how she’s waiting for her vegan turkey leg bone to arrive in the mail so she can take a crack at perfecting a vegan smoked turkey leg.

Joya grew up wanting to paint. She was an artist, and still is in her free time. She went to cosmetology school, where she excelled quickly, leading her to drop out and start her own company making beauty products and doing bridal makeup, Make Me By Joya. She then moved to Charlotte in the early 2010s – right around the time “The Hunger Games” was filmed nearby – because she wanted to break into movies. Unfortunately, North Carolina allowed its film incentive tax credits to sunset in the mid-2010s, and the industry largely moved to Atlanta.

So Joya began taking on “side hustles” as a brand ambassador and as a model for promotional events. Food Lion hired her to work many of its big events, including the Southern Women’s Show.

There, she met Lisa Brooks, a wildly successful celebrity chef, who Food Lion had hired to cook for its events.

The meeting changed her life.

Chef Joya. Photo courtesy

Joya loved cooking, but she had never thought of it as a full-time career. Still, watching Brooks –  a fellow Black woman – cook in front of hundreds inspired her. She’d go backstage and wash dishes just to be close to Brooks and pester her with questions.

“I kinda, maybe brushed her off a little bit, but she was persistent,” Brooks says. “It was probably a year from the first time she mentioned … she wanted to explore being a chef to when I was finally like, ‘Oh my God, okay, I’ll pay full attention to you. Bring me some of your food.”

And so that’s exactly what Joya did. She brought Brooks curry chicken, candied yams, lasagna and ribs – all vegan.

“That chicken curry, I took the first bite and I said, ‘Are you telling me this is vegan?’ I was picking it apart with my fingers,” Brooks said. “My mind was blown immediately.”

Brooks had some advice for her: You’re going to be a vegan chef. And not just any vegan chef. You’re going to be one of the world’s best vegan chefs. That’s it. No questions. End of story.

There was just one problem: Joya was no longer vegan and didn’t want to be known only as a specialty vegan chef.

“I don’t want to ever be put in a box,” Joya says.

Shortly after, in 2018, Joya entered Charlotte’s Mac Down, a macaroni and cheese tasting competition. Her vegan mac and cheese took home the top prize.

“Nobody knew who I was then,” Joya says.

Impressed by her, Julia Simon of Nourish invited Joya to bring her mac and cheese to Charlotte’s upcoming Vegfest. There, people finally knew who she was.

“That (Vegfest) door opened, and there was a line,” Joya says. “Anytime Chef Joya had an event, there’s gonna be a line, she’s gonna sell out and this is how it’s gonna be.”

Her mac and cheese recipe on YouTube now has more than 81,000 views — and Chef Joya became known as the mac and cheese chef, the woman with the vegan soul food. But what if Joya didn’t want to be the weird kid anymore? What if she didn’t want to be the only vegan kid in the metaphorical cafeteria? What if, as a Black woman, she wanted to be known as more than the mac and cheese, soul food chef?

“It bothered me for a long time,” Joya says. “Even though my Asian food is good, my Italian food is good, I think (people) wanted me to stick to my roots – what I was “supposed” to be cooking.”

So Joya bounced between private dinners and catering, where she could cook more experimentally, and between larger events, where people could expect the soul food favorites they had grown accustomed to.

Joya records daily videos of herself in the kitchen, her hair very rarely the same style or color even – sometimes in an afro, sometimes blonde, sometimes in multiple forms within one video – for her hundreds of thousands of followers. She makes soul food favorites like fried green tomatoes and fried chicken. But she peppers in videos – eyelashes nearly as long as the noodles she’s cooking – making things like lobster mushroom fra diavolo and filet mignon.

In one, as she teaches her followers how to make a moist and sugary sweet blueberry cobbler to the tune of Janet Jackson, she’s wearing a curly, short-cropped pink wig.

She’s Chef Joya. That’s what we expect from her, the weird kid who found her place in a kitchen.