Celeb Chef Charity Morgan Brings Vegan Cooking to Southern Meat-Eaters in Max Special (Exclusive)

Though the days of soul-crushing salads and bland veggie burgers are long gone, certain zip codes still imagine plant-based cuisine to be flavorless, uinteresting, and downright sad.

This assumption hardly represents Chef Charity Morgan's vegan cooking, which is brimming with vibrant flavors and inspiration from her Creole and Puerto Rican background.

The private celebrity chef's 2022 cookbook, Unbelievably Vegan: 100+ Life-Changing, Plant-Based Recipes, shows off mouth-watering plant-based recipes like Creole Krab Cakes with Tarragon Remoulade and Smoky Jambalaya with Blackened Veggies.

Despite impressing the likes of NFL players — including her husband, former NFL linebacker Derrick Morgan — and celebs like Miley Cyrus with her vegan concoctions, the Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts grad knew it would be a challenge to charm the meat-eating Southern folk of Nashville, Tenn.

With 15-plus years of culinary experience, Chef Charity was ready to expand some minds and bring tasty plant-based options to the meat-heavy menu of Nashville's cherished Germantown Pub for her Max Original culinary special Unbelievably Vegan With Chef Charity, which premieres on Aug. 22, 2024.

In her Max special, Chef Charity seeks to create vegan menu items that mesh with Germantown Pub's non-vegan comfort food offerings, all while harmonizing with Chef J-Dee Agnew and appealing to the pub's owner and loyal customers. She relies on her "replace, replicate, and reveal" method for veganizing a menu, which is exactly what it sounds like.

"The reveal is like the aha moment," she explains.

Green Matters spoke exclusively with Chef Charity Morgan over Zoom about the Unbelievably Vegan With Chef Charity special, her overall mission as a vegan chef, and making plant-based food infused with love.

Chef Charity's mission has nothing to do with converting carnivores — aka "carnies" — to veganism.

"My overall mission is to make people feel like you're not sacrificing anything," she tells Green Matters. "Let's look at the gains."

She is the first to admit that pitching this perspective to certain people can be a challenge, as those who don't know about the shapeshifting abilities of plants like oyster mushrooms, jackfruit, cashews, and cauliflower are not only stubborn, but skeptical.

"You could see in the in the special I'm having all the patience [for] J-Dee," she begins with a laugh. "We talk about compassion for the planet, compassion for animals, but then we skip the major part: Having compassion for people. That's the role I want to sign up for."

When approaching Germantown Pub's Chef J-Dee — who's responsible for the eatery's beloved Trifecta Wings and Catfish Nuggets & Fries — Chef Charity had to clarify that they're both looking for the same thing when it comes to comfort food.

"Food is my love language. So I know when something's BS; don't throw me a salad!" she says. "Do you know how much love I have to put into a [plant-based] Caesar dressing to make it taste like a Caesar dressing?"

Chef Charity's favorite dish she made in the special is easily the vegan version of J-Dee's Trifecta Wings, which involved experimentation with cauliflower and mushrooms.

"That was special to me, because it was special to him," she shares. "I'm not coming in and saying, 'I'm going to come in here and change your menu.' ... I took his menu [item] and I made a plant-based version. And I have to stress of how he inspired me ... it was a collaboration, just allowing two people from two different worlds that don't believe [the same things] to realize that you can coexist and you can learn things from each other."

When arriving in Nashville, Chef Charity had no desire to alter or erase any bit of traditional Southern cuisine or culture.

"I'm not trying to take away your history. I'm not trying to take away your culture. I'm not trying to take away your memories," she begins. "It's not the 'this or this,'' but it's the 'and.' ... How about that and this?"

When Chef Charity tried a plant-based diet alongside her husband for what she thought would be just a few weeks, she quickly noticed health benefits. "I felt so good," she says.

"No matter what your reasons are or why you're vegan — whether it's environmental, whether it's [about] animal rights or health — people must understand that we all lead to the same goal."

When she first started cooking vegan meals for NFL players, Chef Charity recalls receiving backlash from a small portion of the vegan community that would point fingers at those who weren't checking off every plant-based box.

"'Oh, but they're playing with a football. Isn't that leather?' I don't have time for that. We need to start somewhere. ... At the end of the day, we have the same message. We're just saying different things," Chef Charity explains.

Unbelievably Vegan With Chef Charity debuts on Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024, on Max.