Photo illustration by Johansen Peralta
‘There’s always turnover’: A decade of photographing New York’s food scene
Photographer Clay Williams on the Brooklyn restaurant landscape's constant flux, the effects of the pandemic, and representation in food
Like what you’re hearing? Subscribe to us at iTunes, check us out on Spotify and hear us on Google, Amazon, Stitcher and TuneIn. This is our RSS feed. Tell a friend!
Don’t follow Clay Williams on Instagram if you’re on a diet. A Brooklyn-based photographer specializing in food, drinks, travel and, at least before Covid, events, Williams is a prolific shooter for The New York Times, The James Beard Foundation and Zagat. His feed is replete with delicious shots of plates from restaurants in all corners of the city, from the super famous to the tiny, anonymous holes in the wall.
Williams was born in Queens and raised in Brooklyn, where he sometimes marvels at how much has changed.
“We didn’t really eat out a whole lot when I was kid. I grew up in Bed-Stuy, long before it became whatever it is now, and there were just a couple places,” he says on this week’s episode of “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast.” “There’s always some sort of turnover. The thing about being from New York is you have to remember no place is what it used to be as much as what it is now. That’s a total bastardization of a Colson Whitehead line.”
View this post on Instagram
Williams, who has also contributed to the books “111 Places in Queens that You Must Not Miss” and “111 Rooftops in Brooklyn that You Must Not Miss,” is more recently a co-founder of Black Food Folks—described on its website as “a fellowship of Black professionals in food and drink, promoting and supporting one another for mutual success.”
“I photograph food events all the time, or at least I did,” says Williams on the podcast. “I’ve been in so many rooms of food people where there are 100, 200 people and there may be three Black folks there. I’m one of them, and I’m working. Maybe another is behind the bar or something. In terms of actually who’s attending, it’s super minimal.”
Black Food Folks has evolved into a community of people in the industry looking out for each other and sharing stories. “When folks got together, it was a like a family reunion,” Williams says of their first meet-up. “It was a real community gathering.”
And starting last fall, Black Food Folks has been running a new grant program, Black Food Folks Give Back. This year, its ten recipients were each granted $5,000; they include chefs, farms, wine professionals, podcasters, magazines and a variety of BIPOC-focused non-profits.
View this post on Instagram
Give the podcast a listen for more on all of that, the continuing impact the pandemic has had on the industry, which restaurants he’d bring back from the dead if he could and the end of legal drinks to-go. “If politicians could be tried for malpractice, that particular thing, it was just venal. It was just so amazingly shitty,” he says. “It was a lifeline. And they just yanked that away with just two days notice.”
View this post on Instagram