our chef
SHAWNTÉ PEERY, Executive Chef
Mall of America / Napa Valley Grille
Spending most of her life in the Midwest, Shawnté Amour Peery comes from a diverse family. Growing up around food, Shawnté learned the art of cooking and barbecuing from her grandmother on her father’s side who was born and raised in Virginia making the best southern style comfort food. Peery began experimenting with food around the age of thirteen, though she never planned to make it her career. Thinking she’d become a writer – with the hopes of becoming an English teacher - her junior year of high school, did she realize that her interest was more closely related to culinary arts.
Two months after graduating high school, she began taking classes at Le Cordon Bleu, Brown College in Mendota Heights, MN. She was clearly dedicated to this new career path by being in the top 5% of the class and never missing a day of school. Prior to graduation, she was doing her externship in New York City where she completed her degree. After her externship, Peery worked in Jean-Georges Vongrichten’s restaurant, The Mercer Kitchen, where she started as a Garde Manger Cook and worked through the pizza, grill, entremets, and fish station ranks getting herself fully immersed into the industry. Never did she look back at her decision to make the move to “the Big Apple” at a ripe age of 19; that’s where she picked up those life lessons that no one can ever teach you.
While at The Mercer Kitchen, she had the honor of serving not only Jean-Georges himself, but she also had celebrity citings such as Denzel Washington, Milla Jovovich, Jack Nickelson, and George Lucas (just to name a few). She also had the honor of meeting her future husband while working there. “Working in that restaurant instilled in me the skills necessary to succeed in this industry. I believe that hard work, self-motivation, and dedication to the craft are the most important skills any cook or chef can have. Above all, you must love what you do,” says Peery. “No one should become a chef to be famous. You must truly appreciate the beauty of food and the way it is prepared. Anyone in the industry can tell you, it is obvious when someone does it for money, and when someone does it for the love of the craft.”
In March of 2005, Peery returned home to Minneapolis because the cost of living in New York was less than affordable. That April, she began working at Napa Valley Grille in the Mall of America as a pantry cook, and within a few months she moved her way up to a lead line cook position, then onto Sous Chef. After that, it became obvious that the saying, “too many cooks in the kitchen,” became prevalent leaving her and the other Sous Chef to run the restaurant. As Chef de Cuisine, Peery proudly represents Napa Valley Grille and she looks forward to the continued success of the restaurant.
