COLBY RASAVONG

This chef’s deeply personal Lao cooking comes with a playful sense of humor and a wine-friendly, Southern-dinner-party state of mind.

- HUNTER LEWIS

BAD IDEA

Nashville

IN THIS BUSINESS OF FOOD, we don’t give nearly enough credit to high-school vocational teachers, so let’s start here with a shout-out to Brenda Lewis at Siegel High School in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Without her early tutelage of Colby Rasavong, the city of Nashville might not have the captivating, wine-forward Lao restaurant Bad Idea.

Lewis’ culinary arts curriculum called for biscuit-making on day one, Rasavong recalls. Although he’d worked behind the counter at his aunt’s restaurant, Taste of Thai in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, being in the kitchen was new to him. “I realized that I really wanted to cook,” he recalls. “I was so excited to make something that was fresh and be able to eat it and watch everybody else’s faces when they ate it as well.”