(l-r): Derek Astorino and Fred Neuville
Charleston-based chef Derek Astorino was recently named the winner of the third annual Favorite Chef competition, hosted by celebrity chef Carla Hall.
The nine-week competition, which drew more than 92,000 entrants from across the country, aims to highlight rising culinary talent while raising money for the James Beard Foundation. This year’s event raised $2.7 million, bringing the competition’s total contributions since its founding in 2023 to $12.2 million.
Astorino’s path to the culinary world has been anything but traditional, but his passion for cooking has been constant. It started in childhood, learning alongside his grandmother in the kitchen. “I was always in the kitchen with her,” he said.
That love for food followed him into adulthood—so much so that as a cadet at The Citadel, he risked disciplinary action just to keep cooking in the barracks. Later, in the Army, he was tasked with overseeing meal prep in the mess hall.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, when everything was being canceled, Astorino organized a floating concert in Charleston Harbor. He moored a 120-foot barge off Castle Pinckney and booked performers including Lauren Hall, Brady Smith and Colt Ford.
“Charleston’s a food town,” he said. “I couldn’t have an event without food.” But his idea of loading food vendors onto the barge proved too unconventional. “I called around asking if I could lift their trailers onto a boat,” he laughed. “Nobody wanted in.”
Undeterred, he headed to Miami to work on a food boat near Haulover Inlet, then returned to Charleston with plans to launch his own. That venture, first attempted with a pontoon, quickly ran into hurdles. “It was a nightmare,” he said. “So I took the structure off the pontoon and put it on a barge.”
Though the barge didn’t meet South Carolina’s regulatory requirements to sell food, it became a platform for something different: culinary content. “Now I just take chefs out and cook,” he said. “I’m not a volume guy. I’d rather hang out, talk and get to know people.”
These days, Astorino works in sales for Specialty Food Solutions, helping restaurants and chefs source premium ingredients. It was a colleague who encouraged him to enter Favorite Chef. At first, he didn’t grasp the scale of the competition.
“There were 1,536 groups of 60 people,” he said. “The statistics of me winning were just not in my favor.”
Chef Brett McKee
What convinced him to commit was the cause. “A lot of my clients are James Beard finalists or recipients,” he said. “So when I saw the competition supported the foundation, I thought, ‘Yeah, I can get behind this.’”
Over the course of the competition, Astorino estimates he helped raise between $120,000 and $140,000 for the nonprofit.
Winners are determined by public vote, with one free vote allowed per person each day. Additional votes could be purchased as donations. Along with his winning title, Astorino received a cash prize, a feature in Taste of Home magazine and a private cooking session with Carla Hall.
Looking ahead, he’s considering another run at launching a Charleston-based food boat, this time with a name that nods to local history. “A marketing guy I work with came up with ‘The USS Forktown,’” he said—a play on the USS Yorktown, a decommissioned Navy ship docked at Patriots Point. “I called a couple of people I knew and finally found a guy selling a 90-foot ferry. I owe it to myself to go check that thing out and maybe let that concept cook a little more.”
Follow Derek Astorino’s Food Boat blog: https://thefoodboat.co
