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By Chanda Temple | City of Birmingham
When Roscoe Hall was a kid growing up in Chicago, his mother would take him to the museum as a reward for good grades.
Standing there, surrounded by paintings and sculptures, Hall would stop and stare. Little did he know that decades later, people would do the same when it came to seeing his work in museums.
For someone born into an Alabama family restaurant famously known for ribs served with a side of sliced white bread, one would think smoked meat would be Hall’s destiny. But it wasn’t. Painting in pigments was more his speed. But before the painting developed, he worked in various kitchens across the country.
After his family moved to Birmingham in the early 1990s, his first job was at a Subway in Five Points South. By age 18, he got a job working as a dishwasher at Bottega and then a line cook. While his friends went out to party after work, he’d go home and paint.
The stroke of the brush calmed him down. It was true meditation.
But that meditation developed into art that caught people’s attention.
Folks said there was something rich in Hall’s self-taught technique, and they encouraged him to explore it. He shared his portfolio with reps at San Diego State University. He got accepted and moved to California in 1999.
While in college, he picked up jobs at different eateries. He graduated in 2003 with a degree in fine arts with a focus on photography and later moved to San Francisco to work for two years at Chez Panisse, which is known for the farm-to-table movement.
The cost of living in San Francisco was something Hall had not expected. He could only afford to pay $1,000 a month to house his car in a garage, leaving him to crash at a flop house or sleep at a friend’s house. The next day, he’d rise early, shower and pick up his clothes from his car.
He pulled on his chef’s coat and went to work. No one ever knew he was homeless.
“I could have called my mom and told her, but I didn’t. I just told her I had a job,” he said. “Then, I got enough money to get a room in an apartment with three people.”
Living with three other people in a small apartment was still a lot to deal with, forcing Hall to eventually look at his life and wonder, “What am I doing?”
He answered that question with what was familiar: cooking. He took the summer off and wrote his own self-printed cookbook, which had different spices pressed between the pages. He sold copies to make extra money to fill up his gas tank for a move to St. Louis.
While en route to St. Louis, his routine was: “Drive. Camp. Paint. Drive. Camp. Paint.”
And once he arrived in St. Louis, he worked as a chef at a new restaurant, only to later move to Savannah, Ga. to pursue a master’s degree in art history from Savannah College of Art and Design. He worked in more kitchens and painted even more.
“I cooked my tail off while painting and while studying art history,” he said, adding that in 2006, he moved to Portland, Oregon, where he worked as a personal chef for a vegan daycare center and other jobs. He also did more art shows.
Then, he moved to Baltimore, where he worked in another restaurant. While there, people told him that he had to go to New York next for his career. He listened, embracing the same plan he had in San Francisco: Soak up the culinary culture and crash on a friend’s couch.
He landed a job at the popular but now-closed New York Momofuku Ssam Bar, where he worked his way up from prep cook to line cook. He stayed for two years.
Chef and painter Roscoe Hall is also a featured artist during the Southbound Food Festival.(Marika N. Johnson, For The Birmingham Times)
Back to Birmingham
But by 2013, Hall found himself back in Birmingham to help his mother with home life. He said the move was one of the best decisions in his life. While here, he got a job at the now-closed Urban Standard, met his wife, got married, had two kids, landed a job to create recipes for Food & Wine Magazine and eventually saw his work end up in the permanent collections at the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the University of Alabama, to name a few.
For a man who did a cooking presentation at the Smithsonian earlier this month, competed on Bravo’s “Top Chef” in 2021, and has a maternal grandfather responsible for starting Dreamland Bar-B-Que in Tuscaloosa in 1958, Hall is proud of the steps he has made.
“Sometimes, the work pays off,” said Hall, 48.”It takes a long time, but it pays off.”
The payoff is all around him, not only when someone calls him for a speaking or cooking gig, but also when they call for his art.
In 2025, Ryan O’Hara, owner of the Michelin-recognized Pizza Grace on Morris Avenue in Birmingham, asked Hall if he’d create two paintings for the restaurant. He gave Hall no parameters, and Hall created two pieces that get customers talking about them as much as the award-winning pizza. One piece is called, “Date Night,” and shows a couple having a meal. The other was inspired by a pizzeria scene from a 1980s movie.
O’Hara smiles each time he sees the paintings, which are rich in texture and also colors from vegetables such as sweet potatoes and collard greens.
“The way he paints feels natural, approachable and organic. We are thrilled to get some of his pieces in here,” O’Hara said.
Inside Hall’s studio are pieces of a torn chef’s coat, burlap from Africa and clothing from thrift stores, covered in paint and blended into his works. There are also pieces of paper towels, which Hall first used in honor of his grandfather in the founding of Dreamland Bar-B-Que.
“I used paper towels because Dreamland used them so much. It reminded me of what people wiped their faces with and how many rolls of paper towels you go through at barbecue restaurants,” he said.
The texture of the paper towels gave life to the faces, and every time Hall stretched a paper towel across a canvas, it was as if his grandfather, John “Big Daddy” Bishop was there, guiding him. (And in way Big Daddy was. Roscoe has a tattoo of him on his left forearm.)
Chef and painter Roscoe Hall is seen in his art studio. (Marika N. Johnson, For The Birmingham Times)Memory Carries a Heavy Weight
Memory carries a heavy weight in Hall’s studio, like the paint he uses. Before he paints, he weighs his paint for consistency, just like he weighs food before he cooks it.
Then, he writes what goes into his “recipe” and puts the “ingredients” on the back of each painting. One example is below:
50 grams of acrylic
30 grams of oil
Thoughts of Harriet Tubman
2 ounces of red clay pigment
11 ounces of yam pigment (He makes some of his paint from produce and spices.)
2 pounds of denim
½ torn porter shirt
15 grams of coals from Sloss Furnaces
The words are a reminder of how, with every move Hall made, he discovered something new about himself. And that discovery led him to paint.
Today, he said his younger self would give him a pat on the back for all that he’s accomplished, including that he’s been selected for a fellowship and is a featured artist at this year’s Southbound Food Festival in Birmingham.
Hall’s work is also part of a new exhibition at the Birmingham Museum of Art – Roll Call: Two Hundred Years of Black American Art. Opening September 26, the exhibition and accompanying publication showcase the 250 Black American artists included in the museum’s permanent collection. On September 25, the museum will host a panel discussion on the exhibition, featuring Hall and two other notable Birmingham-area artists, Richard Dial and Celestia Morgan.
Hall said he wishes he could cook for his younger self a meal of salmon croquettes, a biscuit, brown buttered rice and a scrambled egg, which his mother used to make for him so many years ago.
“It was my favorite thing to eat, and it was probably the first thing I learned how to cook,” Hall said. “Eating those weird bones out of the can. Delicious. Delicious. I should make some.”
