He started out making Big Macs. Now this Miami Beach chef is among the best in the U.S.

You might think culinary careers are built on a foundation of roast chicken, beef tenderloin and French omelets. But for Chef Tristen Epps, simple scrambled eggs, a job at McDonald’s and cooking Bourbon Street chicken at Golden Corral built his path to success.

Executive chef at the Eden Roc Miami Beach and its waterfront restaurant Ocean Social by Tristen Epps, Epps was recently named a 2024 James Beard Award semifinalist in the Best Chef: South category. Before coming to revamp Ocean Social a little more than a year ago, he was executive chef at Marcus Samuelsson’s Red Rooster Overtown, when the restaurant was recognized as a Bib Gourmand by the Michelin Guide.

But he fell in love with cooking much earlier, when his single Trinidadian mother revealed the mysteries of scrambled eggs when he was just a kid.

“I thought it was just the coolest alchemy, this hard little shell turning into this viscous blob turning into a liquid, and when you scramble it with a little heat and some seasoning, it turns into this really delicious thing,” Epps says now. “Then she was like, ‘Look what happens when you put some green onions in it or cheese on it.’ That constant change was fascinating to me.”

Epps stops reminiscing to laugh for a moment.

“I had a military Caribbean mother, so control was not something I had,” he admits. “So being able to customize food and have control over something that was a basic need was amazing.”

The journey from being a child wide-eyed with possibility to a James Beard semifinalist was jam-packed for Epps, who is nominated in the same category as Chef Valerie Chang, whose Peruvian restaurant Maty’s was named one of the best new restaurants of 2023 by Esquire magazine and Bon Appétit. Like Chang, whose restaurant is named after her grandmother, Epps pays homage to his culture via the menu at Ocean Social, infusing seafood with Afro Caribbean touches and shaking up the idea of what a hotel restaurant could and should be.

Ocean Social’s menu is seafood heavy — though Epps acknowledges a hotel restaurant must always serve steak — with shared-plate standouts like the crisp, salty Key West shrimp toast and hearth-roasted clams served “souse style” in a spiced broth. The “cracklin octopus” is served with chicharron, golden mole and bacon fat pineapple, while the unusual mushroom ceviche delivers king trumpet mushrooms, almond leche de tigre, hearts of palm and onion.

But even as he serves elegant smoke-roasted mahi and roasted diver scallops, Epps knows his future was forged amid Egg McMuffins and Big Macs. Working at McDonald’s, he says, “taught me everything.”

“It taught me work ethic and a lot about doing the right thing,” he says. “Learning pace and working as a team. Some days you were cooking, some days you were at the drive through, some days you were up front. I found I had more value when I offered to do everything rather than saying, ‘I only want to do this.’ ”

The job had other perks, too, he learned.

“I loved not being home, and I loved the fact that I could tell my friends ‘I work at a restaurant,’ and they could come visit me and I could hook them up,” he says. “To this day I do the same thing! But now it’s foie gras and caviar.”

His stint at Golden Corral afforded him another thrill: it was the first time he got to wear a chef’s coat.

“I was so proud of myself!” he remembers. “They have a front part of the restaurant where they grill your steak and make the Bourbon chicken, and nobody wanted to work that, but I loved doing it. I was awful at it, didn’t know temperatures to save my life. You got well done or rare. I had no clue what to do, but I was so happy.”

Growing up and moving into the realm of fine dining was a bit of a shock for a military kid. He moved a lot throughout his life, living as a kid in Japan, cooking as an adult in Sweden. But landing a job at Thomas Keller’s Michelin-starred Per Se in New York was eye-opening.

“Honestly, as a Black kid, I never imagined myself being there or even eating there,” he says. “It was everything I knew I wanted, everything I wanted to see, everything I wanted to do. But it wasn’t my world. I knew it existed somewhere, but I thought it was somewhere far away, like in Europe. . . . Caribbean people didn’t go there. We didn’t even look to go there.”

Epps was only at Per Se four months — “I was the lowest of the lowest of the lowest of the lowest,” he jokes — but he understood where he wanted to be. After working at what he calls “a couple of my trashy places,” he went on to cook at hotels and country clubs around the South, then took a competitive three-year apprenticeship at The Greenbrier, a luxury resort in West Virginia. Surrounded by people obsessed with food, he knew where he wanted to end up.

Epps went on to work with Chef Marcus Samuelsson at Red Rooster Harlem and eventually made his way to Miami, where he learned that aside from four crucial items — cornbread, shrimp and grits, deviled eggs and fried chicken — he was free to create his own menu. And even with the must-haves, he was allowed to make them over however he wanted.

“The cornbread was so good, I never changed it,” he admits. “I just changed what you put on it.”

For the first time, Epps was able to showcase his culture via cuisine. (Samuelsson did try to put the Swedish meatballs from New York on the Miami menu, but Epps managed to talk him out of it).

At Ocean Social, he’s done more of the same — and more overall. Leading a hotel’s culinary concepts means in addition to the wood-fired and seafood-forward cuisine at the main restaurant, he also creates food for the pool area, plus a room service menu. He had to put together a breakfast menu for the first time, which “exercises a different part of the brain,” he says.

There are disadvantages to being part of a hotel, most of them involving confounding tourist expectations, Epps says, but the advantages are hard to ignore. You get to create different types of menus, do a lot of different things, flex your expertise in myriad ways. The kitchen is huge, and you’ve got a big team.

“Everyone gets insurance. Everyone gets well paid. Everyone has parking,” he says. “If something breaks in the kitchen, I just call an engineer. If we’re out of eggs, well, let me just go to the other kitchen.”

As for that James Beard nomination, Epps admits he immediately started crying when he found out, not so much for his own sake but for what it meant for his team. When he got it together and told the staff, those who knew what the award meant started crying, too.

“It reinvigorated everyone immediately,” he says. “It was ‘What do we need to do to improve?’ All of a sudden I felt like I was back 15 years ago when everybody was like, ‘How do I take your job?’ The edge came back.”

Even if he isn’t named a finalist or the winner, Epps says, the nomination means a lot (finalists will be announced April 3).

“It’s a hard job,” he says. “You can quit and go work in the weed industry and make more money. You can do other jobs, work less and make more. In a kitchen you spend a lot of time getting yelled at, not seeing family, working overnight. But I was never doing it for a paycheck. So it’s validating.”

Ocean Social

Where: 4525 Collins Ave., Miami Beach

Hours: 7:30 a.m.-9 p.m. Sunday-Thursday; 7:30 a.m.-10 p.m. Friday-Saturday

Reservations: OpenTable or 786-961-6043