Ask Alicia Simmons about her happiest childhood memories, and she immediately recalls the many hours spent in the kitchen with her twin sister and grandmother at the family’s farm in the Shenandoah Valley. “We made lunch for dad and grandpa every day,” says Tavola’s executive chef. “That’s how I fell in love with cooking.”
Growing up on a farm formed Simmons’ appreciation of food because she knew the hands that touched every morsel she helped prepare and then consumed, the amount of work it took to get an ear of corn from a seed in the ground to her plate. “Farmers,” she says, “are more appreciated now than they used to be. But growing up, farmers were my heroes.”
Her grandfather was a dairy farmer who grew a variety of crops, and also raised ducks, pheasant, and trout. “I was lucky to see it all,” says Simmons, 28, adding that it came as little surprise to anyone when she enrolled in the culinary arts program at Valley Career & Technical Center.
“Basically, we had a little restaurant at valley vo-tech, which set you up to work in a bigger restaurant,” says Simmons, who quickly increased her knowledge of prepping and cooking and pricing everything out. She says it was a great foundation, something she built on when she graduated from Piedmont Virginia Community College’s culinary arts program several years later. More importantly, though, her vocational training confirmed what she’d known since she was a child: She wanted to cook professionally.
Soon after graduating from PVCC, Simmons landed a job making salads at Staunton’s Newtown Baking & Kitchen, where she worked alongside Chicano Boy Taco owner and former Zinc executive chef Justin Hershey.
But it was her pastry work—she’d fallen in love with dessert-making while at VCTC—plus a recommendation from Hershey that led Simmons to Tavola in 2015. In addition to making desserts at the popular Belmont restaurant, she prepped food and helped serve private events. Soon, she was working on the line and putting together salads for Tavola’s then-chef de cuisine Caleb Warr, “a great mentor who took me under his wing and really showed me how a chef is also a teacher,” says Simmons. “He was so patient, and took the time to show me all the little things.” Eventually promoted to sous chef, Simmons was named the Italian eatery’s executive chef in 2021.
On a typical day, she arrives at Tavola around 11am to receive the day’s food orders (many of the restaurant’s ingredients come from local farms, and its specials are based on what’s in season), and begin prepping, which means everything from baking bread or cheesecake to preparing sauces or butchering half a pig.
“That’s the joy of it,” says Simmons, who earned Best Chef honors in this year’s Best of C-VILLE competition. “And I love cooking for all the foodies here, people who appreciate our open kitchen and seeing how hard we work. They see it all go down, and they like the food even more [because of it].”
Simmons prides herself on preparing some of the area’s finest cuisine (linguine alla carbonara, anyone?), but she also makes it a priority to share her culinary knowledge, scoffing at those TV and movie chefs who terrorize their kitchen employees.
“Nobody appreciates going to work and being yelled at,” Simmons says. “I had great teachers coming up. And I want to reflect the way my grandma, Justin, Caleb, and [Tavola co-owner and chef] Michael Keaveny treated me. You need to enjoy your job to enjoy cooking. A big part of what I do is take the time to show everyone else how it’s done, so they can take what they learn and teach someone else and keep the ball rolling.”