Carla Hall has contributed so much, and so joyously at that, to the 21st century food conversation. The Washington, D.C.-based chef delighted and impressed audiences and judges with a runner-up placement on “Top Chef” in 2008, launching her career as a food celebrity, personality, and mind. Not only does she bring Southern and soul food to the masses with her cookbooks, and return appearances on “Top Chef” in multiple capacities and in many other places, but she also co-hosted the food-based daily ABC talk show “The Chew” for years, ran a restaurant, and maintains one of the best Food Network stars’ personal websites.
Hall exudes a contagious happiness, but she isn’t immune to the horrors of life. She found fame later in life relative to other food personalities, having experienced a great deal of pain and trauma that she had to work through and has talked about openly, showing support for other survivors and fans and that they can achieve whatever they put their mind to, despite challenges they’ve faced. Here’s a look into the dark side and sometimes tragic life of Carla Hall, and what she went through to get to where she is today.
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She Was Raised By An Abusive Alcoholic Father
Carla Hall was raised in Nashville in a two-parent home for most of her early childhood. While she credits her father, cafeteria worker George Morris Hall, with imbuing in her an appreciation of Southern food, as well as the sense of humor that both inform so much of her professional persona, hers was a rough childhood affected by violence and domestic issues. A frequent drinker, the elder Hall physically abuse his wife; they married and divorced, and then married and divorced again, all before Carla Hall turned seven years old.
Hall witnessed all of that turmoil, and she doesn’t speak much of her late father in present-day interviews. His influence is felt, however, in how she’s never imbibed alcohol at no point in her entire life. “My father was an alcoholic, so that may have something to do with it,” she told Metro Weekly.
Her Grandmother Developed Alzheimer’s Disease
Carla Hall didn’t take cooking seriously until adulthood, but she forged some strong and lasting food memories during childhood by observing her grandmother making traditional American dishes each week after church. Hall’s late grandmother’s specialities included smothered pork chops and cornbread prepared in a cast-iron pan. When she was training to be a chef, Hall found herself unable to reproduce her grandmother’s specialties (including a peach cobbler ice cream) because she regretfully didn’t know exactly how they were prepared. “I was retroactively sleuthing these recipes I had eaten growing up, and that was really hard, but it was also something that kept me really close to my grandmother,” Hall told the Alzheimer’s Association.
When her grandmother’s cooking skills started to falter, it’s then that Hall and other relatives realized that dementia was setting in. “There was one point when she served us macaroni noodles in milk. There was no cheese. It wasn’t baked,” Hall recalled. “We realized she was losing her memory and found out she had Alzheimer’s.”
She Experienced A Lot Of Early Career Woes
Carla Hall may have shown us what cooking on television is really like, but getting there required a lengthy journey.”Theater saved me from being bullied,” Hall told The New York Times. With a life on stage a clear path forward, Hall applied to the prestigious theater program at Boston University, and it was a devastating shock when she was rejected. Instead, she attended Howard University to be closer to her sister and studied accounting.
She enjoyed the precision of the nature of accounting, but didn’t enjoy the job itself. Hall worked at PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Tampa field office and was the only person of color on staff. Hall quit that job and pursued modeling for two years and, upon heading back to her college town of Washington, D.C., she embraced cooking, a passion to which she’d always felt drawn but rejected anyhow. “I spent so many years pushing it away,” Hall said. “But then I understood that my connection to this food is my connection to my heritage and my story and my family.”
Even when she landed a spot on the food panel talk show “The Chew,” Hall felt lonely on a show without Black producers or a hairstylist who knew how to specifically style Black hair. And when she found out that the male hosts of the show earned five times what she did, she pushed for a raise. After several years of asking, Hall’s pay was doubled.
Carla Hall Was Mistreated By Police
Following the police-caused death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020, numerous anti-brutality protests started up around the U.S., bolstering the visibility of the Black Lives Matter movement. During this period of national conversation, chef and food television host Carla Hall spoke out about her own frightening incident with police, which occurred two decades earlier in Washington, D.C.
“I was slowly going through a light behind an 18-wheeler so I couldn’t see the stoplight, that it was red, and I slowly went through,” Hall told ABC7 News. A police officer witnessed the event, and in addition to the small infraction, noticed that Hall’s car carried lapsed license plate tags. The officer pulled over Hall, asked for her license and registration, and after viewing them in his cruiser, ordered the future T.V. star to exit her car. Amidst much confusion, she did as directed. “The next thing you know there are five patrol cars, me behind the car, handcuffed, and they took me in.” Hall believes that the interaction was absolutely a case of racial profiling.
Carla Hall Had Imposter Syndrome
Carla Hall is a beneficiary and participant in the lasting legacy of “Top Chef,” even though she didn’t win her first stint on the competition series, broadcasted in 2008. As one of the most T.V.-ready chefs to ever compete on the show, bursting with charisma and exuberance and even wielding a catchphrase (“Hoo-dee-hoo!”), Hall subsequently became a fixture on Food Network and food shows on other cable channels. And yet as confident and engaging as she appeared on camera, off-screen it was a much different story, as Hall suffered from extreme self-doubt.
Hall felt blindsided by fame and ill-suited to it. “When I did my first cookbook it really felt like imposter syndrome: Who wants recipes from me? Why should I do this?” she told T. Cole Rachel. “When your ego steps in, things get complicated. I look back at that first cookbook and I can see how my ego clouded everything.” She later noticed, and ever since revises at book signings incorrectly published recipes that were composed under the influence of stress and anxiety.
She Had A Miscarriage
Carla Hall married yoga instructor Matthew Lyons in 2006. The couple never had children by choice, although they once considered the option and experienced a pregnancy that ultimately ended early on. “Right before we got married, I got pregnant, and then it was just a natural miscarriage,” Hall told People. The pregnancy ended when Hall believes she had been carrying for eight to nine weeks.
While there was some emotional impact of processing a suddenly self-terminating pregnancy, Hall found peace with the situation. “I just accepted it. And I just sat there and I’m like, ‘Okay, there’s nothing I can do about this,'” she said. “And I know it sounds cold, but there was truly an acceptance.” Hall, stepmother to Lyon’s child from a previous marriage, interpreted the event as a signal that she wasn’t supposed to be a biological mother, and that she ought to pursue her career with more focus.
Her T.V. Show Got Canceled Because Of Someone Else’s Misdeeds
Mario Batali was under criminal investigation by the NYPD following allegations that the chef, restaurateur, and T.V. food celebrity had made unwanted contact of a sexual nature with two employees of one of his restaurants. After those two women came forward in late 2017, along with others who levied similar accusations of harassment and assault against Batalli, ABC immediately fired Batali from his job as a co-host of its daytime talk show “The Chew.” At the end of the 2017-2018 television season, ABC canceled “The Chew” altogether, ending a seven-year run and putting numerous show staffers out of work, including co-host Carla Hall.
Throughout it all, Hall publicly supported her friend and co-star even as he faced trial for some of his actions and was somewhat responsible for her loss of employment “Much to many people’s dismay, I was there for him,” Hall told People. “But it wasn’t for me to forgive this person.”
Carla Hall’s Restaurant Was A Major Flop
In 2016, eight years after she became one of America’s most famous T.V. food personalities via “Top Chef”, Carla Hall opened her first restaurant, a casual comfort food spot. While some celebrities need to stop opening up restaurants, it seemed as if Carla Hall’s Southern Kitchen would be a big deal, but it just didn’t work out due to bad luck and poor choices. “Everyone assumed that my first restaurant’s success was a foregone conclusion,” Hall said at a 2017 conference sponsored by “Nation’s Restaurant News,” (via Eater). “It took us two and a half years until we opened our doors, and then we were only open for a year.”
A mere two months after the grand opening, an electrical fire shut down the eatery for a while, and then the walk-in refrigeration unit fell into disorder twice. “People just didn’t trust us to come there. We were letting them down and they were already making an effort to come to us,” Hall said (via NRN). Other functional considerations doomed Carla’s Southern Kitchen, such as its location in a remote neighborhood and a controversial decision to fund the startup with crowdfunding. “It’s an understatement to tell you that I got beat up by the social media community for using Kickstarter,” Hall said. And despite her celebrity visibility and access to multiple outlets, Hall’s employment at ABC’s “The Chew” didn’t allow her to talk about the restaurant on T.V. or social media.
She May Develop Alzheimer’s Some Day
Advanced age-related degenerative neurological diseases which slowly rob the body of its basic abilities sadly run in the family of Carla Hall. Her grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease after relatives noticed her cognitive abilities had suddenly and drastically slipped, and more recently Hall’s mother was diagnosed as being in the early phases of dementia. Hall, who turned 60 years old in 2024, decided to get a genetic test to assess the chances that she would similarly develop a dementia-related disorder.
“I did 23andMe and had my panel done, and it said I carry the gene for late-onset Alzheimer’s,” Hall told Marie Claire. After learning that movement five days a week may help reduce the risk or impact of Alzheimer’s by channeling more oxygen to the brain, the chef instituted and sticks to a rigorous routine in which she walks and lifts weights daily.
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