Welcoming Chefs Andre Fowles and Nicola Blaque

We’re honored to welcome two more names to the Jamaica Jerk Championship’s Founding Judging Panel: Chef Andre Fowles and Chef Nicola Blaque.

Andre Fowles was born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, in a tenement yard, where he learned to cook from his mother and grandmother — crediting his grandmother, Mama Cherry, as his foundational culinary influence. He later trained at the Culinary Institute of America and is now based in New York City. A three-time champion on Food Network’s Chopped and a semifinalist on Chopped: Grand Champions, he currently serves as personal chef to musician Bruce Springsteen, and in 2026 released his debut cookbook, My Jamaican Table, with a foreword written by Springsteen himself.

Nicola Blaque was born in Mandeville, Jamaica, and immigrated to the United States at age five. She served ten years of active duty in the U.S. Army, rising to Staff Sergeant, before enrolling at the Culinary Institute of America. In its first year, her restaurant The Jerk Shack in San Antonio was named one of America’s sixteen best new restaurants and earned a Michelin Bib Gourmand. She was later a James Beard Award semifinalist for Best Chef Texas.

Together, Fowles and Blaque bring a rare, directly lived credibility to the judging table — two Jamaican-born chefs who have each carried the island’s food to national recognition, and who now return to help set the standard by which it will be judged.

National in soul. International in stature.

Respect the Jerk.

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