Tonya Allen’s passion for cooking started in the kitchen of her family’s San Fernando Valley home at the apron strings of her mother and grandmother, preparing dishes from their homeland of British Guyana. No Christmas passed without a week’s worth of pepper pot on the stove. It’s also where she learned the power of women; she has set the same tone of sisterhood at Bacari PDR, where she has worked her way up from line cook to chef de cuisine.
