- Company
- FIELDTRIP
- Role
- Founder & Chef
- Est. Net Worth
- $3 Million (Est.)
- Stage
- Emerging
- Industry
- Hospitality
JJ Johnson
Founder & Chef at FIELDTRIP
About
JJ Johnson is a classically trained chef who founded FIELDTRIP, a fast-casual restaurant concept centered on rice bowls that celebrate the grain's role as a staple food across virtually every culture on earth. After years cooking in fine-dining kitchens — including a stint at the acclaimed restaurant The Cecil in Harlem, where he earned a three-star review from the New York Times — Johnson recognized that the future of his culinary impact lay not in tasting menus for the few but in delicious, affordable, globally inspired food for the many. FIELDTRIP's concept is deceptively simple: high-quality rice prepared using techniques from different culinary traditions, topped with proteins and vegetables that draw from West African, East Asian, Caribbean, and Southern American food cultures. Johnson's cookbook 'The Simple Art of Rice' became a bestseller, and his work with the nonprofit organization Brigaid — which helps school districts improve the quality of their cafeteria food — reflects his commitment to ensuring that good food is accessible to everyone, not just those who can afford restaurant prices.
Current Company
FIELDTRIP — Founder & Chef
Rice as a Universal Language
JJ Johnson's FIELDTRIP is built on one of the simplest and most powerful insights in food: that rice is eaten by more than half the world's population, prepared in thousands of different ways across virtually every culture, and yet had never been the centerpiece of a modern restaurant concept. Johnson's menu treats rice not as a side dish or a base but as the star ingredient — Carolina Gold rice slow-cooked with West African spices, sushi rice seasoned with Japanese furikake, basmati prepared in the biryani tradition, sticky rice paired with Thai-inspired toppings. Each bowl is a lesson in the culinary geography of grain, showing how the same humble ingredient is transformed by different cultural traditions into dishes that are worlds apart in flavor, texture, and technique.
Before FIELDTRIP, Johnson had established himself in the fine-dining world, cooking at some of New York's most acclaimed restaurants including Tribeca's The Cecil, where his Afro-Asian-American cooking earned a three-star review from the New York Times. But Johnson realized that the fine-dining model — expensive ingredients, elaborate preparations, high prices, small audiences — was not the most effective way to advance his mission of celebrating the African diaspora's culinary contributions. FIELDTRIP allowed him to reach a far larger audience with food that was affordable, accessible, and delicious, without sacrificing the cultural intentionality and ingredient quality that defined his fine-dining work.
Food Justice and the Next Generation
Johnson's work extends beyond the restaurant to advocacy for food justice and culinary education. His cookbook 'The Simple Art of Rice' is both a recipe collection and a cultural history, tracing how rice traveled across continents and oceans, carrying with it the food traditions and agricultural knowledge of the African, Asian, and Latin American communities that cultivated it. The book argues that understanding rice — where it comes from, who grows it, how different cultures prepare it — is a way of understanding the migrations, trade routes, and cultural exchanges that have shaped the modern world. Johnson's writing treats food as a lens for examining history, identity, and power — themes that resonate with a generation of diners who want their food choices to reflect their values.
His involvement with Brigaid — the organization that places professional chefs in public school kitchens to improve the quality of school meals — reflects his conviction that good food should not be a luxury reserved for those who can afford restaurant prices. Johnson has argued that the American school lunch program represents one of the greatest missed opportunities in public health: a system that feeds millions of children every day but that, in most districts, serves food that is nutritionally inadequate, culturally monotonous, and often unappetizing. By bringing professional culinary skills and cultural awareness into school kitchens, Johnson and Brigaid are demonstrating that school meals can be healthy, diverse, and genuinely delicious — and that investing in children's nutrition is one of the most cost-effective public health interventions available.