13 Facts You Probably Didn't Know About Carla Hall

You've probably seen Carla Hall on The Food Network, featured on shows such as "Halloween Baking Championship" or "Beat Bobby Flay." The chef and television personality has made a name for herself since she first appeared on Top Chef in 2008 and now boasts an impressive résumé and an extensive list of television credits both in and out of the culinary field. 

You also probably already know about her cooking style, bubbly personality, and longtime catchphrase "hootie hoo," but there's more to Carla than meets the eye. We've gathered 13 facts that even the biggest fan of Carla Hall may not know, from her childhood to her family to her favorite dessert. She also started her working life in an industry far from to food world and has been seen on the big and little screens. Carla Hall is one today's biggest cooking stars, so read a little more about her before watching her on her latest "Baking Championship" show on The Food Network. 

Carla Hall was born in Nashville, Tennessee, where she spent most of her childhood surrounded by the city's distinct music and culinary scenes. She's a big fan of Nashville's famous hot chicken and has dabbled in creating her own recipes for her numerous cookbooks.

One famous Nashville hot chicken joint that Carla revisits when she's back down south is Hattie B's, a family-owned local chain with restaurants all over Tennessee and surrounding states. "She's a complete doll to talk to," Hattie B's co-owner Nick Bishop Jr. tells The Tennessean, "she's very sweet to our staff." Besides Nashville's hot chicken, Carla has a couple of other favorite restaurants around her hometown, including The Southern V, Swett's Restaurant, and The Cupcake Collection, which she likes to revisit whenever she is in town. Her love and admiration for Nashville is apparent in the recipes she still makes today.

Cooking wasn't at the forefront of Carla Hall's mind when she was growing up. Instead, she made major some career changes before becoming the culinary star we know and love today.

After graduating high school, Carla moved from Nashville to Washington D.C. where she studied accounting at Howard University's School of Business. Four years later, upon graduating from one of the country's most famous historically Black colleges or universities (HBCUs), Carla moved on to Tampa, Florida, where she worked as a certified public accountant at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) – one of the big four accounting firms across the United States. 

Carla was a short-lived CPA, working at PwC for only two years before switching careers for the first time. "I really hated my job as an accountant," she told Dice in 2017. But, she hadn't found her love for food at that time, and she made one more surprising career move before becoming Chef Carla Hall. 

After leaving the accounting world, Carla Hall made the unlikely pivot to work as an international model. She quit her job and decided to go to Paris with a group of her model friends. She enjoyed the fashion capital so much that she moved there to try her hand at walking runways around Europe. In the early 2000s, you could see her modeling across London, Milan, and Paris, where she finally discovered her love for food and cooking.

An American expat, Carla met other United States natives in Europe who missed their definitions of comfort food. She attended weekly Sunday suppers with a friend she met from Memphis, Tennessee. "We would get together, and we'd make dishes we were missing from home: buffalo wings, mac and cheese, collard greens," Carla tells Yahoo! Upon realizing that she didn't even know how to make her mother's mac and cheese, Carla dove into the wonderful world of cooking — starting with buying cookbooks. "It was actually when I was modeling in Paris that I found food, which is so crazy," she says, "I had the exact opposite experience of food and modeling and not eating and all of that."

They say coffee can be an acquired taste, but Carla Hall isn't trying to get acquainted. "I don't like coffee," she reveals to Harper's Bazaar in a video diary of everything she eats in a day. In fact, Hall tries to stay away from caffeine altogether, stating, "It probably seems like I drink a lot of caffeine, which I do not!" It would seem her bubbly personality is all-natural and organic.

Carla is one of many celebrity chefs with a peculiar food aversion, but she is certainly in the minority of Americans who don't enjoy a daily cup of joe. She does concede that she will occasionally drink a cup of tea if it's accompanied by a cookie or a little sweet treat for dessert. If it's typically in the evening, though, one has to assume she's reaching for a decaffeinated cup of tea. 

After discovering her love for food, Carla Hall moved back from Europe and went to work training to become a chef. She completed her culinary training at L'Academie de Cuisine in Maryland, a state known for having some of the best crabs in the United States. Though it was once one of the top culinary schools in the United States, it unfortunately shut down in late 2017 after 41 years of operation. 

Carla's training at L'Academie de Cuisine took her to a few jobs around Washington before her big break. She first worked as the Sous Chef at the Henley Park Hotel before moving on to become the executive chef at The State Plaza Hotel and The Washington Club. Before closing their doors for good, L'Academie de Cuisine invited Hall back to teach classes of her own to a new batch of young students and professionals.

Matthew Lyons and Carla Hall got married on April 29, 2006, two years before Carla's breakout season of "Top Chef." Carla met her soon-to-be husband in Washington D.C., after her return from Paris, where he was working in congressional affairs. 

It took a while for the two to meet, though they eventually did, thanks to online dating. Carla made a profile on Match.com using the name "Scrabble Girl," and Matthew reached out to her on the first day she used the platform. They reportedly fell in love on their first date. "I remember as soon as I saw her, my immediate thought was, 'I'm done,'" Matthew told Yahoo! in the interview series titled "It's Love". Carla isn't the only one in the relationship who has made a major career move or two. After working in congressional affairs for over 30 years, Matthew became a certified yoga instructor. He started teaching in 2017.

With longstanding roots in Washington D.C., Carla Hall where (at the time of this writing) she works as the culinary ambassador for Sweet Home Café at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in the nation's capital. Situated right on the National Mall, the museum is the newest Smithsonian Institute Museum, having opened in late 2016.

Carla's culinary ambassador role involves cultivating the menu in a way that relates to the general experience of visiting the museum. She tells stories through her food, nodding at African Americans' history, culture, and cuisine across the country. The Sweet Home Café serves around 2,500 meals per day to visitors of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Its menu changes seasonally, and the food is made of locally sourced ingredients, meaning Carla is certainly put to work in this role!

Carla Hall has several causes and charities that are close to her heart, including Helen Keller International, Alzheimer's Association, and CARE. Carla's connection to Alzheimer's hits close to home, as her grandmother suffered from the degenerative disease before she passed away. Carla shared her grandmother's story with the Alzheimer's Association, saying the family knew something was wrong when her grandmother could no longer make the macaroni and cheese that Carla grew up eating. 

Carla also stands up for LGBTQ+ equality, signing a legal brief by the Human Rights Campaign in 2017 saying that bakeries or restaurants should not be able to discriminate or turn customers away based on their sexual orientation. Carla is also a Chef Advocate for CARE — or the Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere. She traveled to Mozambique in 2015 along with CARE to learn about food insecurity and how to combat the global hunger pandemic.

Besides her various roles on The Food Network, Carla Hall has also appeared on the big and small screens. Over the years, she's played herself, played other characters, and has even done voiceover acting for numerous animated TV shows.

Carla's first time on the big screen was in "Girl's Trip," portraying herself at a food festival in 2017. A Nashville native, Carla couldn't pass up the chance the following year to take a small role in the series "Nashville" with Connie Britton and Hayden Panettiere. 

In the 2021 "Gossip Girl" reboot, Carla played Rocky, ostensibly a personal chef to a wealthy family in Manhattan. She also appeared in a recurring role as a cook in "General Hospital" in 2018. In the animated Disney cartoon "The Lion Guard," Carla voices the character Mpishi, a harrier hawk described as a gourmet. In the adult animated show "Bojack Horseman," she played a fabricated version of herself: Spaghetti Scientist Carla Hall. 

All of Carla Hall's hard work paid off in 2015 when she and the rest of her cohosts on "The Chew" won a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Informative Talk Show Host. She shared the award with the rest of the cast, fellow chefs and television personalities Mario Batali, Clinton Kelly, Daphne Oz, and Michael Symon. She was also nominated again for the same award in both 2016 and 2017, losing to Dr. Oz and Steve Harvey. 

"The Chew" ended the following year, in June 2018, after 7 seasons and over 1200 episodes. Carla was featured in nearly all of them, having started from the very beginning of the syndicated daytime talk show in 2011. With the encouragement of her husband Matthew, Carla moved to New York temporarily to fulfill her daily hosting duties on "The Chew" until the end of the 7th and final season. 

Though she's undoubtedly discovered countless dessert recipes since her days at L'Academie de Cuisine, Carla Hall's favorite dessert of all time is one that she grew up eating with her grandmother. Their five-flavor pound cake is perfect for the holidays (or any time of year) according to Carla and the rest of her family. 

Speaking to AllRecipes, Carla describes her and her grandmother's pound cake as a "bouquet of flavors." The pound cake mixes vanilla, lemon, rum, coconut, and almond for a delicious combination that makes a light and fluffy loaf. She credits the loaf to her late grandmother, aptly naming it Granny's five-flavor pound cake. It's not just her favorite cake, but it's also relatively easy to make. Carla and her family have been making it for decades so, like anything, the ease may come with a little bit of practice. 

Food trends come and go, but internet fame or notoriety is forever. If you remember the butter board trend of 2022, you'll likely recall seeing them everywhere — as well as the intense backlash that came from critics saying that the charcuterie-like appetizer is unsanitary. Around the same time, Carla Hall was experimenting in the kitchen and decided to take the butter board a step further. 

Utilizing different cookie butter flavors, Carla turned the butter board into a dessert board — inventing the cookie butter board. Note she did use mini spoons to deter from spreading germs or cross-contamination. However, when the whole board is made of fruits, biscuits, and cookie butter, cross-contamination is part of the game. Her video making her cookie butter board went viral on social media, enough so that Carla had to explain why she thought it was so popular. "I truly think it is the controversiality of the butter board," she said in a list of her most popular recipes of 2022, "people are passionate about their love (and their hate!) of this trend, and that definitely played a role in the virality of my cookie butter board." Try one of these next time you want to elevate your charcuterie board game. 

In the aged old debate between sweet and savory grits, Carla Hall is happy to play the middle. Ask any Southerner their grits preferences and they're sure to teach you a thing or two — Carla Hall included. Sweet grits are typically cooked with a little added sugar and eaten for breakfast with toppings like fruit or honey. They can be a point of contention between those who enjoy sweet grits and those who prefer the traditional savory grits, which can be eaten both for breakfast or dinner (or any time of the day, let's be real.)

Carla categorizes grits as "a blank palette that goes with almost anything from breakfast to dinner," per CarlaHall.com. Though she admits to craving savory grits more, she sees no problem with adding a little sugar in grits and calling it breakfast. "Growing up I ate sweet grits quite frequently as a breakfast item," Carla writes on her own recipe for shrimp and grits, "As an adult, I do find myself more drawn to enjoying savory grits as you would find in shrimp and grits."