Order Up! A Conversation with Demetra Overton of Sweet Savant, chef, product tester, YouTube creator and mom
On global Southern food, real-life home cooking, and why you don't need the "best" product - but the product that's best for you and your family.
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Demetra Overton, creator of Sweet Savant, shares how she went from professional kitchens to real-talk reviewing products for real life home cooks
Chef Demetra Overton has been cooking professionally since the 1990s, but her path to Sweet Savant didn’t follow a straight line. Trained at the Institute of Culinary Education and shaped by time in professional kitchens like The Ritz-Carlton, Demetra built a deep foundation in technique long before she became a YouTube creator with a devoted audience. After culinary school, her career eventually intersected with motherhood, and like so many parents, her priorities shifted. Even though she stepped away from restaurant kitchens, she never stopped cooking. What started as sending homemade treats to her husband’s office grew into a personal chef business, and later into Sweet Savant: a place where Demetra could share real, practical cooking from a real home kitchen.
Demetra is known for her global Southern approach to food, and her cooking reflects the many cultures that influenced her early food memories: Caribbean coworkers sharing dishes at her mom’s job, weekend barbecues with her dad, homegrown vegetables, fresh fish, and soul food traditions that evolved over time. In the interview, she talks candidly about raising adventurous eaters, why frozen vegetables are a parenting win, how one-pot meals became a survival strategy, and what it actually looks like to cook well at home without chasing perfection.
This conversation runs during Black History Month, and Demetra’s story is very much part of that lineage—of knowledge passed down, adapted, and carried forward. At the same time, she reminds us (often without saying it outright) that identity isn’t something we only talk about one month a year. It shows up in how we feed our families, how we teach our kids curiosity and confidence in the kitchen, and how we make space for both tradition and change.
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A Conversation with Demetra Overton, Sweet Savant
Introduce Yourself: I’m Demetra Overton, a trained chef and the creator of Sweet Savant. I have a son and a daughter, both adults now.
Sweet Savant began as a way for me to support my family while still fulfilling my creative life as a chef, and my husband has always been my biggest cheerleader. What started as a private chef and catering business has grown into my YouTube channel doing product demonstrations so people can see how kitchen tools actually work in real homes from someone who’s both a chef and a mom who cooks every day. That’s still my passion: helping people decide what they’ll actually use, not just what looks good online.
Did becoming a mom change how you thought about food and nourishment?
