Elizabeth Terry

Elizabeth Terry was born in Salem, Ohio,[1] the first of six children of Gordon Flagg and Nanee Gibbs Bennett.[2][3] She remembers the influence her grandmother's Louisiana home cooking from when she was child.[1] Terry graduated with a degree in psychology from Lake Erie College in 1966.[1][2][4] There, she met her future husband, Michael H. Terry, who was attending neighboring Kenyon College.[1][2] They married in 1966, and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, while Michael studied at Harvard University.[1]

Terry's first jobs before college had been selling bridal clothes and dressmaking in a fabric store.[2] While her husband pursued his studies, she obtained jobs as a probation officer and lab assistant.[2] Following his graduation, they moved to Atlanta, where their first daughter was born. With her husband's encouragement to find something new to do, Terry began working in a cheese and wine shop,[1][2][4] then ran her own lunch shop called Thyme For You.[2] They travelled through France on six occasions, where Terry picked up cooking techniques from many chefs.[1] In 1980, they moved to Savannah where she planned to open a sandwich shop.[1] This eventually became a restaurant housed on the ground floor of a mansion built in 1900, while the family (now including a second daughter) lived upstairs.[2] The restaurant, Elizabeth on 37th, opened on May 14, 1981.[2][4] She had researched historical recipes from families living in the local area at the Georgia Historical Society.[1][5]

The year after opening, Atlanta Magazine described the restaurant as "the finest restaurant anywhere in coastal Georgia."[2] It won several awards, including the 1995 James Beard Foundation Award for Best Chef Southeast,[6] "in part because she [had] redefined Southern cuisine for the '90s".[2] Terry was featured in magazines including Food & Wine,[7] Lear's,[7] and Delta Air Lines SKY magazine.[6] In 1996, she wrote the cookbook Savannah Seasons with her daughter Alexis.[6][8][9][10] Some of her recipes had previously been published in newspapers,[7] and one, for boned shad, was included in a book by Craig Claiborne after she had cooked it for him in 1987.[1][7] In 1998, the Terrys entered into a business partnership with brothers, and longterm employees, Gary and Greg Butch.[11] In the early 2000s, Terry was a visiting chef at cooking demonstrations in New York[12] and at the Kellogg Center, Michigan State University.[13] By 2005, Terry had retired,[14] and the Butch brothers continued to run Elizabeth on 37th, using some of Terry's old recipes.[5] Following the death of her husband in 2012, Terry moved to live near her daughter on the West Coast.[8]

• 1995 - James Beard Foundation Award for Best Chef Southeast[6]
• 2005 - Barbara Tropp President's Award, Women Chefs & Restaurateurs[14]