In Alexander Smalls’ autobiographical love letter to his upbringing, When Alexander Graced the Table (Denene Miller Books/Simon & Schuster, January 7), the kitchen in the family’s Spartanburg, South Carolina, home is aswirl with folks peeling, cutting, and baking for the next day’s post-church supper.

Sous chef to his mother, Johnnie Mae Smalls, young Alexander wants to make a dessert for his father, Alex. He decides on a lemon pie. It should come as no surprise that Smalls, winner of a James Beard Award for Between Harlem and Heaven: Afro-Asian-American Cooking for Big Nights, Weeknights, and Every Day (written with JJ Johnson and Veronica Chambers), includes the pie recipe in the back of this vividly inviting picture book co-written with Denene Millner and illustrated by Frank Morrison.

Morrison’s illustrations capture the chords and melodies of a house full of family, motion, and love. It’s “total lyricism,” says the restaurateur-raconteur-singer, sitting in his Harlem home for this video interview. Like his storied restaurants—Café Beulah, Minton’s, the Cecil—Smalls’ Harlem haven is the site of many a heady dinner party. Though he doesn’t drop names, they waft in and out of the conversation naturally because the Grammy and Tony Award winner knows how to set the table for a brilliant collection of friends.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What a lovely book. Morrison’s artwork has such musicality.

We waited two years for Frank, and I am one who needs immediate gratification! I lived the book, so that was easy to pull out of me, but then to have to sit pregnant for two years before I could see the imagery—it was painful. But my God did that man capture the essence, the spirit, the engagement.

It’s clear from your books and restaurants that you’re drawn to collaboration.

Well, it really is an extension of what I do for a living. I set the table in people’s lives, and I nurture them. I remember being really impressed as a young kid by those who cooked. When I wrote Grace the Table with Hettie [Jones], I coined the expression “The person who wields the spoon, wields the power.” I wanted to be that person at every gathering. So, the spirit of collaboration, togetherness, engagement was always a part of how I saw the world and myself in it.

Chef and opera singer: How did this dynamic take hold?

I see everything in my life through two lenses—music and food—which make me extraordinarily happy and content. I always feel intentional about the things I love. I know that they will feed me somehow. My mother gave me this extraordinary advice: “If you love what you do, you will never have a job. And we know how lazy you are.”

Now seriously, did she say that?

Oh, she was a wonder. She left no stone unturned or word unsaid. She left the planet thinking I wasn’t really working as an opera singer. The Grammy, the Tony—didn’t matter.

She kept you honest.

I remember the first time my parents came to Café Beulah, all my friends would come and surround them—Phylicia Rashad, Lynn Whitfield, Kathleen Battle, Toni Morrison—and they just loved it. My dear, dear friend Cicely Tyson would always be present. I got up to leave the table, and my father whispered in my mother’s ear (it was Cicely who overheard this), “You see, Johnnie, you can stop worrying. He’s doing well. He’s got a job.” And she turned to him and said, “He ain’t doing nothing. Everybody else is working. He’s running his mouth. Look at him over there.” And then she said to Cicely, “You feel his hands? There’s no calluses.”

Hilarious! Do you have a favorite dish of hers?

Two, actually. I loved her buttermilk mac and cheese.She’s the only one I know that made mac and cheese with buttermilk.And the other was her creamed corn. Oh girl, let me tell you, every Sunday in the summertime, I had to have four things: potato salad, fried okra, mac and cheese, and the creamed corn. I loved to make fried-okra-and-creamed-corn sandwiches with sliced tomato.

I’d let the corn get cool or cold, spread it like a paste, and then I piled the fried okra on top of that, and it would hold the okra in place. Then thinly sliced tomato on Wonder bread. I’d alsoeat potato salad sandwiches. Years later, when I moved to Rome to study opera in the ’70s, I went into cafes where they would slice the sandwiches. They’d always take the ends off, which annoyed me…

The ends are the best.

And then they would put them under a damp towel sitting on the bar. Nobody was concerned about whether you were going to die if the mayonnaise got too hot. That was just the way we lived. What was under that beautiful cloth? Potato salad sandwiches! I had never seen that anywhere except in my kitchen on my plate. Potato salad sandwiches— without the sweet pickle relish, of course.

There are two words you have a beautiful intimacy with: joy and grace.

As a child, joy was something that just poured out of me and poured into me. I was the only boy. I was the only grandson. I was everybody’s favorite. I was spoiled, and I had no problem being a chameleon and entertaining everybody for the attention that they so wanted to give me. But because my parents were reverent, I was taught humility, and I was taught the importance of being thankful in everything. I decided at a very early age that joy and grace would be the way in which I stepped through life. I would add to that recipe dignity. My grandfather was so proud. He was a proud Black man.

You seem to be in perpetual motion. Where do you find stillness?

The reason this apartment is put together in the way that it is, it’s really my cradle. I lose myself in my art. Everything in this apartment has a story—and I know the story. I have a music room. Volumes and volumes of books. All of it is all up in here. And I have no problem shutting down, turning everything off. The public thinks I entertain 24/7. As much as I’m in the public eye, I need twice as much time by myself. It’s so calm here.

I asked you your favorite dishes your mother made. Did she have a favorite of yours?

Well, let me put it this way: She would be hard-pressed to tell me. She didn’t gush over things.The most you’d get out of her was, “That was very nice.” It just would be so out of character for her. A Taurus.

Seems like Johnnie Mae gave you the ingredients to be in the company of fierce women: Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Gloria Steinem, Jessye Norman…

A couple of nights ago, Nikole Hannah-Jones [MacArthur Fellow and author of The 1619 Project] came over for dinner. It was just the two of us talking about a new project of hers. And I’m like, What is this that I set the table for? So many incredible people, and all that started with my mom. I think that’s the next book.

Lisa Kennedy is a writer in Denver.