Chef Christopher Viaud Brings Haitian Heritage to the Table

As a 2022 James Beard Award semi-finalist and alum of the hit Bravo Network show Top Chef, Christopher Viaud is no stranger to the spotlight. 

Now Viaud, the child of Haitian immigrants, is the owner of three restaurants—Greenleaf and Ansanm in Milford and Pavilion in Wolfeboro—and is focused on bringing the tastes of his childhood to a changing public. But that wasn’t where he started.

“My original concept at Greenleaf focused on contemporary American dining with local sourcing,” says Viaud. “I knew that concept it would be a hit.

“It wasn’t right at the beginning I thought I wanted to open up a Haitian restaurant,” he says.

The road to business ownership for Viaud began in 2017 as head chef at Manchester’s Cabonnay restaurant. In 2018, he took a year to soul search before starting a farm-to-table restaurant, Greenleaf, the following year.

It wasn’t until 2021 that Viaud brought Haitian cuisines to NH in a pop-up venture with his siblings, now a permanent restaurant called Ansanm.  “There’s not much diverse cuisine in our area,” Viaud says. “I think that brings people to Ansanm.”

He says he was worried that the public would not be enticed to try Haitian gastronomy right away when Ansanm began in June 2021. That worry was put to rest rather quickly.

“We had to shut off ordering the first time we did it,” he says.

Many of those customers came from the sizable Haitian community that has moved to the Nashua area over the last two decades. Anecdotally, he says COVID-19 sped up the community’s growth; many sought relief from densely populated cities like Boston and New York.

“We started to see a lot more come from outside the area,” he says. “Diverse cuisine, such as Haitian cuisine, I think, has a role in that.”

It also exposes families in the area for generations to something new. “It allows people to try something exciting and new,” he says.