Mia Ormes. (Photo provided by Ormes)

Germantown Info Hub is sharing a series of local chef profiles this holiday season, with their stories on how and why they love to cook, their favorite holiday meals, the ways in which community intersects in their cooking practice, and what they feel is the recipe for a thriving community.

Mia Ormes was always interested in what was going on in the kitchen. By her grandmother’s side as a child, she learned how to debone a whole fish, season and cook it, how to make traditional Barbados peas and rice (where her grandmother was from), and how to season other traditional dishes. 

And she carried that passion with her through her entire life, creating Meals by Tribu, a business based on providing nourishing and healing foods that honor ancestral recipes and bolster health.  

Ormes started the business in 2020, taking traditional dishes of the African diaspora and putting her own innovation on the recipes, with an emphasis on nourishing and local ingredients. Dishes like gumbo, potlicker soup, and coconut curry are some of her signature soups. 

She began with an emphasis on postpartum nutrition, providing the birthing parent and the community around them with meals and snacks. She also did a lot of catering, creating spreads that were balanced with her dishes and what her clients requested. 

She has since branched out to what she calls Tribu’s higher self, her Sacred Kitchen consulting and counselling. 

“The Sacred Kitchen is reconnection through food. It’s taking you on a journey, a healing journey through the food, reconnecting you that way. So we’re not just talking about nourishing the physical body,” said Ormes. 

When she started her business, Ormes had already been on a personal journey with food, realizing food was medicine, as she began working to heal her own health issues,  including eczema. And she says, it’s exhausting to keep talking about what and when to eat, which she feels has so much conflicting information. 

She wants people to start listening to their bodies and eating more intuitively, not just to break down food into calories.

“Let’s quiet the noise. Center yourself. What is your body telling you? How do you listen to your body? What is it telling you that you need in this moment?” Ormes asks. 

She recommends to her clients and her community to bring ceremony and ritual back into our everyday eating and to eat foods more aligned with the cycles and seasons of the year. 

Ormes has also loved collaborating with local herbalists, holistic healers, and event planners to work with her on gatherings around food and connection. 

For the holidays, Ormes loves seeing Barbados-style peas and rice on a holiday table, fish cakes, and a traditional drink like sorrel or hibiscus juice. But she also loves to anchor her personal holiday table with a turkey, delicious gravy, and pickled cucumbers. 

And what is her recipe for a thriving community? Ormes says it is as simple as love. 

“Love is the ultimate vibration that you want to be on. And so that’s the frequency you want to be on. So you want to infuse everything that you do with that. All you need to do today is love, because that’s what comes back to you,” she says. 

She says cooking is what she calls “spell work” because it is alchemy, using all the elements of air, fire, water, and earth.

“You can take flour and water, and you can make food from flour and water. You literally can take flour and egg and make pasta. You can take flour, water, yeast, and salt and make bread. So we are talking about very simple things,” she says. 

Ormes continues, “What transforms all of those things … what makes them taste good? What makes your grandmother’s dish taste better than the same thing prepared at a takeout restaurant? Because she put love in it. It’s intention. So the number one ingredient would be love.”

Ormes’ Sacred Kitchen and The Heart Connects is hosting a Grief Out Loud: Thanksgiving Reimagining dinner at Young American Hard Cider & Tasting Room this Thanksgiving, Thursday, Nov. 27, 2025, from 4:00-8:00 p.m. You can find more details and a full menu here. 

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