At COTE Flatiron, in 2017, I started teaching free wine classes to anyone on our staff who wanted to sign up. The logic was simple: educated people sell more, and people who know the stories behind the bottles care more about pouring them. That happened. But something else happened that I never saw coming.
With a little education, a foot in the door of a world they'd never felt welcome in, people became empowered. Dishwashers became runners. Runners became bussers, then servers, then sommeliers, then managers. One person in that very first class told me that before then, the only way he'd ever experienced wine was in the dish pit: dirty glasses coming through, and him, curious, lifting them to his nose to catch what the guests had been drinking.
I grew up in the world of wine (perhaps the very definition of an Old Boys' Club if there ever was one) and watching that classroom, I understood something. This was the secret to making wine more dynamic, more alive, more fair: free education for the people the industry had always kept on the margins. In 2018, I co-founded WINE EMPOWERED with two other female sommeliers from COTE, Cynthia Cheng and Amy Zhou.
Eight years later, we’re still small but mighty, a 501(c)(3) offering tuition-free wine education to women and people of color in hospitality. Because the upper ranks of this industry should look like the rooms we actually serve.
So I’m kicking off a new summer spotlight series on our Wine Empowered alumni- where they started, and where they are now. First up: Camille Williams, class of 2024.
When Camille started the program she was working in a casino in Connecticut - and commuted hours weekly for the program. A little over a year later, she is running some of the most respected restaurants in New York (and therefore, the world!). We talked on a Monday afternoon at SAGA - Kent Hospitality Group’s two-Michelin-starred restaurant on the 63rd floor of a 1932 skyscraper in downtown Manhattan. Camille was in the middle of setting up for a private event that night. We sat in a cleared dining room, two glasses of water between us, under the restaurant’s famous Basquiat painting.
VJ: Tell me how you got into restaurants in the first place.
CAMILLE: Restaurants were always the second job in my family. My mom was a single mom - her daytime job was selling medical equipment, and then two nights a week she’d go work at our local pizza place. The Recovery Room, right across from the hospital. I’d say, “My mom’s at the Recovery Room,” and people would go, “Oh, she’s a nurse?” No - it’s a pizza place across the street.
It was a small husband-and-wife spot, the kind where the regulars knew her. She almost became more powerful than the owners, because she’d watched these people grow up, watched their kids grow up. My aunt bartended a few towns over. So it was always something I knew wasn’t your ‘real’ job - it was an outlet, a way to get more money and have people to talk to.
I’m the middle child of seven. I learned young that nothing was about me - it was about talking, working things out, taking care of people. So restaurants felt like exactly what I already did. I could float around a room, make you feel good for a second, and the whole time none of it was about me. It just felt too natural to count as work.
VJ: So you went and got the ‘real’ job first.
CAMILLE: I became an insurance agent. That was the first time my family told me they were proud of me. And I hated it. I hated the office. I knew I loved being social in restaurants, but it felt too easy to be a real job - because it was just… what I did all the time.
“It just feels too natural for it to feel like work. And I kept returning to restaurants because of that.”
Then COVID closed everything. I ended up at a place in Mystic, Connecticut - the Shipwright’s Daughter - right as the town started getting James Beard buzz. Suddenly my family was proud to say I worked there. They’d tell their friends, “You’ve got to go see Camille at work.” That was the first chef-driven place I’d ever worked - - the first time the chef’s vision dictated everything, not just the service. Then I got the chance to join Tao, where people walked in, saw the room, and were impressed I ran it.
VJ: When did wine become the thing?
CAMILLE: In Mystic, they were trying to do small-producer, biodynamic, natural wines - in a town where everyone just wanted Kendall-Jackson. So you had to teach it. And I’d suddenly become a boss. I realized I needed to learn about wine so I could actually be an asset to my staff. I was the person who’s supposed to have the answers.
That’s always what learning was for me. I never had a goal pinned to my wall. I just don’t like not having an answer, and I’m the person who’s supposed to have them. I was following my instincts and realized I was climbing a ladder I didn’t even know I was on.
VJ: And you found Wine Empowered through an Instagram ad?
CAMILLE: I was at Tao working late nights, so my days were free. I’d started following wine professionals, and the ads started popping up. Class was Monday mornings - my days off were Tuesday and Wednesday. So I’d close on Sunday night, get home around 1 a.m., wake up early, and take the train into the city. I slept a lot on that train.
Barnes & Noble in Union Square was always open, so I’d get a coffee and finish studying. Class at 10, take the quiz, then right back to Grand Central, grab an empanada, get on the train. Sometimes I’d have my work clothes in the car and drive straight from the station to the casino to close that night. I figured I’d rather make Monday one brutally long day than lose a real day off. It was a lot of fun. I have no idea how I did it.
VJ: And before this, you’d only taken wine courses online.
CAMILLE: All pre-recorded, no one to talk to. It’s like learning a language - you can study French alone, but if you’re not talking to anyone, it doesn’t lock in. The very first class, I’ll never forget how you taught us to taste: your first sip, you don’t actually taste the wine - you taste your mouth’s reaction, resetting to what you’re drinking. The second sip is the wine. I still tell people that. It blew my mind, and I’d never had anyone in the room to tell me before.
VJ: And let’s talk about the process of getting into Wine Empowered. The process is no joke. Hundreds apply then there is — a referral, multiple interviews.
CAMILLE: Every step felt like a Hail Mary. No one’s going to pick me, but let me just apply. I got the student interview, then the interview with Cynthia - I walked out thinking, that was weird, I have no idea. A friend told me, “They’re going to keep moving you through.” And I said, I don’t want to get confident - someone could have a better interview, you never know.
Then I got the email: Welcome to Wine Empowered! I was in New York for the weekend and I just sat there - oh my God, I did it. I get emotional even now. I’d gotten engaged two days before, and honestly I was more freaked out about getting into the program.
That first day of class, I heard where everyone worked - like Tatiana, all these places I’d been a fan of from Connecticut. The teachers were impressive, but so were my classmates. They picked me to be in the room with these people? They all worked at my dream restaurants. I just thought it was so cool to be there.
VJ: Getting in is one thing. The class itself doesn’t suddenly get easy.
CAMILLE: I compare it to a college course because of the self-study. You can’t just show up and learn what you need - you have to take on the responsibility. You walk into a quiz on something you should’ve studied all week. The lecture is two hours, and wine is bottomless. Every teacher has a different obsession - some are deep in history, some in geography, some are label-heavy on their favorite producers - so you have to be ready for anything.
My first couple of weeks, I was writing down literally everything - I thought I’d run out of notebook paper in a single region. By the second half I figured out what actually mattered: the AOC, the aging rules, the things that kept coming back. But it clicks.
VJ: Walk me through what happened after you graduated.
CAMILLE: I wanted mentorship - I’d come up through work, never went to school for management, and I’d had a lot of men as bosses telling me to handle situations a certain way without realizing my physical presentation changes how people receive the information.
So I joined the James Beard Legacy Network. You’d sent an email about a role, and I reached out to them even though I was already in management, because I wanted to stay connected to this group.
Meanwhile, I’d told my fiancé I had an interview in New York - and he found a job and an apartment before I’d even had the interview. So suddenly I needed to apply everywhere. That’s when the Gramercy Tavern opportunity came up, and it moved fast.
VJ: That’s wild - you move to New York and land at one of its most iconic restaurants, with a Michelin star.
CAMILLE: And the thing is - I have a hard time taking credit - but a lot of it was them being impressed that I’d done Wine Empowered from Connecticut. My job didn’t sign me up. They told me later that’s exactly why they pushed for me: I cared enough about the industry to do it on my own.
It was a service manager role - a step down in title and pay from AGM - but I knew working under Danny Meyer’s world would change my trajectory more than a bigger title somewhere else.
VJ: And then Saga.
CAMILLE: I came in to shadow Chef Charlie for a day - just to learn, for myself. People kept pulling me aside to chat, and I thought, wow, what a friendly group. They were interviewing me. Before I left, they pulled me outside and offered me a job. The line was: “We know Amy [Zhou] and Victoria’s work ethic. If you made it through their class, we know what that says about you.” I was frozen. That’s not why I came in that day. I keep accidentally paving a way I didn’t know I was paving, because I just wanted to learn.
Now I’m the AGM here. Saga and Overstory are two stars; Crown Shy has one; Overstory was 33rd on North America’s World’s Best. I started in November, got promoted in January, and it’s been a whirlwind. Chef Charlie and I went to cook dinner in Hong Kong; he’s in LA this week. I haven’t had a second to breathe - I can’t believe it’s already June.
VJ: People think Wine Empowered is just a wine program - but it empowers you to build a whole career. What did it give you that you use every day?
CAMILLE: The biggest thing: when you don’t know something, it becomes a boogeyman. From Connecticut, I looked at beverage directors and thought they had accolades I could never achieve. Then I got in the room - and they were just people. Normal people, gulping their water, hands shaking, PowerPoints not working, saying French words without a French accent. It pulled back the curtain and made it attainable. That’s what I loved most.
VJ: Had you been in rooms like that before - not all men, not all suits?
CAMILLE: No. Even at Tao, the wine guy was the boss, and the buyers were older rich men who wanted big, bold Italian wine. Wine felt like one of two things: a luxury you put on a shelf for special occasions, or the cheap stuff people made fun of. My cousin drank RELAX [wines] - she’d let me sip it, but in the wine world you’d call that garbage. It never felt like something people I knew actually drank.
Then I walked into Wine Empowered and my classmates were my age, dressed like me, doing the things I like to do. The teachers seemed like people I’d know. And it hit me - the wine world is made for people who look like me. They belong.
VJ: What about the community?
CAMILLE: In a small town, if there are two good restaurants, they’re competitors - there’s only so much to go around. New York showed me the opposite. Two beverage directors at the most successful places in the city can just be friends. I’d been around gatekeepers who wouldn’t teach you something because they found it threatening. To see people at the top training the people coming up under them - that was the most interesting thing to me about this whole industry.
VJ: What would you say to someone who wants to apply but doesn’t see themselves as ‘wine industry material’?
CAMILLE: You don’t see yourself there because you’re not there - you have to put yourself in those spaces. I didn’t see myself either. Being the first isn’t always a great feeling; it’s uncomfortable. But sometimes you have to sacrifice yourself a little so the next person can see it’s possible. There are younger girls here now who pull me aside, because I’m the first person they’ve met who looks like them that they can ask. If you’re interested, you belong. That’s literally it. You just have to find your way in.
You don’t have to check a set of boxes. Getting in or not isn’t a measure of your self-worth - and someone telling you no doesn’t mean you don’t deserve to be there. I pushed a friend to apply who kept saying, “They won’t pick me.” Nobody could care more than her. You’ll get in - and if you don’t, you reapply.
VJ: Why should people support Wine Empowered - money, time, wine?
CAMILLE: The connectivity can’t be overstated. We think of wine as something in a glass, but the community is so much bigger than that. The field trips changed me - going to Rosenthal’s office, to Skurnik, tasting things I’d never had, in rooms that showed me what was possible. I hadn’t set foot in a vineyard until we went to Macari on Long Island, and I realized great wine was being made in my own backyard - not just California or France.
Wine is an expensive hobby. There’s a real barrier to entry - the bottles, the regions, the trips. You can be just as interested as anyone and not be able to afford it. Wine Empowered gives you the community to talk it through and the access that can change a life. You never know what sparks it - maybe our next great winemaker is the person who finally got to visit a vineyard.
The biggest takeaway was the time. One of our instructors, Robin [Wright], had just done a huge DRC dinner and was there the next morning to teach us. When someone that busy gives you a day, it makes you feel important - it makes you puff your chest out. Even when you’re too nervous to speak up in a tasting because you don’t want to be wrong, it reminds you that you were worth this person’s time. The money and the trips matter. But people investing their time in you is life-changing. Empowering the next generation - what could be better than that?
Honestly, I can’t say it enough. Everyone told me they were so impressed I made it through Wine Empowered. People in this industry know the reputation - if you can hang with that class, they know what it says about you. I thought I was doing it all to help myself. Really, it was with your help. It was one of the most fun, hardest things I’ve ever done - and when you love it, it doesn’t feel like work. You look back and realize the hard times were really golden…
VJ: We can’t wait to see how you continue to change the industry as a Wine Empowered alumni and champion. You continue to take on hard things, and you turn them into gold, you alchemize them.
To find out more about Wine Empowered and ways you can support people like Camille, visit www.wine-empowered.com. Every donation goes directly towards our initiative of supporting a more dynamic hospitality world, and making dreams come true.
✨ Plus: Behind the paywall below for subscribers, the wines & cocktail to drink now at SAGA - direct from Camille! One that is ELECTRIC & one that is Burgundy-meets-Champagne! ✨
