For years, Brice Cunningham’s demanding days were spent in restaurant kitchens, building a culinary career and becoming part of Charlottesville’s food scene at restaurants including le Fleurie, le Petit Pois, and Tempo. Now, the former chef is facing an entirely different kind of pressure as he trains in Brittany, France, to sail solo across the Atlantic.
Cunningham is preparing for the 2027 Mini Transat, a transatlantic race aboard a roughly 21-foot sailboat. The challenge requires the discipline, persistence, and attention to detail that shaped his career as a chef, but it also represents something more personal: a return to a dream he set aside decades ago.
Sailing first captured Cunningham’s imagination as a child in France, where he first sailed alone in a small boat on a pond at about 10 years old. When his family moved to Tahiti the following year, sailing became a defining part of his life. His parents enrolled Cunningham and his brother in a sailing club, and weekends were soon spent on the ocean.
The brothers eventually followed different professional paths. Cunningham pursued cooking, while his brother became a professional racing sailor, earning French and world championships and competing in America’s Cup campaigns. Cunningham also remembers hearing that an ancestor had been a chef aboard a sailing vessel, creating another connection between the family’s culinary and maritime histories.
His own culinary career consumed much of the next several decades. Eventually, Cunningham realized that continuing to postpone his sailing ambitions could mean never pursuing them at all.
“I think I underestimated the challenge,” Cunningham said. “It’s a great endeavor, huge challenges, and it’s a life reboot.”
The Mini Transat appealed to Cunningham partly because it offers an education in ocean racing. Competitors must master navigation, weather, routing, boat maintenance, and decision-making while racing with extremely limited communication and without computers. For Cunningham, successfully crossing the Atlantic alone would offer something even greater.
“It’s the epitome of freedom,” he said. Once a sailor has developed the ability to make that crossing independently, Cunningham explained, there is no need to wait for a crew before setting off on another adventure.
His years in professional kitchens may provide valuable preparation. Cunningham sees parallels between protecting a culinary reputation and protecting himself at sea, where preparation, focus, and attention to seemingly small details matter. Both also require persistence through long, demanding hours.
Training has revealed just how competitive, complicated, and expensive the undertaking will be. Cunningham is investing in coaching and specialized programs to deepen his understanding of weather and routing, and he is currently seeking sponsors to support his campaign. His goal is not merely to finish. He hopes to place in the top 15 and deliver an exceptional performance for an older competitor.
Training alongside other sailors in France is also teaching him how to handle the isolation ahead. Spending two years immersed among people preparing for the same challenge creates a community before each sailor ultimately has to rely on himself.
Charlottesville remains part of Cunningham’s story, even from across the Atlantic. After more than two decades in the community, he described himself as “magnetized” to the two and hopes his racing can become another way to represent it.
Meanwhile, despite his culinary pedigree, Cunningham isn’t imagining an elaborate meal at the finish. After weeks of food chosen primarily for practicality, he envisions a celebratory piece of fresh raw tuna with lime and rock salt, reminiscent of the fish he ate growing up in Tahiti. It would bring Cunningham back, in terms of flavor, to where his love of the ocean truly took hold.
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