The Top Chefs Band
L–R: TJ, Loveberry, and Aft. Photo by Marcella Sanchez
There’s a band in San Francisco comprising musicians from The City and whom I discovered on social media playing shows on a stoop here in SF. I can’t quite be sure when I discovered them, or whether it was me or my wife, but either way, right from the start, we knew we’d stumbled upon something special. Something truly unique. Something joyful, beautiful, free … something for the people. People could gather around with neighbors, some they know, some they might be meeting for the first time.
“Community” is something of a buzz word lately, especially in light of things like gentrification, neo-tech fascism, and just plain ol’ fascism. But for good reason—it’s one of the most powerful tools we have not only to resist all the nonsense being forced on us, but also to overcome that crap and move on toward creating a world of inclusion, equity, diversity … and good tunes.
The band’s name is Top Chefs. This last episode of Season 8 of Storied: San Francisco is, not by accident, all about them and the magic they create.
We start things off with TJ Milan, lead arranger for Top Chefs and co-editor of what they call “Stoop Sessions.” TJ was born and raised in San Francisco. His dad came out here from Connecticut, and his mom is from The Philippines. His parents lived in South of Market, and TJ lives in that neighborhood today.
TJ’s mom came to The City with her parents when she was young. She later joined the Army, serving with a support group for the Green Berets. His dad had moved to New York first for work. Then he got offered a job in San Francisco in the late Eighties and took it. In the mid-Nineties, the two met at a law firm where they both worked. In 2002, they had TJ, the youngest of their three kids—he has an older sister and an older brother.
His dad is an amateur saxophone player. More on that in a bit. The family lore goes that his sax stylings played a part in his parents’ union, because duh.
I give TJ the opportunity to rattle off his SF schools, something he’s proud to do—Clarendon Elementary, Hoover Middle School, and School of the Arts (SOTA). He describes his time at SOTA as “very chaotic.” There was beef between the SOTA kids and the Academy kids in his days. Academy is sort of a school-within-a-school for SOTA, a majority/minority arrangement. Despite that situation, though, TJ met the person who’s still his significant other to this day.
The only time TJ left San Francisco for any significant time was to go to college at The New School in New York City, where he studied jazz. But he credits most of his education with Community Music Center in The Mission.
The entire time TJ spent in NYC, he felt in his heart that he would return to his hometown. He played out a lot while he lived in New York, but the market for saxophonists was saturated. He came back to SF around September 2024. It started off rough, as he puts it. He started busking to make ends meet.
Then we turn to Liam Berry, aka Loveberry, the head of audio production and guitar player in Top Chefs and co-editor of Stoop Sessions.
His mom came here from San Diego. Her mom came to the US from Ecuador, where she was raised. His mom’s dad is from Illinois. Loveberry’s grandfather was on a work trip in South America when he met his grandmother. That couple went to Philadelphia before landing in San Diego. Their daughter, Loveberry’s mom, moved to The Bay to go to UC Berkeley to study biology.
I take us on a sidebar about how San Diego can be cool to visit for like two days, max. But there’s only so much that good Mexican food and nice weather can do for me before I need to get back home.
His dad is from Cupertino. His dad’s dad is from Philadelphia and his dad’s mom is from Houston. They met when his grandfather worked for NASA and was stationed at the Johnson Space Center in Texas. His grandfather was transferred to the Ames facility on the Peninsula and brought his wife with him.
Loveberry’s dad wanted to get out of the area where he grew up, but he didn’t want to go too far. So he got into SF State for meteorology. He ended up working in the data science field after discovering that meteorologists don'’t make great money.
His parents met at a party through mutual Cupertino friends who’d moved up to Berkeley and Oakland. They were still together until a couple years ago, when Loveberry’s dad passed away.
He was almost raised in Oakland. His dad worked a low-paying job at a tech company and his mom, back then at least, worked different admin jobs (today, she’s a librarian). They’d lived in the Inner Sunset and put bids in on a couple houses in Oakland, where they could afford to buy in the late Nineties/early 2000s. They also bid on one house here in The City, in The Castro. And that’s the one they got.
That’s the house Loveberry grew up in, and when his parents first bought it, the house needed a lot of work. There are family stories about moving in and a mysterious tub of some sort of toxic goo.
Schools he went to and music intertwine for Loveberry. He started at Rooftop K–8, where kids worked on a different art project every year. When he was in second grade there, Loveberry started to gravitate toward guitar and started taking lessons. He went to high school at Gateway, which didn’t have a music program at the time. So he and some friends started the school’s music club.
In the summer between his sophomore and junior years of high school, Loveberry smoked pot for the first time. He also did an internship at NASA over that same summer. Going back and forth between those two wildly different worlds, he preferred the community that came with smoking pot with friends. Music became more and more a thing, but so did partying. Shit got out of control. He got out of high school to get himself into rehab.
After rehab, he wanted to go to music school in Los Angeles, but his parents nixed that idea. Instead, he stayed in The City and worked at a few different local eateries. So he never left.
A guy he met playing open mics in SF offered Loveberry $1,000 a month to open a recording studio and music business. It didn’t work out, but it showed him that he could persue music and art as a lifestyle. He worked at some nonprofits and did visual art as well as music. He met Afterthough (Aft) in 2021. Top Chefs formed soon after that.
In Part 2, Aft joins us to chat about the band—Top Chefs.
We start with the story of how TJ met Aft. A mutual friend of his and Loveberry’s, Lucas Hanson, put on a show at DNA Lounge called “Liam Berry and Friends.” TJ was just getting out of high school at the time. They asked him to join them on stage, something he’d never really done before. TJ had been playing smaller sets in restaurants, but joining a band at a bona fide venue was new for him.
Loveberry (Liam) had met Aft at something called a “sound gig” for a set they would play as part of the effort to keep People’s Park in Berkeley from being closed. They called Loveberry because he had a PA and they needed someone to run sound. Loveberry didn’t really know what that meant at the time, and he might’ve been mistaken for a guy named Jeff whom they’d been expecting. Nevertheless, Aft was one of the few people who was nice to Loveberry that day in Berkeley. The band ended up needing a guitar player, and so a mutual friend told Aft that he should have this guy, Loveberry, play guitar with him. They agreed and ending up borrowing a guitar from a member of the crowd. Aft later invited Loveberry to a rehearsal back in SF.
Afterthough, aka Aft, joins the conversation at this point. He recounts his version of that day in Berkeley. It was still early pandemic enough that folks were wearing masks. He liked Loveberry’s playing that day enough to ask him over. They played a couple of shows as “Aft and His Band” or “Aft … backed up by (various musicians.)” Aft was also asked to play with “Liam Berry and Friends.” At that DNA Lounge show, Aft met TJ and the trombone player Will, who’s also in Top Chefs now.
Aft had played in bands for years, including with a set of twins who played piano and bass. But those guys moved to New York around the time he connected with Loveberry. And soon after that, TJ and other members of today’s Top Chefs. There’s some collective fuzziness around when this all went down, but that doesn’t matter. It was the beginning of coming out of a worldwide pandemic when time began to get totally skewed for everyone. But also, they were just busy playing music and making friends.
I ask the three of them who came up with the idea to play shows on the stoop of Aft’s childhood home on Scott Street. Loveberry and TJ credit Aft with the idea. Liam talks about arrangements that Aft was putting together with complex horn sections. And in those sessions, one of the musicians started a habit of saying, “Yes, chef” to Aft when he was asked to do something. That came from watching cooking competition shows. The dude was messing with Aft, so at the end of a show one night, when Aft was introducing band members, he called this guy “the top chef” to get him back. The name stuck for the entire band after that.
There’s a story about TJ’s Filipina grandma, who lives near DNA Lounge, making Filipino BBQ on a stick and madeleine cookies for the band. TJ wasn’t sure what to do with the food, so he set it out in the crowd while they played a song called, “Everybody Eats.” It was a whole thing, and something Aft says he wants to bring back.
I ask the fellas whether anyone has ever compared their Stoop Sessions to NPR’s Tiny Desk music series. There’s a resounding “yes” from all three. Then Aft shares that Top Chefs actually shot a Tiny Desk audition video on the stoop. It was early 2024, and despite not making it onto the hit public media show, they realized that they had something in shows on the stoop. In 2025, thanks to a fundraiser show, the band went to South by Southwest in Austin. After that, they played in the Haight, Hunters Point, Bernal Heights, downtown.
Then Top Chefs started ramping up the quality of the videos. In late 2025, just before they planned to take a break from the band, Aft called a media day. The video of that performance went viral. Top Chefs’ Stoop Sessions had arrived. It must’ve been around that time that my wife and I discovered them and immediately knew we’d found something special. And it was basically in our backyard.
This coming Sunday, Aug. 2, they’ll be at Chapel of the Flowers in Berkeley. If you’re in the South Bay next weekend, they’re playing San Jose Jazz on Friday, Aug. 7. There’s a show in Levi’s Plaza in The City on Saturday, Sept. 12. And for more shows and info, and to lose yourself in videos of past Stoop Sessions, follow @stoopsessionslive. The band account is @topchefsband. Their website is topchefsband.com. Sign up for their email list to learn about upcoming Stoop Sessions. That’s the only space they share that info with folks.
That’s a wrap on Season 8: Every Kinda People. Thank you for listening and supporting our effort to uplift and share the stories of artists, activists, and working people who make San Francisco what it is.
We recorded this podcast on Scott Street near Alamo Square in June 2026.
Photography by Marcella Sanchez
