Fine dining with an unusual chef

The National Museum of African American History and Culture opened in 2016 during President Obamas last year in office after 8 scandal-free years (we can only marvel, but sadly). To honour David Adjaye, the Ghanaian British architect who designed the stunning building, a champagne maker threw a fancy dinner party, and asked a rising young African-American chef to create the menu.

Kwame Onwuachi, the chef, was ambivalent.

I don’t do ‘African American-themed’ menus. I am an African American chef, so if I cook my food, isn’t every menu I create African American by default?

As you see, Kwame doesn’t care for being typecast, labelled, or put into a convenient ethnic box, something that happens all too often as he’s rising on the upscale restaurant ladder. Still,

On the other hand, why quibble? This is a media dinner, not a thesis on race. And I was gearing up to open a restaurant. Any press is good press, and good press is especially good press. [..] It’s not that I’m cooking for [some] of the most influential tastemakers in DC [..] It’s that I’m cooking for all of the people, and to tell all of the stories, told and untold, remembered and forgotten, housed in the floors below me.

This balance between his awareness of racial slights and his practical understanding of realities makes Kwame’s memoir an interesting read, much more than a simplistic rant.

Kwame has had an unusual background. Son of a Nigerian-immigrant father and an African-American mother whose family came from Texas and Louisiana, he grew up in the Bronx. There was a long history of cooking in his family: his grandfather ran a private restaurant for black people in his backyard and later cooked on a riverboat, and his mother made both Nigerian and her own favorites for the family. There were violent beatings from his father after his parents split up, and his mother struggled to make ends meet via informal catering gigs. By five or six, he was helping with the cooking: peeling shrimp or stirring roux.

The cooking afternoons sound idyllic, but the outside world was harsher: when he got to 10 years old, he was surrounded by tough kids, whom the teachers viewed and treated as dangerous. He started coming home late, smoking cigarettes and weed, and veering towards the powerful gangs, until his concerned mother decided to send him to Nigeria for a couple of years.

Everything was different in Nigeria: no TV, everyone expected to help out pumping water and feeding chickens, attending a beat-up school and dealing with Nigerian punishment.

Back in the States, detention was cool. Here, punishments included digging a hole equal to your height and carrying a cinder block across the dusty soccer field. Talking back to my teachers suddenly lost its appeal.

Back in New York City at 12, Kwame was expelled from schools, got into fights, and bought his first gun at sixteen. He went to college, but supported himself by selling drugs and drifting into addiction. To the reader, the prospect of a career in cooking seems impossible at this point.

Then one morning, a cold cloudy day in November, I awoke from yet another binge [.. to see ..] TV footage of Obama, all smiles and hope and change. I had never felt so alone or so rootless. […] For the past year, the closest I had come to cooking was mixing the [drinks] in my dorm room. That morning, though, I felt an irresistible need to make something.

The first step to redemption! A low-end job at a rib shop in Louisiana (“down there, the world was black and white”), then chef on an oil rig leads to enough money that he can make it back to New York, where his dreams of starting a catering company are funded by selling candy bars on the New York subway.

Kwame is clearly a motivated entrepreneur, from the drugs to the candy bars, and it does not seem surprising that he is able to break into the fiercely competitive New York catering environment. How he makes it beyond to the high-end restaurants run by famous chefs like Tom Colicchio and Thomas Keller, trained at the Culinary Institute of America, appeared on Top Chef, and eventually was invited to cook for the event described at the beginning of this review …. for that you’ll have to read the book.

He provides plenty of history about the food he cooks.

Gumbo, in its essential form, arrived shortly after 1720, carried in the taste and muscle memories of enslaved West African people. The word gumbo comes from the Gold Coast Twi term ki ngombo which means “okra”.

If you are one of those readers who like reading about food history (and I am), this is all fascinating.

He is aware that (like it or not) he represents a lot of African American cooks who never ascended to the rarefied cooking strata he inhabits. He is able to explore and articulate his ambivalent reactions to situations.

The gumbo I’m making tonight [..] is almost ridiculously extravagant. The crustacean broth is made of caramelized lobster, king crab, and shrimp bodies. [..] The king crab arrived last night from Norway. The new-shell lobster, which tends to be more tender and flavorful than the late-season ones, came from Maine and is much more expensive than its hard-shelled kin, and the Ossetra caviar is $395 per seven-ounce tin. If I were a white chef, this luxurious riff on a gumbo might come with a whiff of cultural appropriation. If I were a black chef serving it only to white folks, I would feel uneasy too, as if somewhere in my fancifying lay a secret shame that black folks’ food needed fixing. But tonight I’m a black chef serving black-tie food to a largely black crowd.

Kwame’s background is unusual, to be sure, and it is quite reasonable that his cooking journey should be informed by his background. Yet it gets somewhat repetitive and a tad self-indulgent to read over and over again how his menus are representative of his personal life.

As a bonus, the memoir includes recipes for some of his food: the aforementioned gumbo, egusi stew of Nigerian origin, corn veloute and so on. (Sorry to say that as an Indian, though, I am not a fan of chicken curry involving ‘2 tablespoons curry powder’).

The author might seem young to produce a memoir, but his experiences and thoughts are extraordinary enough to easily fill this short book, and it’s engaging reading.

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