Notes from a Young Black Chef (Adapted for Young Adults) - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kwame Onwuachi is the James Beard Award-winning executive chef at Kith/Kin in Washington, D.C. He was born on Long Island and raised in New York City, Nigeria, and Louisiana. Onwuachi trained at the Culinary Institute of America and opened five restaurants before turning thirty. A former Top Chef contestant, he has been named Esquire’s Chef of the Year, one of Food & Wine’s Best New Chefs, and a 30 Under 30 honoree by both Zagat and Forbes.

JOSHUA DAVID STEIN is a Brooklyn-based author and journalist. He was a restaurant critic for The New York Observer and has been a food columnist for The Village Voice.

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Standing on Stories

The air is so warm in D.C. tonight, it still feels like sum­mer. It’s October, it should be night already, but the sun is taking her sweet-ass time leaving the stage. It’s just too beautiful a day to say goodbye. From where I stand, on the fifth-floor balcony of the brand-new National Museum of Afri­can American History and Culture, the city spread below seems full of promise. Across the North Lawn, American flags flutter in the wind around the base of the Washington Monument. To the east, the Capitol building, with its impressive dome, is bathed in bright light, and to the south, the White House sits like a perfectly proportioned dollhouse. In the distance, the red and blue lights of the carousel at National Harbor glitter in a tiny festive constellation against the pink-fading-to-blue sky, guileless and beautiful.

Standing above the scene in my chef’s whites, I feel like an orchestra conductor peering in on my pit as the musicians tune up. Under the ruby sun, everything glimmers and shimmies with excitement. Next month is a historic election. Next month I’ll open my dream restaurant. Next month I’ll step into the life I’ve always wanted. So though it’s late in the day, it feels like the dawn of something new.

“Chef!” A voice behind me cuts short my daydream. “Where should we put the allium shoots?” The voice belongs to Jong Son, one of the team of nine young chefs I brought to cook at the museum with me tonight. “Next to the Ossetra caviar in the reach-in fridge,” I tell him. Behind me is a hive of activity as cooks rush to finish their premeal preparation, called mise en place, before the guests begin to arrive. My mind turns to the spreadsheets and to the lengthy lists of tasks and quantities through which even the most sublime food—in fact, especially the most sublime food—must pass before it can be made whole again. I turn my back on the view and head in to the kitchen.


 
With the opening of my first restaurant, the Shaw Bijou, less than three weeks away, my mind churns on over­drive. For the past two years, the project has come to consume my life. It is, by far, the most ambitious thing I’ve ever been a part of, the most logistically complicated and the most precari­ous for me personally. It is the expression of years of busting my ass, of constant forward movement, of seizing opportuni­ties manufactured to be beyond my grasp. Though my culi­nary journey started like so many other chefs’, as a child in my mother’s kitchen, opening a fine-dining restaurant of my own is the goal toward which all my efforts have been oriented. I’ll need every bit of luck, every scrap of knowledge, every shred of strength. I’ll need to call on every single connection I have, and tug on the thread of every story I can tell, to open the doors to my very own place.

The experience and knowledge I’ve gained since graduating from the Culinary Institute of America I hope will help me. My time at some of the best restaurants in the country I hope will prepare me. That I won a national dining competition called Dinner Lab and that I appeared on Top Chef has hopefully given me a national audience that will translate into customers. But you never know. Everyone is famous to themselves. Whether the audience on the other side of the television screen will show up at the Shaw Bijou, I’m not sure.

When I arrived in Washington, D.C., from New York two years ago, I thought by now I’d be the prince of the D.C. restau­rant world. Things haven’t gone exactly as planned. All ambi­tious restaurants suffer setbacks, but it seems we were dealt a particularly crummy hand. Already, my partners and I have blown through a handful of opening dates and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Everything that could go wrong has, from broken water mains to boneheaded zoning laws. I’ve found out that, just as L.A. is a city that’s run on movies, D.C. is a city that runs on red tape. But, somehow, we’ve toiled on and finally we have a date—November 1.

D.C. is a city whose culinary landscape has long suffered from the preferences of deep-pocketed politicians for the unchallenging, dick-swinging food of steakhouses. There is, of course, a small vanguard of fine-dining chefs, but as a young black chef from New York, who has worked in some of the most acclaimed restaurants in the country, my arrival was greeted with a lot of excitement and anticipation.

As the weeks turned into months that turned into years, the food media’s fascination with the Shaw Bijou has only grown. Bijou, as we call it, has become like a destination resting somewhere between myth and reality. As each detail leaked out—Washington, after all, is a city with no shortage of leaks—interest grew. There would be only eight tables. True. There would be a members-only club on the second floor. True. We would sell tickets, not take reservations, and those tickets would be nonrefundable. True. That I had parlayed my fifteen minutes of fame on Top Chef into a million-dollar restaurant. Not true. My partners and I were already deep into opening Bijou long before Top Chef ever came along. But there’s a lot out there about me that’s untrue.

I took a ton of heat a few months ago, when I announced that dinner at the Shaw Bijou would cost $185 per person, not including tax, tip, or wine pairing. The price tag made us one of the most expensive restaurants in D.C., and it immediately made me a target for populist rage. Who was I, the city’s critic class howled, to charge so much? How dare I, new here and so brazen, compete with José Andrés, whose flagship, minibar, was our closest equal, pricewise? To whom had I paid my dues?

I could have responded that our food costs were high and our margins were low. I could have pointed out that $185 is pricey, but when you look at cities with more established fine-dining scenes, cities like New York, a city with five Michelin three-star restaurants, to D.C., where the guide hadn’t even arrived yet, $185 is not ridiculous. I could have shown the haters the $150,000 worth of reservations we had presold and said, “Well, the public begs to differ.” The truth is, I could have said what­ever I wanted to but nothing would have helped. It was an audacious move; part of being audacious is dealing with the blowback.

But the real truth, the truth I keep under lock and key, is that I also sometimes wonder if all the haters are right. This fear I haven’t shared with Mya, my fiancée, or my mother, Jewel, or even fully with myself. I haven’t dared to give shape to these thoughts with words. But damn, $185 is kinda pricey for a first-time chef in a new city. Who do I think I am?

It’s a question I can’t afford to pose so close to opening night. Lately, my life has taken on the rhythms of a boxer in the lead-up to a title fight. I’m in the restaurant, in motion, head down for twelve hours a day. This morning began with me on my knees, for instance, grouting the tiles in the kitchen. Later I crawled into the phone-booth-sized office in the basement to finish assembling recipe books for my cooks. My eyes ache from peer­ing at microcress and obsessing over the angle of a rice chip on a piece of lamb sweetbread. But in the high-wire act that is fine dining, these things matter. Well-grouted tiles matter. Mil­limeters matter. This frenetic pace is only broken up when I sit down with curious journalists for interviews in which I attempt to appear relaxed, confident, and charming as I make the case about why people should root for us. Then...