![]() Creole and Caribbean flavors infuse his cooking. His mother’s family hails from Louisiana and Trinidad. Onwuachi’s life story is written in his recipes. ![]() She shielded me with love, instead of revealing to me the harsh realities that were going on.” “There were a lot of times where we didn’t have lights,” he says, “and my mother made up a game called Lights Out, where we all slept in the living room together and put candles everywhere. “So she started a catering company from the house, and me and my sister became her first two employees.” “My mother was an accountant and she wanted to figure out a way to spend time with us while still taking care of the bills,” Onwuachi says. But that road began in a one-bedroom apartment in the Bronx, where he grew up with his mother and sister. Eventually, there would be a stint on Top Chef, work in the best restaurants in America, the opening of his first place in D.C. His road to the rarefied world of fine cuisine has had many fits and starts, which he details in a new memoir, Notes From A Young Black Chef. These days, Onwuachi is a rising star in the food world - the executive chef at Kith and Kin, a celebrated Afro-Caribbean restaurant in Washington, D.C., and a nominee this year for a prestigious James Beard award. And I want to explore this a little bit more.” “Here’s something that brings back these fond memories. “I didn’t know that I wanted to cook, but it was like, here’s something that I’m familiar with,” he says. He went to the grocery store and bought ingredients to cook a chicken curry. ![]() And I immediately flushed everything that I had down the toilet and was like, I need to find myself,” Onwuachi recalls. He was, he says, lost.īut when he saw President Obama, something clicked. He was dealing drugs to survive after he dropped out of college. The memoir is written with restaurant critic Joshua David Stein, and while the seams between one writer and the other aren’t evident, there are moments when emotional urgency seems diminished by an arm’s length presentation.It was the morning after the election of America’s first black president, and Kwame Onwuachi was hungover. The narrative is largely chronological, and Onwuachi’s life is so full of adventure and fascinating detours that the story never drags. A few recipes require a practiced hand - some readers won’t have the experience needed to build and maintain a consommé raft - but even a literary critic with underdeveloped kitchen skills can make a tasty meal from Onwuachi’s recipe for shrimp étouffée.Īs a book, “Notes From a Young Black Chef” is engaging and well crafted. He learned the chicken curry from a neighbor and developed the London broil after uninspired meals at the home of childhood friends. His desire to share family dishes and dishes he learned through his life and travels is so profound that he ends every chapter with a recipe. He’s Nigerian on his father’s side, and Jamaican and Trinidadian on his mother’s. Significant people and experiences in Onwuachi’s life inspire the dishes he wants to make. In an Onwuachi kitchen, all team members are encouraged to contribute ideas. ![]() Other admirable millennial sensibilities inform his vision, too. His experiences working in New York at Per Se and Eleven Madison Park amplified his desire to have a kitchen rich in diversity, where standards of excellence are prioritized but despotic behavior is disallowed. ![]() Onwuachi’s vision as a chef is inspired by his desire to make the fine-dining dishes he wants in a country that many insiders and investors argue isn’t ready for a black chef making anything beyond upscale versions of fried chicken and macaroni and cheese. Troubles and talents took Onwuachi to Nigeria, back to the Bronx, to New Orleans, to a cooking job in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, to the Culinary Institute of America, to kitchens at two of the finest establishments in Manhattan, to numerous cities as a competitor in a pop-up restaurant competition called Dinner Lab, to San Francisco for the television show “Top Chef,” then to Washington, D.C., where he was lured to launch Shaw Bijou. Onwuachi grew up hard in the Bronx, living modestly with his mother, who is also a chef, because his father was temperamental and violent. That difficult setback arrived at the end of a long Icarian rise. At the end of Kwame Onwuachi’s “Notes From a Young Black Chef,” the then-27-year-old is dusting himself off after the sudden closing of his debut restaurant, Shaw Bijou. ![]()
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