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2023-10-15 | WebClipping | 2023-10-15 | https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/09/kwame-onwuachis-cuisine-of-the-self | true |
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Kwame Onwuachi’s Cuisine of the Self
It was only 10:30 A.M. on a Tuesday in July, but the staff at Tatiana, the restaurant in Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall, seemed exhausted. “Kerry Washington was in last night,” a publicist told me. Someone else mentioned that there had been a private event on Sunday—the one day of the week when the restaurant is usually closed. The last guests had trickled out at 4 A.M. on Monday, and the managers hadn’t left until six. The party was for Beyoncé, who had just played a sold-out show at MetLife Stadium, and Jay-Z. (“I buried the lede,” the publicist said.)
Kwame Onwuachi, Tatiana’s chef and proprietor, wouldn’t normally be at the restaurant so early, but he was there to record a television segment for WNBC—his second of the day, after the “Today” show, at half past eight. “You’ve had a busy morning!” the camera operator said. “It’s not really morning if you don’t sleep,” Onwuachi replied.
For the segment, Onwuachi and a reporter named Lauren Scala were going to sample dishes that he’d be cooking for an event at the U.S. Open: pepper steak, hamachi escovitch, black-bean hummus topped with berbere lamb. A bottle of spring water was produced. Someone asked if there shouldn’t be wine, too. “Are you gonna turn this water into wine?” Scala quipped. Onwuachi laughed and said, “It is my Jesus year, though! Thirty-three.”
“Do I remember when I was thirty-three?” Scala wondered aloud.
“My goodness, Keith! You look like you’ve seen a goat.”
Cartoon by Tom Chitty
“It must have been a good year if you don’t remember it,” Onwuachi said.
For Onwuachi, it’s been a very good year indeed. Last November, he opened Tatiana, his first restaurant in New York City, his home town. Tatiana is named for Onwuachi’s older sister, who helped raise him (an enormous portrait of her with her two daughters hangs in the private dining room), and its menu is inspired by his personal history. He grew up steeped in the cuisines of his elders—his roots are in Creole Louisiana, Nigeria, and the Caribbean—as well as in food from the city’s corner stores, street carts, and Chinese restaurants.
At Tatiana, he fills dumplings with crab and egusi, a traditional Nigerian soup made with pungent ground melon seeds. He deep-fries pods of okra until their ridges blister and split—slightly puffed, crisp, and salted, they’re finished with honey and mustard powder, and served with a Trinidadian-style pepper sauce. For a dessert called Bodega Special, he makes a “cosmic brownie” (an homage to a Little Debbie product), which is dotted with rainbow-hued chocolate chips and paired with ice cream both flavored and shaped to look like a powdered doughnut.
The first time I ate at the restaurant, shortly after it opened, Onwuachi made the rounds, checking in with every table. One of my dinner companions told him that her name was Tatiana, and he insisted that she stand up for a long embrace. He was dressed in street clothes, including a do-rag. If this made it seem as if he wasn’t actually working in the kitchen, the truth is that he doesn’t usually wear chef’s whites. Onwuachi, who is small and a bit boyish (“Booyakasha!,” he hollered, as he bounded down the steps to the basement prep kitchen), favors baseball caps and vividly patterned button-downs. He wears thick-framed glasses, which give him a slightly nerdy, erudite air, and he’s heavily tattooed. For a while, he had the word “patience” inked on his right forearm, but he had it removed and replaced with an elaborate depiction of the ingredients for gumbo. A jumble of text on his left arm includes the words “New York City Kid,” in script; a large “X,” as in Malcolm; and the name of his ten-year-old niece, Madisyn, in her own handwriting.
His look is fitting for a restaurant that feels more like a night club than like a stuffy house of fine dining. The space has floor-to-ceiling windows that are hung with curtains of slinky gold chains. Music—hip-hop and R. & B., much of it from the late nineties and early two-thousands—is played at a volume that can make conversation challenging, or at least athletic. In the first few weeks after Tatiana opened, when the staff was still getting its footing and tables weren’t turning over fast enough to keep up with reservations, Onwuachi poured free tequila shots for waiting guests.
“You’ll see some people walk in, and you see the surprise on their face,” Mouhamadou Diop, one of the restaurant’s managers, said. He recounted an evening when an older white woman had wandered in after a Mostly Mozart concert. She asked what music was playing—it was Cardi B. “She said, ‘I like this song,’ ” Diop told me. “And I said, ‘Let’s dance, then.’ ”
Last March, Pete Wells, the Times restaurant critic, awarded Tatiana three stars, extraordinary for a rookie restaurant. Then came an even bigger shock: in April, when Wells published a list of the hundred best restaurants in New York, Tatiana held the No. 1 spot, ahead of Atomix, Le Bernardin, Via Carota, and other redoubtables. “We needed Tatiana. We needed a kitchen that puts Caribbean and African and Black American cooking, too often kept in the city’s margins, right at center stage,” he wrote. “And after quarantines and masks and distancing and sundry social traumas, we needed a party.”
“I think we should break up.”
Cartoon by Sofia Warren
When I asked Onwuachi if he was surprised to have topped the list, he smirked. He knew the restaurant was a hit; it had been packed since pretty much the week it opened. But, he said, when a friend had sent him the link to the list on the day it was published, with a text that said, “Boom,” he’d instinctively started scrolling to the bottom: “When I got to one hundred, I thought, Oh, I must have skipped it. And then I got back up to ten, and I was, like, ‘No fucking way. No fucking way. No fucking way!’ ”
Onwuachi had learned to temper his expectations when it came to establishment recognition. He’d attended the prestigious Culinary Institute of America, in Hyde Park, New York, and worked as a kitchen stage, or intern, at Per Se. His first job out of school was at Eleven Madison Park. But he became disillusioned by the racism he experienced in fine-dining kitchens. At Eleven Madison Park, he and the few other Black cooks on staff were overlooked and even stymied by their white supervisor, he wrote in his 2019 memoir, “Notes from a Young Black Chef,” which he co-authored with the food writer Joshua David Stein. One day, Onwuachi raised concerns about alienating Black patrons. His boss laughed and said, “No Black people eat here anyway.” Onwuachi left the job not long afterward.
From there, his career proceeded in fits and starts. In 2015, when he was twenty-five, he competed on “Top Chef,” placing sixth. (His downfall was serving store-bought frozen waffles with his fried chicken.) The following year, he opened his first restaurant, the Shaw Bijou, in Washington, D.C. In some ways, it was a prototype for Tatiana, with an autobiographical tasting menu and an opulent dining room. It closed after just two and a half months, thwarted by flighty investors and harsh judgment from the press. The food critic for the Washington Post, Tom Sietsema, wrote that he had left feeling unimpressed and underfed. His review ended, “Pizza, anyone?”
It seemed that Onwuachi had finally found his footing with Kith/Kin, a restaurant in D.C.’s InterContinental Hotel, which earned him the James Beard Foundation’s Rising Star Chef of the Year award in 2019. (Previous honorees included Grant Achatz and David Chang.) But Onwuachi walked away from the restaurant in 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, after the hotel refused his request for a share of ownership. He relocated to Los Angeles, unsure if he’d ever return to the kitchen, thinking he might become an actor instead. In L.A., he took classes, went to auditions, and eventually landed a small part in “Sugar,” a movie about social-media influencers who become drug smugglers.
Onwuachi got a call from Lincoln Center in early 2022. In recent years, the institution had declared its commitment to expanding its programming, including food, beyond predictable Eurocentric fare. It was looking for someone to helm a new restaurant in the complex. Leah Johnson, a Lincoln Center executive, whose paternal grandparents were from Barbados, was delighted by the Caribbean elements of the dinner that Onwuachi prepared for the search committee, but she was also struck by his rainbow-cookie panna cotta, which, she told me, “tasted exactly like the cookies I grew up eating at Veniero’s”—the hundred-and-thirty-year-old Italian bakery on East Eleventh Street. The committee offered Onwuachi the space, and accepted his terms: he would be not a chef for hire but, instead, an equity partner in the business.
Onwuachi was born on Long Island and raised in the Bronx. His parents, Jewel Robinson and Patrick Onwuachi, split up when he was three years old. Robinson, the daughter of a chef, was an avid home cook, and, after losing her job as an accountant, she opened a catering business, serving the Creole staples of her childhood. Five-year-old Kwame and ten-year-old Tatiana were often enlisted to help in the kitchen. In his memoir, Onwuachi recalled that his mother struggled with money, but that the business, whose clients came to include Queen Latifah and the hip-hop trio Naughty by Nature, satisfied her appetite for “glamorous adventure.” He wrote, “She’d bring a change of clothes to a gala she was catering and, after her shift was done, slip in as a guest.”
Onwuachi lived with Robinson in a cramped apartment, and saw his father mostly on weekends. Patrick, who worked as a construction project manager, took his son to the batting cages and on vacations, but he could be abusive. (“My job as his dad was to prepare him for the world,” Patrick said.) Around the age of ten, Onwuachi began to act out. “I was a bad kid,” he told me. Robinson sent him to Nigeria to stay with his grandfather P. Chike Onwuachi, an Igbo chief and a luminary of the Pan-African movement who taught for many years at Howard University, so that he might “learn respect.”
What Robinson had billed as a single summer stretched to two years, during which Onwuachi lived without municipal electricity or water, and learned to raise livestock and grow vegetables. It’s an experience that he references frequently, not only because it acquainted him so thoroughly with his heritage but also because it taught him at an early age how to adapt. “I was speaking pidgin within a couple months,” he recalled. But when he returned to the Bronx his rebellious streak flared up again. He was kicked out of Catholic school for antagonizing teachers and classmates, and he joined a gang at the Webster Houses, where his best friend lived. He worked at McDonald’s, for $7.25 an hour, until he realized that he could make more money selling weed, an enterprise he continued in college, at the University of Bridgeport.
There, Onwuachi’s hustle caught up with him: before his first year was through, he was expelled for failing a drug test. He went to live with his mother, who had moved to Louisiana, and embarked on a “sad-ass parade” of menial jobs: as a prep cook for Robinson, who was an executive chef at a catering company; as a dishwasher; and as a server at a barbecue restaurant. Things began to look up when he got a gig cooking on a cleanup ship for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Onwuachi seemed to have little in common with the ship’s mostly white “back-country Louisiana boys”—until he started to make the food that they had all grown up eating. Before long, he was put in charge of the kitchen.
In 2011, he enrolled at the C.I.A., where he dutifully learned the foundations of classical French cooking. He scraped together tuition money by running a catering company in the city, making burritos at a local Mexican restaurant, and selling ramen, boba tea, and pork buns behind the student rec center. (Not technically allowed, but the administration looked the other way.) The C.I.A. offered no classes on Afro-Caribbean cuisine, but for a work-study program—a sort of free-choice elective that tasked him with preparing lunch for fellow-students—he made dishes from various countries in Africa, fermenting his own Ethiopian injera and blending his own spices.
Onwuachi’s formal training inspired him to exalt Afro-Caribbean ingredients and techniques, rather than to simply plug Afro-Caribbean flavors into European formulas. The building blocks of his cooking, as laid out in his cookbook “My America,” include browning—a caramel made with canola oil and sugar, used in the Caribbean as a coloring agent and a sweetener—and Southern-style “house spice,” a customizable mixture that goes in everything from eggs to the flour for fried chicken. He treats these with the same uncompromising rigor that Paul Bocuse, patron saint of the C.I.A., might apply to mirepoix and hollandaise.
When I visited Tatiana, Onwuachi returned again and again to the basement prep kitchen to inspect the minutest of activities, giving cooks exacting instructions on how thick to cut the short ribs for his pastrami suya, a recipe that combines Jewish deli meat and Nigerian barbecue. My favorite dish on the menu was a big bowl of Jamaican-style braised oxtail, served with a smaller bowl of rice and peas. The carrots on top of the rich, sticky segments of bone-in meat were Thumbelina, an adorable heirloom variety, and they were expertly “turned”—kitchen-speak for peeled and cut. The dish also incorporated perfect orbs of firm but tender chayote squash, lily-pad-like nasturtium leaves, and carefully sliced chives. It was beautiful, but it still managed to look, and, more important, to taste, like something you’d eat at home, or at a family restaurant in the Bronx.
Onwuachi’s work has been lauded for its specificity, for its fidelity to the places he comes from. In some ways, his success has uprooted him. He has the blinkered air of someone who is overscheduled; in the time I spent with him, he was never quite able to remember what he’d done the day before, and was constantly checking the calendar on his phone. He travels frequently, keeping places in midtown Manhattan and West Hollywood. But he’s long had a nuanced understanding of what gatekeepers in the food world like about his story. Of his admissions interview at the C.I.A., he wrote, “I cast myself partly as a lost wretch who had been saved (glossing over the exact nature of my transgressions at Bridgeport), partly as a one-man show of the black diasporic experience, and totally as a hustler.”
Still, he bristles at being stereotyped. Before “Top Chef,” Onwuachi worked briefly for Dinner Lab, a startup that operated a members-only supper club in cities across the U.S. When the founder, who was white, asked him to cook Senegalese food for a fund-raiser, Onwuachi politely declined. (He had no particular connection to Senegal.) In their initial pitch, the investors behind the Shaw Bijou suggested that he offer “upscale riffs” on Southern cooking. Again, he declined, for fear of “becoming an actor in the long and ugly play of degrading black culture for the benefit of white people,” he wrote.
His project, instead, is to develop a varied, idiosyncratic Black culinary idiom—and to bring it into the mainstream. Onwuachi seems to revel in the contradictions of his position—blaring “music with the curse words” at the home of the New York Philharmonic—but he’s savvy about operating within the system. When I asked if he ever wanted to take a more radical approach, he was unequivocal. “I’m a businessman,” he said. “I’m an artist, sure, but I employ fifty people. I’m playing my fucking music that I wanna play, we’re putting oxtails on the menu, I’m putting a Black woman’s name on the side of Lincoln Center. I feel like I’m being as radical as I want to be.”
In late August, Onwuachi flew to D.C., and then drove to a small town called Middleburg, at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia’s hunt country, an area that has long drawn élite weekenders from Washington. He was there for the third annual Family Reunion, a food festival that he started with Sheila Johnson, a co-founder of Black Entertainment Television and the first Black American woman to become a billionaire. In the late nineties, Johnson bought a horse farm in Middleburg. (Her young daughter was an aspiring equestrian.) One day, she noticed that a gun shop in the village center had a Confederate flag hanging in the window, so she bought the building that housed it. Later, she bought hundreds of acres of land nearby and placed most of it under conservation. In 2013, she opened a luxury resort, called the Salamander, on a small remaining parcel.
Johnson and Onwuachi met in 2019, at a conference in the Bahamas. “I was so intrigued by him,” Johnson said. “He was kind of introverted, so I got him out on the dance floor. He couldn’t put two feet together. I said, ‘I’m gonna teach you how to dance.’ ” After Onwuachi left Kith/Kin, Johnson proposed that they work together. He conceived of the Family Reunion, a four-day gathering of Black chefs and food-industry professionals, plus enthusiasts who wanted to mingle with them, at the Salamander. The partnership has proved fruitful: since its inception, the Family Reunion has more than tripled in size, and next year Onwuachi and Johnson will open a restaurant together in the former Mandarin Oriental hotel in D.C., which Johnson recently added to her portfolio.
This year’s Family Reunion was a Who’s Who of the Black American culinary world. The legendary pitmasters Bryan Furman and Rodney Scott, who had driven their rigs from Georgia and South Carolina, respectively, gave master classes on barbecue. A group of Caribbean American chefs from all over the U.S. retrieved crackly-skinned whole pigs and spatchcocked chickens from a ditch that had been dug into the Salamander’s lawn in order to illustrate the history of jerk, which originated, in Jamaica, with Indigenous people and Maroons—Africans who had escaped slavery—stealthily roasting wild game in pits. Virginia Ali, the eighty-nine-year-old co-founder of Ben’s Chili Bowl, a D.C. restaurant famous for feeding civil-rights activists during the 1968 riots, provided half-smoke sausages and hot dogs for a cookout-themed buffet.
“You look wonderful,” Ali told Onwuachi on the first day of the festival, straining to be heard over a band rehearsing at top volume. “Hard work agrees with you.”
“It does, right?” he said. “I think I’m addicted to it.”
Onwuachi spent the weekend in a state of perpetual motion. He roamed the Salamander’s grounds, sometimes in a golf cart, with a demeanor that was part summer-camp director, part pastor, part door-to-door salesman. He greeted guests with a cheerful, if slightly canned, “Welcome home!” and doled out hugs and collegial shoulder squeezes. In many ways, the event was an advertisement for him: its full title—“Kwame Onwuachi Presents the Family Reunion”—was even printed on the tags of the T-shirts and hoodies for sale at the merch table, which was staffed by his mother, his sister, a former babysitter, and two childhood friends.
Much of the time, he was trailed by a documentary film crew from Bronxville, a production company that he co-founded with the filmmaker Randy McKinnon, who adapted “Notes from a Young Black Chef” into a screenplay. (It was acquired by A24.) Hovering close behind, carrying a tote bag full of bottled water, was a strikingly tall young man with his hair in twists, whose name was Destined One Leverette. The Family Reunion arranges room and board for volunteers, and Leverette insisted that he had applied for a position—yet the organizers had no record of it. He’d come, on his own dime, from Birmingham, Alabama, where he worked in the kitchen of a chain restaurant called Pappadeaux Seafood Kitchen. He was nineteen. Onwuachi said that he’d taken pity on Leverette: “He’s, like, ‘I’m ready to work.’ I’m, like, ‘Where’s your chef coat?’ He’s, like, ‘I don’t have it.’ I was, like, ‘Well, then, you’re going to just do whatever is needed.’ ”
Onwuachi had learned at the first Family Reunion that he couldn’t host the event and cook for it at the same time. (His eyes widened when I asked if he’d be doing both.) The task of schmoozing with guests suited him, but he kept a close eye on the food and the service. He became noticeably irked when he saw a snaking, slow-moving queue for Scott and Furman’s barbecue. In an instant, he switched modes, suddenly chillier and more mercenary as he summoned an assembly line for pre-portioning plates. Servers tensed and hustled as Onwuachi shouted directions and called for extra hands. By the start of the evening’s late-night R. & B. karaoke party (dress code: all white), he was once again the gregarious m.c., wearing silk pajamas and revving up the crowd.
The festival’s corporate underwriters included Coca-Cola, United Airlines, and Wells Fargo, the last of which hosted a talk on “elevating Black wealth.” But what might have felt like a cynical commercial exercise was infused with a sense of purpose and an unmanufactured joy. During a surprise performance by the R. & B. singer Joe, Onwuachi wrapped his arms around Johnson as they swayed to the music. At lunch on the final day, Onwuachi invited Leverette onstage and introduced him to the crowd as “a young man who showed up on the doorstep of the Family Reunion.” Afterward, Leverette was rushed by well-wishers offering jobs and, in one case, cash: a generous stranger wired him five hundred dollars. (Leverette later admitted that he’d fibbed about applying to volunteer at the festival; he had, in fact, just shown up.)
That evening, after the première of a Lexus commercial that featured Onwuachi driving around Los Angeles, he and Johnson presented a lifetime-achievement award to Jessica B. Harris, the renowned culinary historian. In her acceptance speech, Harris called Onwuachi “the linchpin, a pivot point”—a connector of people and traditions. A few weeks later, when I spoke to Harris by phone, she noted the “dynastic” way that Onwuachi came into the food world, through his mother’s career. “His food embodies his stories, and his stories are really personal,” she said. “There are a lot of places that tell stories that are researched.”
Onwuachi’s staff at Tatiana see themselves reflected in his food. The majority of the restaurant’s cooks and servers are people of color. “It’s like the Family Reunion—Black people just come,” he told me, laughing. The back-of-house environment is one of camaraderie and friendly competition. As I watched line cooks set up their stations, an intern pulled something out of a cabinet. “Why is there a bag of . . . Lay’s?,” she asked, holding up an industrial-sized bag of potato chips and looking genuinely befuddled. “Oh, that was for Jay-Z, but he didn’t eat them,” Onwuachi explained. “We’ll have them after service.”
The chips had been intended for osetra caviar, two tins of which had also gone uneaten. Onwuachi doesn’t usually offer specials at Tatiana, but that morning he’d started to think about how he could sell what was left. For a jerk-cod entrée, the pastry team was making corn bread; maybe he’d serve squares of it topped with the caviar and crème fraîche. By the time the front-of-house staff arrived, the idea had evolved. “Corn-bread pudding,” he announced. “With a quenelle of caviar. That’s more interesting to me.”
He bloomed curry powder in butter in a pot on the stove, then crumbled in the corn bread and added heavy cream and oat milk. When it had cooked down into a smooth, thick paste, he tasted it. “Fucking great!” he declared. “That’s fun.” Instead of crème fraîche, he decided to top it with the white sauce that he makes for his halal-cart-inspired shawarma chicken. In the finished dish, the gentle heat of the curry and the sweetness of the warm pudding were offset by the cool, tangy white sauce and a salty plink of caviar at the end of each bite.
“No! Chef, no way!” Chase Ford, one of the line cooks, said as he tried the pudding. “I got chills.” It tasted, he said, exactly like a cornmeal porridge that his mother, who is Jamaican, had made when he was a kid. He remembered eating it sitting in her lap. ♦
An earlier version of this article misidentified an influential chef at the Culinary Institute of America.
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