Yes, Chef (28 page)

To be honest, though, only one phrase in his juvenile tirade unsettled me: when he called me a black bastard. Actually, I didn’t give a fuck about the bastard part. But the black part pissed me off.

Restaurant kitchens will always have an element of playground justice to them. Big guys will pick on little guys, and new kids will be teased for whatever makes them stick out from the rest. If there’s a weak spot, somebody will find it. Up to a point, that kind of bullying is built into the hierarchy of the kitchen; as an underling, you deal with it or find a different job. But what I finally realized in London was that I wasn’t an underling anymore. I didn’t have to take that kind of bullshit. There was no action I needed to take; I didn’t need to talk things through with Gordon Ramsay and come to a
kumbaya
moment.
In the years since, I haven’t felt a need to make myself available when a mutual friend brought Gordon into my restaurant, or go out of my way to be his friend. I have better things to do.

The sad part is, there are so few black chefs out there whom I could have called about Gordon Ramsay that would have understood the situation. Who would I have called? In New York City, I could think of one person: Patrick Clark, the second-generation chef from the Bronx who, if he hadn’t been felled by a heart problem at forty-two, would probably be running a number of restaurants right now. In the few years I knew him, Patrick taught me a lot about how to navigate our profession as a black man.

In our earliest interactions, it always seemed like he was determined to ignore me. I remember Håkan taking me to a James Beard House event shortly after we’d gotten our three-star review, and when Patrick and I crossed paths, he looked right through me. By then, I’d learned some of the subtleties of black American communication, and one was to give a slight nod to any black person you encountered, especially if blacks were underrepresented in the room. Just a simple head nod was enough; it was a way of saying, “I see you, even if we’re almost invisible here.” But Patrick looked right through me. I was thrown off by this, especially since he was well known for mentoring aspiring black chefs. Patrick was also generous toward charitable causes, and many of those had a specific agenda to help people of color: He cooked for a scholarship fund for African American chefs; he cooked for Meals on Wheels; and he served as a mentor for the Careers through Culinary Arts Program (C-CAP), a program in public high schools that rigorously prepared mostly minority students for positions in the culinary field.

Patrick ignored me for the same reason Bobby Flay turned down my request for a favor: I was too new on the scene. It wasn’t yet clear whether I belonged. A year later, when Patrick decided I was in it for the long run, he embraced me, calling me up to join him at events, getting me hooked into C-CAP (where I now sit on the board of directors), and bypassing the subtle nod for an energetic handshake or one of his signature bear hugs.

“Chef,” he’d say, a big smile spreading out under the canopy of his mustache. “How’s it going?”

Over time, I came to see that first snub as Patrick treating me the same way he would have treated a fledgling white chef. He was putting my experience before my color, which was a sign of respect.

Ironically, in many ways, the restaurant world has always stood out for its tolerance. We are one of the least homophobic professions you’ll find, and you can’t go into a New York kitchen without finding three or four languages spoken. We mix religions, ages, and political views. But blacks, and especially American blacks, are still shamefully underrepresented at the high end of the business. I do see some progress, though. More blacks are finding their way into the fine-dining world nowadays. Govind Armstrong, Marvin Woods, Roblé Ali, the Neelys, and Robert Gadsby all have mighty followings, and sommelier Brian Duncan and beer master Garrett Oliver are regular presences at the major food festivals and galas. But we’re still few and far between, just the opposite of where we stand in the world of fast food restaurants … on both sides of the counter. And when Gordon Ramsey called me a “black bastard,” it felt like he wanted to keep it that way.

I
’M VERY MUCH AN IMMIGRANT
when it comes to American racial history: I come from a European place, and don’t have the sophistication about race and identity that my American-born friends have; you can only learn so much from MTV. But I have lived here for fifteen years and, over time, I’ve developed several theories as to why kitchens remain so white:

The Nest Egg Theory
: Restaurants are a nickel-and-dime, low-margin business; I learned from Håkan early on that you can’t stay afloat if you don’t watch every penny. But to get into a restaurant on the ownership level requires money, big money, especially if you’re trying to set up in a posh area where real estate prices can eat you alive. The fact is, blacks in America still don’t have the financial resources whites have, and even the young black cats on Wall Street
who
have
made it big usually aren’t holding on to the kind of crazy wealth that goes back more than one generation. How likely are they to back an investment as risky as a restaurant?

The “I Didn’t Iron Clothes So You Could Flip Burgers” Theory
: Many of my middle- and upper-middle-class black friends have parents who had few professional options outside of the service industry, or who sent their kids to college by working as maids, porters, and janitors. The thought that their kid would take all those years of sweat equity and turn it back into the service industry is beyond inconceivable, so these parents have steered their kids as far away from that path as possible. A bit of good news on this front: My friend Richard Grausman, who founded C-CAP, sees that attitude starting to melt away, largely because of high-profile platforms like the Food Network, which has made being a successful chef more visible and respectable. He wouldn’t go as far as to say the floodgates have opened in the years since the early nineties when he started C-CAP, but he does believe there’s been a shift.

The Cost of Integration Theory
: No thinking person would see the desegregation that came out of the civil rights movement as a bad thing, but when I talk to older black people, I realize that certain opportunities did disappear when black-owned businesses that served exclusively black communities began competing in the open marketplace. Pull out some old photos of Harlem and, everywhere you look, there are diners and soul food shacks, seafood restaurants and steakhouses. In the 1970s and 1980s, chains came into those black communities and it became very difficult for families to hold on to these small mom-and-pop restaurant businesses.

The Geographical Racism Theory
: When I moved to Harlem in 2005, I noticed how many tour buses would come through my neighborhood, white faces peering out the windows, stopping only to duck into Sylvia’s for an oversize plate of soul food. Beyond Sylvia’s, Harlem is just not a destination for the people who go to Gramercy Tavern and Nobu and, as a result, the restaurant scene suffers. I never saw people catching a cab twenty blocks
uptown
for a nice dinner, and yet
they’d think nothing of hopping down from the Upper West Side to the Village for a meal. (Look, when a lot of the Manhattan maps you can buy cut off at the top of Central Park—literally don’t even bother to show Harlem—you know there’s a disconnect.) I don’t lay the entire problem at the feet of racism, but it would be naive to say it isn’t a factor. How else did we come up with a vocabulary—not just in America but in French and Swiss kitchens—where
schwarze
and
nègre
are still synonyms for “peon”?

The Ethnic Food Theory
: In the 1990s and 2000s, there were two restaurants in New York that took cuisines—Latin and Indian—that were for many years relegated to a lower-level “ethnic” status in American dining, and elevated them to the top. They have both now fallen victim to the economic downturn, but not before good, long runs that made their mark. With Patria, chef Douglas Rodriguez cemented the concept of a Nuevo Latino cuisine that didn’t rely on cartoonish themes and melted cheese to draw people in. In Tabla, Floyd Cardoz did something similar with Indian food, taking it way beyond samosas and curry. I see a similar opportunity to preserve, protect, and enhance African American cooking. We have amazing regional diversity in American cuisine, and much of it is connected to the black community, whether it’s Creole or Cajun, Memphis’s dry-rub BBQ or North Carolina’s vinegar-based sauce. As a nation, though, we don’t embrace it. At least, not the way we should.

W
HEN
I
FIRST STARTED TO GAIN
some notice in the United States, I wasn’t sure how to handle other people’s desire to categorize me as a black chef. I was uncomfortable with it, resentful of having to discuss it, and worried it would define me. I turned down invitations to events or requests for interviews that seemed geared exclusively toward black audiences. But the more I traveled around the country, the more I came to see my race as an opportunity rather than a burden. Part of that came from meeting the few younger blacks who’d be in audiences at cooking demonstrations. They’d show up at a shopping mall
demo or a cookbook signing, and I could tell they were rooting for me even if they’d never tasted my food. I felt the pride they had for me as a black person in a very white industry. I may never be a household name, but I will always remember how inspired I was by my earliest African American fans, how hopeful they made
me
feel about my own life’s prospects.

Now that I have the power, however modest, to influence people’s career decisions, I go to events and always feel that I am representing my race. Sometimes the pressure of being one of a few black faces in the industry is immense; every day, I tell myself, Don’t screw up. I have done what I do for a long time so I am prepared and I know I won’t be letting people down, food-wise. But at the same time, I also know I am on display, and that can be inhibiting. My actions have repercussions that go beyond me. When Barack Obama was running for president, I heard people complain that he wasn’t being aggressive or tough enough in his stances. But I thoroughly understood the counterargument, which was that any sign of extreme assertiveness on his part would result in people accusing him of being an angry black man … and then his message would get totally lost. On my own, much more modest scale, I have had the same concern. My margin for error is much smaller.

After Nils Norén spent a decade with me as my right hand at Aquavit, he left to teach and became the French Culinary Institute’s vice president of culinary and pastry arts; now he works for me again and is a key part of my team. Needless to say, when he calls, I show up. I was speaking to his students several years ago, explaining how I’d made a career of chasing flavors and how my travels around the world showed up in my food. The students were enthusiastic and engaged, and when it came time for questions, I called on a young black guy whose dreads were held in an enormous knitted cap striped with red, green, and black.

“What are some of the modern cooking trends in Africa?” he asked.

My mind was blank.

I had no answer. I locked my smile in place as I babbled through a meaningless observation or two—I’d, uh, been to Morocco several times and, umm, my memory of it was that even the high-end restaurants showcased only traditional recipes. I also knew about Ethiopia’s chicken stew,
doro wat, from
going out to New York’s Ethiopian spots with Mes, and that dish, too, struck me as homespun, as traditional as the meatballs and herring my Swedish grandmother would make. I fumbled around and talked about tradition … and tradition. I got away with my answers—at least the student didn’t challenge me—but I felt as if I’d been slapped into awareness. I felt unsettled. Why
didn’t
I know more about African food? Why was I so clueless about Ethiopian cuisine, when it was the country of my birth? How, in more than a decade of chasing flavors, could I have overlooked an entire continent so completely?

R
UTH
R
EICHL, THEN THE EDITOR OF
Gourmet
MAGAZINE, CALLED ME AT
work one afternoon.

“Marcus,” she said, “I don’t think you’re going to be able to resist this.”

The year was 1999 and a young journalist named Lolis Eric Elie had pitched a story idea to
Gourmet
: He wanted to do a feature on me, but he didn’t want to rehash the same old stories about my Swedish upbringing and my arrival at Aquavit. He wanted to go with me to Ethiopia, to look at its food through my eyes, eyes that hadn’t seen that country for thirty years.

Ruth was right. I couldn’t resist this. I’d be gone for nearly a
month, the longest I’d been away from the restaurant since becoming the executive chef.

“Of course you’ll go,” Håkan said when I told him I was debating over whether to be away for so long. “You have to.”

We landed at Bole International Airport in the capital, Addis Ababa, the city where my mother had died, and I spent the next two weeks falling in love a hundred times a day. Ethiopia has faced terrible struggles and still does, but its ancient landscape and the warmth of the people were unbowed. My birth nation is sometimes called the land of “thirteen months of sunshine,” and it was true: One crystalline day followed another. Decommissioned Russian taxicabs rattled down the city’s main boulevards and battled not just other drivers but herds of goats and sheep and cows, the livestock completely unthreatened by our smoke-belching vehicles. The smell of freshly roasting coffee beans poured out from each little shop, even ones with paintings of computers or hairstyles in their windows. Reddish dust kicked up everywhere, and coated everything. The colorfully trimmed cotton scarves and shawls that covered every man and woman’s shoulders were often used as masks, held in place by a hand.

In those two weeks, I saw my own face reflected a thousand times over, which not only gave me a sense of belonging unlike I’d had anywhere else in my life, but also a deep reminder of how fate had steered my life on such a different course. I’d see an eleven-year-old version of me with a cardboard tray of tissues and gum set up at an intersection. I’d see my own face dashing into coffee shops, my own hands using a branch to sweep the sidewalk in front of a butcher shop. I’d see an old and bent version of me, wearing a blanketlike
gabi
shawl in the cool of the early morning, his hand cupped and extended as he chanted his plea for money.
“Birr, birr, birr.”