Yes, Chef (30 page)

When I came back from my trip to Ethiopia, I went straight there, only to find that Africa was almost nonexistent in this world. I could find an entire wall on Italy, with whole shelves devoted to each of its regions, and endless rows on France and Spain and Mexico. The Africa section was one Time-Life book from the 1950s and a handful of wonderful but tradition-focused books by the culinary historian Jessica B. Harris. Where was contemporary Africa? Where were the recipes?

As far as I could tell, it was invisible, so I figured if I didn’t do something about that, no one would. At that moment, the scope of my next book project expanded, launching me into a seven-year effort to take the pulse of a continent through its food. I would eventually
travel from Cairo to Johannesburg, collecting stories and recipes, learning new techniques and ingredients, and then filtering them through my own palate. The result was
The Soul of a New Cuisine
. I covered a lot of ground—thousands and thousands of miles—but I don’t pretend to have said all there is to say.

I had multiple goals with
Soul
. One was to introduce Africans to each other’s cuisines by compiling and delivering a comprehensive array of authentic recipes from all over the continent. In my travels, I noticed a separation from country to country when it came to food. I didn’t see Nigerian families saying, “Hmm … today we are going to cook Mozambican.” My book could be a way for fellow Africans to look at each other through their foods. I also wanted to show people in the United States that Africa offers an enormous breadth of cuisines that not only have a relationship to foods we already know—foie gras, okra, and jerk seasoning, to take just a few—but that can be made in American kitchens. Finally, I wanted to open up a dialogue between Africa and the contemporary fine-dining world. On this point I knew that the chefs would be curious—we are by nature an inquisitive bunch, and they would respond to new and interesting ingredients, just as they had to wasabi or salsa. This was trickier territory because as soon as you talked about Africa and food, many Americans only associated the continent with famine. I wanted to go beyond that stereotype, to recognize that every country has a middle class, every country has rituals and celebrations around food. Every country has a cuisine.

O
N THE NIGHT OF
S
EPTEMBER 10, 2001
, Nils and I were at the Observatory Hotel in Sydney, Australia, preparing for a promotion the next day. I’d gone to bed, but Nils was having a beer with the Observatory’s chef, Jimmy, in the hotel bar. The TV was flickering away. “What movie is this?” Jimmy asked Nils.

It wasn’t a movie. It was live footage. Two planes had slammed into the World Trade Center.

Nils woke me up with the news, and all we could do was watch the footage, over and over, feeling helpless and wondering how we were ever going to get home. I had done a demonstration down at the towers just a week before; I knew the cooks who died. We caught the next available plane, ten days later, and came home to find our world had changed. The city was in shock. Everything was uncertain.

Aquavit and my first casual restaurant, AQ Café, got hit hard, as did all restaurants in the city. I felt guilty for stressing out about that, given the magnitude of what other people had lost, but Håkan and I had a business to run, and we knew from the start that we were going to have to lay off a good chunk of the staff if we were going to survive. I’m OK with firing people when they fuck up, but canning them when they’ve done nothing wrong? That was painful.

The mood of the city was glum for months; the papers reported one bleak, heartbreaking story after another; very few people were in the mood for a night out. Tourists and business travelers disappeared. One day here, next day gone. In the kitchen at Aquavit, we started shrinking shifts to avoid a second round of layoffs, something I’m proud to say the staff supported. And that was the silver lining. The entire city may have been depressed, but I’d never seen such kindness and camaraderie, such goodwill in the air.

People in the restaurant world often share information with each other. They commiserate, bitch and moan, gossip. They’ll recommend a new purveyor or warn against a sloppy plumber. They’ll share crazy theories about why business is slow. But no one was about to say a negative word about the sudden downturn: We all knew we should be happy to be alive. Every day, Håkan and I sat down to scrutinize our game plan. What if we took two items off each menu? What if we featured pork belly and other less expensive cuts of meat? What if we skipped the morels? We looked at a giant spreadsheet of the projected costs for the next six months, and it wasn’t pretty. One number stood out from all the rest, and Håkan tapped it with the tip of his pen. It was our rent.

“Detta måste gå,”
he said. This has to go. Right then we decided
to move, painful as it would be to leave the elegant townhouse that had been so closely associated with Aquavit’s identity. I would have to give up my post as mayor of Fifty-fourth Street, but there was no room for sentimentality at this point. There was only room for surviving. Midtown may not have been as ravaged as downtown, but it was still a no man’s land. An expensive no-man’s-land.

By the summer of 2002, business finally began to pick up a bit, and we were cautiously looking forward to the fall season, which brings bigger crowds and a back-from-vacation revenue bump for restaurants. Things were looking up again. In addition to working on my Africa cookbook, I’d recently formed a consulting company with Håkan called Townhouse Restaurant Group to field the calls we’d both been getting. We made plans to open up Aquavits in Stockholm and Tokyo.

Then, on another bright and crisp September day, this time in 2002, one of our cooks accidentally knocked over a pot of clarified butter. It was in the morning, about nine, and Nils was coming in the door of the kitchen just as Toshi, the cook who’d knocked over the pot, and two other prep cooks were running out. Nils made a valiant effort to get the fire under control, and was just about to pull the lever for the room’s fire suppression sprinklers when the firemen arrived.

We would have had to close down for a few days if the suppressant had been released. We would have done a massive cleanup, thrown away whatever bins and boxes got hit by the fire-retarding chemicals, but then we would have opened again good as new. Instead, before Nils could hit the switch, the firemen took their axes to the central exhaust hood. The custom-fabricated, weeks-to-replace, incredibly expensive exhaust hood. The exhaust hood we could not function without. We were shut down for a month. When we opened back up, the world went to hell again: President Bush launched a war in Iraq. It may sound selfish to focus on how a war affected business, but in the restaurant world things like this can make or break you. It’s why I have to scratch my head when I hear people talking about “celebrity” chefs, as if they have it easy. Most people have no idea what a
roller coaster the restaurant world can be, and I don’t know one chef—celebrity or not—who doesn’t have to get his hands dirty with the gritty realities of the business to stay afloat. I’m not talking about the manufactured theatrics you see on reality shows; I’m talking about the responsibility of dozens of livelihoods resting on your shoulders and the really fine line between profitability and disaster. We had September 11, then a war, then the fire, then another war … things were not good.

Then came a much-needed sign that the work we were doing
was
good—and what’s more, that it mattered.

M
Y HEART WAS IN MY THROAT
. Actually, it was in my ears, too, pounding so hard I could barely hear what Lidia Bastianich, the legendary chef and owner of Felidia, was saying. Lidia, as she’s known to everyone including strangers, was announcing my category at the 2003 James Beard Foundation Awards in New York City. This shouldn’t have fazed me. I’d competed in front of large crowds before. I was used to competition. But this was different. I was nervous. A few months earlier,
Time
magazine had referred to the Beard Awards as “the Oscars of the food world,” and this year, I’d been nominated—along with four major players in New York—for the title of the city’s Best Chef.

In the micro-world of New York restaurants, this was kind of a big deal.

I suppose my nervousness came from being caught off guard. I’d been so preoccupied with digging out of one hole after another that I hadn’t stopped to think much about this moment. I’d had to rent a tux that afternoon—a stiff polyester number that moved like it had a mind of its own—and hustled to get there on time. But now I was in a room with my idols and my peers, and it finally dawned on me that I was being considered as one of them. In my category, Mario Batali had won the year before for Babbo, his lusty take on Italian food. The decade of winners before Batali was an all-star list that included Gray
Kunz (Lespinasse), Jean-Georges Vongerichten (JoJo), Eric Ripert (Le Bernadin), Charlie Palmer (Aureole), and Lidia, the night’s host. The 2003 field was just as deep: Rocco DiSpirito (Union Pacific), Odette Fada (San Domenico), Alex Lee (Daniel), and David Pasternack (Esca).

I was surrounded by some of the most talented chefs in the world, but I couldn’t help thinking of who
wasn’t
in the room: my grandmother, Helga, the first person to show me the possibilities of food, and my father, Lennart. She’d been gone ten years and he’d been gone seven, but I missed them both every day. In every dish I created and every decision I made, I was living out the lessons they taught me. All I wanted was for them to be here, in this moment, with me.

I had spoken to my mother earlier that afternoon. She called from Göteborg because she’d heard from Anna that I was up for, as she put it, “some kind of award.” Neither of us spoke of
Mormor
or
Pappa
.

“Vad kommer du att ha på mig?”
she asked. What will you wear?

“Oroa dig inte,”
I reassured her. Don’t worry.
“Ingen bryr sig. Det handlar om mat.”
No one cares. It’s all about the food.

“Bara vara bekväm, okej?”
Just be comfortable, OK?

I was the farthest thing from comfortable.

Lydia opened the envelope and announced the winner.

“Marcus Samuelsson, Aquavit.”

The winner’s medallion was solid brass, hung on a wide yellow ribbon. When Lidia draped it around my neck, all I could think was: It’s so damn heavy. And why shouldn’t it be? Its namesake was the father of American gastronomy, the man who introduced middle- and upper-middle-class Americans to French cuisine in the 1950s, raising the standards and expectations around American fine dining. He was an extraordinary mentor for up-and-coming chefs, and he gave back to the community in a big way: Along with food critic Gael Greene, he started Citymeals-on-Wheels, a program that had come to provide millions of meals to New York’s homebound elderly each year.

As I looked out at the audience and heard the applause, I felt a strong connection to the past, a sense of the roots that had given life
to the food and flavors I create in my cooking. I was born in Ethiopia, raised in Sweden, trained in Europe, but now, like Beard, I was American.

To be honored this way among my peers was incredible, and would only expand opportunities for Håkan and me as we developed the restaurant concepts that were perpetually brewing in our heads. I saw Håkan in the audience. He flashed a grim smile. He was happy for me, but the dark cast over his face mirrored what we both knew was a bittersweet moment. Hours ago, we had shut down Aquavit Minneapolis, after four short years.

We had no choice. In the two years that followed the 2001 terrorist attacks on Manhattan’s World Trade Center, restaurants across the country had been suffering. Teleconferences replaced conferences, and our Minnesota venture couldn’t recover from the drop-off in business travel. Earlier that afternoon, we broke the news to our executive chef in Minneapolis, and in the coming week, we would make the decision public, laying off the loyal staff who helped it earn consistently fantastic reviews.

As crushing as this failure was—how the hell could a
Swedish
restaurant fail in the Swedish-American heartland?—we would move on. That was one thing I knew how to do.

M
AYA
H
AILE SHOWED UP, RELUCTANTLY, AT A HOUSEWARMING PARTY
I threw for myself that March. She didn’t want to come to a place she’d never been with people she didn’t know, but a model booker she’d worked with kept pressuring her to come, promising that she’d have fun and meet some fellow Ethiopian expats. She started bombarding Maya with text messages about the party at eight p.m. “It’s off the hook!” she wrote. “Tons of E’s here! Sister, get over here now!” Maya finally showed up at 11:30, and dragged a roommate along for company.

I don’t throw a lot of parties—between benefits and openings, I go to enough of them while I’m on the clock—but when I do, I throw
down
. I’d just moved that spring from a swanky but soulless place in the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle to a swanky and soulful brownstone apartment in Harlem, and it felt like a lot more than just a real estate transaction. I was finally ready to make myself a home, something that had never occurred to me all those years I lived out of duffel bags. I invited everyone I knew, along with some I didn’t; I had a live band, platters of everything from gravlax to sushi, and two tended bars set up, one on my new terrace and the other on the lower floor of my duplex. The night was unusually warm and the party was bumping, wall-to-wall with people. Then two tall girls came in, taller than anyone there, even Mes, who is a pretty tall guy. One was half-Asian, half-white, and the other was black. I swear the room went into a freeze frame for a minute; people actually stopped talking and eating just to stare. The black girl was gorgeous, with big round eyes and high, beautiful cheekbones, and didn’t have a lick of makeup on. Definitely a model, I thought, although I hadn’t seen her before. I would have remembered.