Yes, Chef (35 page)

After three months of delays, Merkato finally opened. The house was packed, and the feedback from the public seemed positive. It was especially gratifying to see how much people of color enjoyed Merkato. Without hanging out a sign that said “Welcome to the Diversity Club,” we were just that, and the cross-section of patrons was one of the broadest I’d ever encountered.

Our greatest hurdle turned out to be the press. Established critics seemed almost uncomfortable with the food, as if they were unsure what to make of the flavors we were working with. Any chef has that one terrible review that he can quote to you word by word, years after the fact—negative reviews are part of the game—but the reviews for Merkato stung to the core. People didn’t like the flavors, they didn’t like the space. Everyone says not to take things like this personally, but how could I not when I knew that ultimately most of us
taste
things personally, with a palate that is framed by our own—often limited—experience. For example, we were criticized for our play on Ghana’s chicken-and-peanut soup, but the objections had no basis in the history of the dish. It felt a little like trying to tell a joke to someone who doesn’t have the same cultural reference points as you do: It’s just not going to sound funny to him.

I know this sounds like sour grapes. The fact is, I have to take responsibility for some of the chaos and inconsistency that surrounded Merkato’s opening, and its ultimate failure. I should have been able to communicate the concept clearly, and to make it work. The thing about starting a new restaurant, though, is that it takes time to settle
in and find your groove. We weren’t going to get things right out of the box; no one can. We needed time to develop and refine our dishes, to respond to how they were received, to correct mistakes. It took
years
for me to develop Aquavit’s foie gras ganache; after three months at Merkato, I was only just beginning to identify a few dishes that might be headed for signature status. Our black bass topped with chermoula had potential, as did our rack of lamb with mango couscous and our chickpea dumplings. But, really, everything was still evolving.

While we struggled with getting the menu right, trouble started piling up with my investors. I wanted to cut back on reservations, to slow down the pace so we could tighten up the front and back of the house. Our waiters needed time to develop expertise about the food so they could present it effectively, and our kitchen needed time to fall into a steadier rhythm. When you’re slammed every night, you can’t do either, but my investors had a big nut to cover, and they didn’t want to turn anyone away. We were packed every night from six to midnight and waiters were ordered to turn over tables quickly to accommodate the crowd, which meant the service was never where it needed to be.

In hindsight, I know you can’t be naive in making partnerships. That’s bullshit. You can’t plead the victim. You can’t be a fool. You can’t turn fish into fowl and you can’t expect club promoters to understand how to run a restaurant. Still, we might have powered through and smoothed out the initial bumps—I certainly had the will to do that—until I got a phone call from my PR company.

“Marcus,” my rep said. “What’s this I read about Merkato putting in a nightclub?”

“What are you talking about?” I said.

“I read about it online. It says you’re putting in a club called Bijoux.”

“That’s bullshit,” I said. I had a contract. This was all spelled out in the contract. No nightclubs.

More people called to tell me they’d heard we were building a
club in the basement, in a space that we’d been planning to use as a lounge for corporate parties.

I confronted one of the investors.

“Yeah,” he said, matter of fact. “We’re opening a club.”

Not only was this a problem in terms of my contract, it violated the provisions of our liquor license. Håkan and I talked it over—the conversation didn’t take long—and even though we faced losing real money in consulting fees, the decision was clear. I wasn’t about to get on the wrong side of New York’s liquor control board. I had too many responsibilities to Håkan, to Aquavit, and to my family, both in Sweden and in Ethiopia, to break the law, even just by looking the other way.

I picked up the phone. “We talked about this,” I said when Ramses answered. “This isn’t right. I’m out.”

“As of when?” he asked.

“As of right now.”

I suppose I could have made a big stink over leaving; I could have taken my story to the media and come out smelling like a rose. But my heart was broken, and I didn’t see anything positive coming from the shit-slinging contest that would inevitably result. So I watched from the sidelines over the next six months as Merkato went down and became a sad joke. It was like watching a loved one die. There was nothing to be done. I just had to take it, to learn from what had happened and move on. And once again, I drew strength from knowing that I had triumphed over much tougher odds when I was a child. I would find a way to write my love letter to Africa another time, under different circumstances.

A
FTER THREE YEARS OF DATING
, I
ASKED
M
AYA TO MARRY ME, AND SHE
said yes—an outcome, believe me, that I never took for granted. Maya and I laugh together and support each other; I don’t think I’ve met anyone, aside from my mother, with a more solid sense of fairness or a steadier moral core. We both have one foot in Ethiopia and one foot out, and we both love America. But what clinched it for me was seeing how welcoming Maya was to Zoe when Zoe finally came to New York for her first visit. I couldn’t have made a life with a woman who wouldn’t accept Zoe. For Maya, that wasn’t even a question.

Maya has grown to love our annual Samuelsson family vacations in Smögen, where the best thing the island has to offer is that nothing
is going on. Ever. And it counts for something that Maya walked into my old room—actually, the room my mother refashioned for me in the townhouse she moved to after my father died—and did not turn and run the other direction when she saw that it had been set up as a Marcus time capsule, circa 1984, complete with my original posters of Michael Jackson, ABBA, and Bob Marley pinned to the walls.

Once we decided to marry, we had to figure out how to bring our far-flung friends and family together for a proper celebration. We solved it two ways. First, we had an informal party in Smögen during the summer of 2008. Zoe flew in from Austria, friends drove up from Göteborg, and we invited almost everyone on the island just by telling a few people to pass the word. I happily left most of the organizing to Anna and my mother; beyond curing a huge salmon, I sat back and enjoyed the show.

Then we had the real wedding right after Christmas, in Addis. Maya wanted to be married there, and I wanted her to be happy. I felt conflicted about the money we’d be spending to make it happen. I’m not a big spender as a rule. At home in New York, I take the subway almost every day and when I fly, even for business, I won’t buy anything but a coach seat, even on international flights. But those are American standards, not even close to the measurement of wealth that you’d apply in Ethiopia. The bridesmaids’ dresses we picked, for example, equaled my Ethiopian family’s annual budget. The one-day limo rental matched the private-school tuition I pay for three of my sisters. After a point, I had to stop myself every time I’d start to translate what
could
be bought for what we were paying. I was spending my money in Ethiopia, I told myself. That was worth something.

We planned a huge celebration. We had to, if only for the friends and family who were flying in from more than six countries. Mats was coming with his wife and two kids and his father, Rune. Mes was coming from New York; his mother and his uncle Workasef would throw their own party for us in Addis during the wedding week. There would be a church wedding, with Maya’s brother as the presiding priest, and a reception at the Hilton. There would also be another,
less formal reception in Maya’s village, where her mother would cook for a week to prepare enough food not only for the two hundred invited guests, but for another few hundred people from the village who would decide to drop in and say hi. There would be more than one ceremonial slaughtering and one beautiful coffee ceremony after another. Hanging at the end of buffet lines were entire sides of raw beef that came with their own butchers—a kind of carpaccio that was extremely popular, at least among the Habesha.

All in all, we would have eleven flat tires, not enough hot water for showers, seven live bands, three choirs, nine hundred guests, and a magnificent set of memories to take home when it was done.

When I am stressed and nothing seems to be coming together the way I want it to, I pull out images of this day when all of the far-flung pieces of my life joined together in a symphony of story and music, laughter and good wishes. I took my Swedish mother, Anne Marie, to Abragodana and she met my birth father, Tsegie. She sat in a straight-backed wooden chair that had been set out in Tsegie’s yard, with him on one side and Kasech, my stepmother, on the other, and each of the Ethiopians holding one of my mother’s hands. Anne Marie presented Tsegie with a pair of reading glasses—she had heard that lately he had trouble seeing—and he cried briefly, then put the glasses on, pulled out a weathered bible from under his robe, and started to read in the ancient language of Ge’ez.

One of my Ethiopian sisters, the sixteen-year-old Salam, translated for me as I tried to use the occasion to rouse my father into allowing Ashou, another one of my sisters, to leave the farm and go to school. After much back and forth, my father finally agreed and the look on my sister’s face was the best wedding present I could have ever received. Her smile was an explosion of surprise and happiness that I will play over and over again in my mind for as long as I live.

Although I longed to sit and ask Tsegie questions, I did not bring up the other woman, my birth mother. I did not ask how my father met my mother, Ahnu, or what Ahnu looked like, or how she laughed. I did not ask him what it felt like to lose Ahnu, Linda, and me in one
fell swoop, or if, having lost Ahnu, he couldn’t bear to bring us home. I did not ask him what he did in the months after, or how often he wondered about us, out alone in the world. Those are all questions I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to ask him.

My Swedish mother observed all the goings-on in my father’s village with the wide-eyed wonder of a European visiting the continent for the very first time. She hugged and kissed all of our sisters and brothers, as they are extensions of Linda and me and as such, she had love to spare for them, too. Taking in the poverty, she said to me afterward, “Macke, is that truly where you grew up?” No, it was a different village, I told her, but exactly the same.

My sister Linda was with us, too. It was her diligence that brought me to our father, and during the wedding she served as a bridge between our two families. She was the one who convinced my father’s family not to slaughter a cow in honor of Anne Marie. They were uncomfortable with what was surely perceived as an extreme lack of graciousness, but it had been a hard year, and this was their only cow, so they heeded her request.

The day before the wedding, we all went out to lunch and ate
pasta saltata
, a national favorite, one of the legacies of Italy’s repeated and failed attempts at colonizing Ethiopia. The dish is a kind of bolognese, but liberally spiced with
berbere
. My little sisters drank too many Mirindas, the orange soda they always want but never get to have, and I was too distracted and happy to stop them. We stopped in the nearby town of Meki on our way back to Abragodana, and Linda surprised me again with her latest discovery, two male cousins from our mother’s side, both significantly better off than our father’s side. One was a farmer and one owned a small restaurant, so we invited them to the reception at the Hilton. When they came, they put me in a chair and hoisted it over their heads and onto the dance floor, and as I bounced above the crowd, held up by my own family, and with Maya and Mes and Mats laughing and clapping along, I felt more grounded in this country, and in this world, than I ever had before.

N
OT LONG AGO
, I
HAD JUST FINISHED EATING DINNER AT A HOTEL RESTAURANT
in New York City when I got word that someone in the kitchen wanted to see me. The guy who came out, Tyrone, was a graduate of one of the mentoring programs I’m involved with. When I met him a few years before, Tyrone had a GED, a chip on his shoulder, and the kind of home life that made
Oliver Twist
look like a fairy tale. Now a
sous-chef
, Tyrone looked sharp and professional in his kitchen whites. There was an ease in his smile and a confidence in his walk. This being a prominent hotel restaurant, I knew Tyrone was making $75,000 a year, easy. Tyrone was thriving, and I felt good about that. But the thing is, the kitchens of America’s finest restaurants
aren’t full of guys like Tyrone. A hundred years ago, black men and women had to fight to get out of the kitchen. These days, we have to fight to get
in
.

When I met Michael Garrett in 2000, I was the executive chef at Aquavit and he was a line cook with two restaurants on his résumé: Houlihan’s and Olive Garden. It took serious balls to walk into a restaurant like Aquavit and ask for a job with those kinds of chops; nine out of ten chefs wouldn’t have let Michael past the coat-check girl. But I’m not most other chefs. My stance is clear: I will bring in some of those kids. The way I look at it is, if I don’t, they would never get a chance. Once they work with me, they’re in. I’m a gate opener or a gate closer, depending on how they do. So Michael was one of those guys. He would never, in a million years, get the job at Aquavit.

I met him and said, “Let’s give him a job.”

Sometimes I think my success makes others forget that it isn’t easy for a black person to make it as a chef in America. Our ancestors, who built the culinary foundation of this country but were only referred to as “the help,” would be shocked to learn that there are more black men and women who are partners at law firms than black men and women who are executive chefs at the top restaurants in this country. When I arrived in New York nearly twenty years ago, you could count on one hand the prominent chefs who looked like me. It’s almost two decades later now and you can still count us on one hand.