Yes, Chef (37 page)

Speaking of which, there are still church ladies and bow-tied Muslims in Harlem selling bean pies. On any given Sunday, you can see whole clans rolling deep and looking spiffy on their way to a gospel brunch that is their reward for surviving yet another backbreaking week and a longer-than-necessary sermon by a minister whose greatest sin is that he loves to hear himself talk. The south side of Central Park is all horse-drawn carriages and bygone-era hotels turned into luxury apartment buildings, but the north side of Central Park sits squarely at the feet of Harlem. Our Central Park is different. Why? More color on the skin and in the clothes. More passion in the loving and the fighting. More impromptu renditions of the Isley Brothers’ “Between the Sheets” than you’ve ever heard in your life. When I lived uptown and cooked downtown, I knew—and yet didn’t
know—
how much living was being packed into the 3.8 square miles that I now call home.

Just as Thelma transformed the Studio Museum into an institution that preserves the legacy of African American artists while promoting new voices in art from around the world, I dreamed of creating a similar space for food. I wanted Red Rooster to guard the history of black cooks in America while starting new conversations in food. During the long, doubt-filled, crazy-making months between my exit from Aquavit and the opening of the Rooster, I had little more than a logo to show for my dream. But in my head, I used that time to immerse myself in the history of Harlem. And I meant to apply all that learning in the most ambitious way possible. Harlem, I knew, deserved nothing less.

A
T SIX P.M
. on a late summer Monday in Harlem, I walked the streets between the Studio Museum and my apartment like a politician working his district on Election Day. Everybody knew me, even if I didn’t know them, and there’s not a soul between 118th Street and 145th
who felt the least bit shy about stopping me on the street and giving me a piece of their mind.

If I make only one contribution in this city, I hope it’s to help change the footprint of dining. I always thought that if I live in Harlem, I should own a restaurant in Harlem. I can own a restaurant in Tokyo, I can own a restaurant in Stockholm, I can own a place in Chicago, but I
should
own a place in Harlem. And that’s where the journey of Red Rooster began.

When I decided to become a chef, my motivations were simple. I looked at my father, Lennart, and I wanted to be as good a man as he was. He provided his family with a comfortable home, he supported us all emotionally, and as a geologist he found a career that tapped into the deep passion he had for the land. If I was afraid of anything, it was of turning out to be less than that. I saw in my friends and my earliest coworkers the paths my life could take. I could be like the pizza guy at La Toscana, back in Gburg, a laborer who made a decent wage and went home on the bus every night to his apartment in the projects. I wanted something more.

The more I exposed myself to cooking, the more I realized that I wanted to chase flavors, that I will always get excited by tasting something new or taking something good and tweaking it until it becomes something great. The more you train your palate, the more sensitive you become. You instantly taste the difference between tap waters from one city to the next. You find inspiration for a dish in the licorice root you taste at a farmers’ market or in the perfume of the chewing gum the kid on the subway seat next to you is chewing. Nothing is off-putting; everything is material to work with.

Food and flavors have become my first language. Not English, not Swedish, not Amharic. Whether I’m with the injera makers in their hut or a sushi chef in Tokyo, we speak a common language. We are all on the search for flavors. I’ve come to understand that this is an unending quest. I don’t know what done looks like and I don’t know what done tastes like. You can never sit back and relax: Audiences change, purveyors come and go, and economies fall apart. The only
thing I know for sure is that I will always be in love with flavor-driven food.

At every major turning point in my adult life, there has come a point where I had to decide, Am I in or am I out? After Merkato crashed and burned, after things went to hell for me at Aquavit, after I proposed to the love of my life and then had to inform her that the “celebrity chef” she married no longer had any money in the bank or a kitchen to cook in, what I decided was that I was going to put all chips on food. Food’s my only bag. It’s my gig, my art, my life. Always has been, always will be. I’m always battling myself—the part of me that says I can and the part of me that says I can’t. My greatest gift has been that the part of me that says “I can” is always, always just a little bit louder.

T
HE FIRST THING
I
DID AFTER BUYING BACK MY NAME WAS FLY OUT TO
Los Angeles to compete in
Top Chef Masters
. I technically had no restaurant to call home, although I was in the planning phase on Red Rooster. Competing on
Top Chef
would, I figured, be a great way to build some buzz. That’s really what it was, a way for me to raise interest (and financing) in what was then a tricky gambit—a high-end restaurant uptown. My business partners and I mocked up a logo, I had chef’s whites made up, and I went off to Los Angeles to film the show.

When I landed in Los Angeles, I got a call from a friend named Sam Kass. I’d met Sam a few years ago and had since heard he’d landed a job as the assistant chef/food initiative coordinator at the
White House. Sam was calling to ask if I’d be interested in creating the menu for the Obamas’ first state dinner. He told me he was speaking to a few other chefs, too, and that the state dinner was going to honor Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India and his wife, Gursharan Kaur. Sam was asking if I’d make dishes that had a subtle Indian influence, and since the honored guests are both vegetarians, to make sure we could create a meal that would be very flavorful with no meat. The finalists would be chosen after evaluating each chef’s menu. It was the kind of call chefs dream of receiving, and in many ways it was far more important to me than anything that was happening on TV.

Indian-inspired food was right up my alley, flavor-wise, but I knew I needed an amazing chef to help me. The first person that came to mind was a woman named Andrea Bergquist. She had cooked with Floyd Cardoz at Tabla, and had traveled through India. I tried to reach her and I learned she was traveling … in India. So it was just me and Michael Garrett for the first tasting. I had quickly learned that while it was easy to sit on the sofa and critique the contestants on shows like
Top Chef
, the actual process of adhering to that schedule and cooking for each challenge was far more difficult than it seemed. The competitive part of me came out while filming
Top Chef
, and I went from merely wanting the PR to build buzz for the Rooster to wanting to win. I was in LA, fighting not to be eliminated from the show, so I called Michael and asked him to do the shopping out in a Queens neighborhood called Little India.

When I told Michael what day Sam and his team would be arriving, he was dubious. “On a Sunday? Really?”

And I said, “Yeah, really.”

Michael was stressing because Sunday is not the ideal day to go food shopping; the selection is far from perfect. The selection, in fact, is crap. You’re never going to get the best fish or vegetables or fruit or even meat on a Sunday morning, hence the atrocity of prettified leftovers that many restaurants try to pass off as brunch.

A couple of days later,
The New York Times
reported that the field
of possible chefs included Dan Barber from Blue Hill in New York, Charlie Palmer from Aureole, Michael Nischan from Dressing Room in Connecticut, and Patrick O’Connell from the Inn at Little Washington in Virginia. It was such a crazy, confusing time: In one arena, I was scrambling to compete against the top chefs in the nation. In another arena, on TV, I was getting my butt kicked in the challenges by Bravo’s handpicked group of top chefs. And I didn’t even have a restaurant. I was so, so focused. It wasn’t about winning or losing, exactly. I knew that I’d get one big step closer to my dream—Red Rooster—if I could just stay in the game.

I sent Sam an e-mail. “This is the menu,” I wrote. “Come to my house.” We had to arrange a tasting dinner in order to stay in consideration for the state dinner, and I was going to hold it at my house. I didn’t want to explain all the legal things that were still dragging on with Håkan and my leaving Aquavit. I didn’t want to admit I didn’t have a restaurant.

There was a break in the
Top Chef
filming, which was fortunate because my meeting with Sam was completely confidential. I couldn’t go to the producers and say, “I’m up for the White House state dinner and I’ve got to get to New York for a tasting. Can you wait one day until I get back?” One of the things that would set the tone for my work with the White House was that my team and I knew nothing that had been discussed would ever end up in a blog or on Twitter. We didn’t tell our parents. We didn’t tell our best friends. I took a lot of pride in that.

When my plane landed in New York, I hopped a cab and went straight to Harlem. In the span of a few short hours, Michael and I prepared more than fourteen dishes for Sam to taste: eggplant salad, curry-rubbed chicken, tandoori-smoked salmon. None of these dishes would appear on the actual menu, but I wanted to show Sam we had range. Maya set a beautiful table and made these stunning, fragrant cinnamon-stick centerpieces, and we cleaned up as best we could. I looked around my apartment and it all felt slightly homegrown for a chef who was pitching himself to cook for the leader of the free world,
but there it was. These big guys were coming in from Washington, DC, and to say the conditions were less than ideal was a wild understatement.

The goal of that first tasting was just to cook Sam Kass a delicious meal. I knew that when Andrea Bergquist returned from India, she would help us create a state dinner that was more than delicious: Her culinary gifts, along with my input and Michael’s, would help us create a meal that was authentic and elegant and inspired.

When Sam called to tell me that our team had been chosen to cook the Obamas’ first state dinner, I felt like a character in
The Matrix
: Time slowed and I could literally feel the air around me change. To say I was honored is to say nothing at all. How could it be that I had catapulted to all this incredible opportunity, when there are days where I still feel like I’m just an adopted kid, trying to find my place in the world? I trace my own footsteps and I still can’t quite make sense of the leaps. First, I was a son, trying to make my father proud. If I have any mettle or maturity, it is because of Lennart Samuelsson and who he was, a man of curiosity and integrity. I did not excel in school and I failed at my attempt to be a soccer star. Because of the happenstance luck that I had a grandmother who was a talented home cook, and that she chose me as her helper, I grew into a chef. I made my way across three continents and in the process I won three James Beard awards. But when it all seemed so clear—Marcus Samuelsson, star chef—the relationship that was at the heart of that restaurant was destroyed and I found myself, at thirty-seven, never married but in the middle of a full-scale professional divorce. When Sam Kass and the White House team approached me, I was—professionally speaking—a car running on fumes, every cylinder of my being powered on hunger and hope. And then when Sam called to say that my team had been selected to cook the Obamas’ first White House dinner, I was more than honored. I was excited about chasing new flavors with an Indian-inspired, vegetarian meal that would connect the dots between the roots of American culture and our American love of global cuisine. I was thrilled to meet the president who shared with
me an East African heritage and, as Langston Hughes might phrase it, a childhood fueled on wonder and wandering. But mostly, I was happy because I knew that this state dinner and all the attention it would bring would shine a light on Harlem and the restaurant I hoped would be my new culinary home.

B
ACK IN
L
OS
A
NGELES
, the last days of
Top Chef Masters
were turning into the weirdest three days in my life. Sam needed me for tastings, but I couldn’t leave the set. So I had to ask Andrea, whom I had convinced to come aboard, and Jimmy Lappalainen, who cooked with me for many years, to go to DC without telling anyone and conduct a tasting without me. I knew exactly what I wanted to cook at this point, and we had gone over the dishes and ingredients so many times that I was confident they would do well. My team knows I trust their skills and technique. This was a huge test—and they nailed it.

I stood by the set of the show, texting Andrea about the state dinner.

No, no, the basmati rice is wrong
.

It’s good but not good enough for the prime minister of India
.

We need to get okra into the menu, too
.

Since the prime minister and his wife are vegetarians, we had a real challenge on our hands, the kind of food puzzle that I love: how can we pull together a menu that’s seasonal, full of subtle Indian flavors, that would deliver and satisfy with no meat?

The first family actually lives in the White House, so I wondered how I would feel if I was hosting a grand evening inside this historical home. I really wanted everyone—especially the guests of honor—to feel welcomed and to have a good time. A bread course had never been served before at a White House state dinner, but I chose bread as the first course because I knew people would be coming from different parts of the country and from around the world. I thought it would be very symbolic to have everyone breaking bread together. So we served cornbread, chutneys, naan, and sambals.

This is what we settled on for the rest of the meal: