Yes, Chef (40 page)

Although the Cotton Club was the hottest club in Harlem, blacks weren’t allowed in. Strivers Row resident W. C. Handy was famously barred from entering the club on an evening when his songs were the featured compositions. In an attempt to make nice, the Cotton Club owners distributed Christmas baskets to the community, but they were never able to shake the bad mojo of their segregationist policies. While today no restaurant in New York has the audacity to bar blacks, you only have to spend one evening barhopping at the finest dining establishments in the city to know that many of our best restaurants
feel
like they are whites-only. I was lucky that at Aquavit my presence attracted a naturally more diverse group of diners, but even still, my core audience there was moneyed and white. I wanted that tribe of Aquavit fans to follow me uptown, but I didn’t want to create a twenty-first-century Cotton Club.

When I first sat down with the team, I knew that in some ways, we were doing more than creating a restaurant, we were creating a salon. We wanted and needed three types of diner to give the Rooster the flavor that we considered the yummiest: Harlemites, the men and
women (regardless of color) who are our neighbors, whose very existence provides the culture and color that is Harlem; downtown diners who love restaurants and great food; and out-of-towners who have traveled from as far away as San Francisco, Sweden, and South Africa. It’s easy to underestimate the out-of-towner because the chance of repeat business is so low. But the out-of-towner has gone through extraordinary measures to come to your restaurant and the experience they take back home with them is as precious as any souvenir. The out-of-towner will tell stories about your restaurant again and again, the way travelers used to show slide shows of their vacation. If they have a great time they will be your ambassador, telling anyone and everyone about your food wherever they go.

We are already making plans to expand. We have six hundred guests a day and two thousand requests a night. That means we’re in the “polite no” business. We have to turn a lot of people down every day, but we want to encourage them to come back. So far, we’re delivering. If we, as New Yorkers, stay collectively open-minded and eat in places and parts of the city we never thought about, then we expand what’s possible. Maybe the next three-star restaurant will be in the Bronx.

When I close my eyes at night, I’m confident we are doing something larger than ourselves, that we can change the city in a positive way. I always felt that the Rooster had the potential to bring out the best in people, people from all cultures and ages, meeting one another and speaking to one another. There aren’t many places in this city where there’s a true intermingling of different perspectives and walks of life. What I love about my dining room is when I see a famous actor or musician seated next to the old-school Harlemites: church ladies in their pastel-colored suits and matching hats, senior citizen brothers in their Kangols and Panamas.

Whenever I felt unsure about what to do next at the restaurant, I thought about the original Rooster, a place that thrived when there were so many other places to go in Harlem. You stopped in for a drink at the Rooster, you went over to Jacques for dinner, and then on to
the casinos for gambling and dancing. The politicians did business there. The laymen could come in and converse. People came dressed—to see and be seen. Now at the Rooster, we host special nights so people in the neighborhood will always feel like there’s a place for them to hang their hat: Tuesdays are Latin nights and we have a salsa DJ and lots of dancing; Fridays are classic soul, Saturdays are rare grooves, and Sundays are gospel brunch with live jazz on Sunday nights. The Rooster is far from perfect, but we are lucky enough to be a part of creating a Harlem that’s not some place in the wilderness beyond Central Park but just any other neighborhood to hang out in. It took a long time and a lot of money, but we did what we came to do—which was to start a new food conversation.

This week alone at the Rooster, we served Bono, Martha Stewart, President Clinton, Chris Rock, the Swedish prime minister, and Terry McMillan. The bold-faced names that came through the door were patrons that added to the high-low mix we aspire to create every night. I really struggled with the notion of how to provide five-star service with a front-of-the-room staff that wasn’t experienced in fine dining. From the beginning, Andrew and I wanted to integrate not only the diners but the waitstaff, too. If you go to almost any high-end restaurant in Manhattan, you’ll see very few black waiters. With tips as high as 20 percent and flexible schedules, waiting tables in New York is a legitimate way to make a very good living. I’ve met dozens of career waiters who serve at restaurants, pursue their art on the side, and make enough loot from waiting tables to be able to buy a weekend home in the country. Andrew and I wanted to create the same kind of opportunities for the people who lived in Harlem, the young black men and women who might not get a shot at a midtown or Soho restaurant. We wanted to be able to invest in our staff’s success and see people in our organization and in our community succeed.

But that was easier said than done—especially for some of the black men. The women of color and the gay men of color really thrived in the early days of the Rooster. The straight black men came in with a chip on their shoulders the size of Lil Wayne’s gold teeth
and they stepped to me with all the impatience and fury of men who did not know how to deal with authority figures. One guy, Dwayne, was twenty-one, and he seemed to have so much potential. But he could never tie all the pieces together. I gave him warnings for not coming in with a pressed shirt, for being late, for wearing sneakers instead of shoes. Then finally I put him on probation. When it was clear that I was going to have to fire him, I tried one more time: “What’s up, Dwayne? What do you need to make this job work for you?” Dwayne shrugged, saying, “It’s too much. You can ask me to be on time
or
you can ask me to shave every day
or
you can ask me to iron my shirt
or
you can ask me not to wear sneakers. But you can’t ask me for all of those things every damn day.” The day that I fired Dwayne was like one of those old Bill Cosby comedy routines when the father is about to spank a kid and he says, “This is going to hurt me a lot more than it’s going to hurt you.”

“Each one, teach one” sounds so good. But what do you do when the one you’re trying to teach doesn’t want to learn? Before he cleared out for the day, Dwayne said to me, “You should’ve met me when I was fourteen. You met me now and it’s too late.” It’s not just Dwayne; making both sides of the house reflect Harlem comes with challenges they rarely deal with downtown: Lopez, a young gay busboy, got jumped on the train—couldn’t make it to work because of a homophobic beat-down. John, one of our busboys, had been out for a few days. He came by the restaurant on crutches with his head and spirits down. He wanted to ask for an extended leave of absence.

He said, “I got jumped. Six guys I went to school with waited until I cashed my check and they jumped me. They do it to all the guys who work.”

I asked him if he went to the police.

He rolled his eyes. “The police don’t come to the projects for stuff like that. What you going to do? I’m just trying to keep my head up.”

I promised him that I’d hold his job, while I wondered if chefs like Daniel Boulud or Alice Waters ever had to deal with stuff like this.
They’ve cancelled the last of the television soap operas, but every day at work when the shift starts, it’s like an episode of
All My Children
. Tammy, my lead runner, walked out. She said, “I feel like I’m being disrespected by some of my male coworkers.” And I couldn’t argue with her, she
was
being disrespected, I just wished she had stayed and helped me fight it out. The Muslim brother, Salaam, didn’t want to take orders from a woman and he threw a racial slur at our white general manager, so he’s out. We couldn’t educate him so we had to fire him. We’re packed every night, and to the outside world, Andrew and I are doing what we dreamed of doing. But sometimes, when I’m dealing with all the little things that go into making a restaurant work, it feels like Harlem is burning.

A
GREAT RESTAURANT
is more than a series of services. It is a collection of meals and memories. I met a man in the Rooster one Saturday afternoon who had worked as a personal bodyguard for Martin Luther King Jr. when he was on the historic Selma to Montgomery march. The man, now in his eighties, had never worked in security. He was a train porter who was simply big and fearless. He said that when he arrived in Montgomery safely, he took the soles off of his shoes. He owned only two pairs of shoes, but he never wanted to wear those shoes again. This man had dined at the original Red Rooster and wanted to come in and see what we had done with the place. He came for lunch with his wife. He also brought in the soles of his shoes and his address book from 1965 with Martin Luther King’s phone number in it.

“Call Coretta,” King had scribbled. “She’ll invite you over for dinner.”

The senior citizens are my favorite Rooster customers, mostly because so many of them remember the original restaurant. It’s hardly a fair exchange: I give them a meal, they tell me stories that are priceless. They make me feel like a part of something.

We cannot honor them all by name, but I hope the old people can feel it and taste it: the love, the respect, the history, and the homage.
And once they’ve gotten a hit of it—our culinary laying on of the hands—I hope they loosen their ties, take off their church lady gloves, and settle in for a spell. For so long, these old black people have served. When they come to the Rooster, I hope they can enjoy being tended to. I hope they can give up on the giving for just one night and simply sit back, relax, and dine.

T
HERE’S A FARMERS’ MARKET
now in Harlem. It’s in Mount Morris Park on 124th and Fifth Avenue. It’s nothing like the one in Union Square. This market is tiny, just nine passionate stalls selling the freshest food this neighborhood has seen in decades—and even more revolutionarily, the vendors accept food stamps. Food is such a direct indicator of our luxuries or our poverty. I have a brother in Ethiopia who is a farmer and he plows the land with one skinny ox. The type of farming he does would be called “organic” here, but that is only because in Africa, organic is all they can afford. My brother has no cell phone, no electricity, but he sets his own schedule and his family eats, literally, farm to table. I’d like to connect the dots for people: If you put the meals that African farmers like my brother eat up against what most black people in urban areas eat today, you’ll see pretty quickly that my brother is not the poorer one.

I’ve become friends with the peach man at Mount Morris Park. He gets up at two in the morning on Saturdays, fills his car, and drives all the way to Harlem. He’s not black, but he understands the significance of the journey. He also sells the best peaches in town. As I walk home, eating one for breakfast, I feel lucky that I have the Rooster as a platform to share the delicious things that I find: Peach cobbler’s going on the menu tonight. The Harlem farmers’ market is open only one day a week from July to Thanksgiving. The Union Square market is year-round, three days a week, with dozens of stalls and fifty thousand visitors a day. We’ll get there. It’s my hope that the Rooster can eventually source most of our produce from the Harlem farmers’ market. It’s like Leah Chase said—the hood needs good, too.

When I think about my purpose as a black chef, the mission seems
clear: to document, to preserve, to present, to capture, to inspire, and to aspire. I’m documenting Harlem’s history at the Rooster, preserving the fine history of African American cuisine while presenting it through my own unique Swedish-Ethiopian lens. I want to capture the imagination of New York’s dining communities, inspire a new generation of chefs and I aspire, always, to make food that makes a difference. When I look at Harlem institutions such as the Apollo and the Studio Museum and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, they have all done a great job of preserving and presenting black voices in music, art, and literature. In food, there are no equivalents. There are very few places where we can go and learn about the history of black food in America, and yet so much of what people think of as American food is inextricably linked to the African American experience: BBQ, Creole, Southern food, and Cajun. I learn how to be a keeper of culture from people like Jonelle Procope, Thelma Golden, Leah Chase, Jessica Harris, Marvin Woods, Brian Duncan, Garrett Oliver, and Edna Patrick.

Community is more than a buzzword in Harlem. This place and these people wouldn’t have survived without the people who believed that building community was possible, necessary, vital—even during Harlem’s darkest days. I don’t know all of their names: the men and women who kept libraries open and instituted free breakfasts in the school; the professionals and paraprofessionals who refused to turn Harlem over to the drug dealers and the criminals; the people in church basements who gave food to the hungry. But I see them when I walk the neighborhood—the gray and the proud, the ones who never stopped wearing Afros and dashikis, the impeccably dressed older women who all look like they could be cousins or sisters of Lena Horne. There’s a tribe of dapper, senior citizen Harlem men who look like they all have access to a secret stash of jazz musician threads: some are more Duke, some are more Davis; they all look extraordinary. I want to do my part to be part of the community, too.

But just because Harlem’s got its own special community, that doesn’t mean everyone agrees on everything. One day I was walking
to work and a guy my age stopped me. He was walking his daughter to school; she couldn’t have been much more than six years old. Her hair was combed into two giant Afro-puffs—and I thought, immediately, of Zoe and what I would give to be able to go back, know her at that age, and do something as simple as walk her to school.