Yes, Chef (31 page)

I am not a tall guy. Five-feet-nine on a good day. But cooking has always given me confidence, and if it’s my food at the table, then I’m at least six-feet-seven. We were in my home, at my party, so I went right up to her.

“Selam,”
she said. Holy shit, I thought. She’s Habesha?

“Give me your number before I get drunk,” I said. “And will you have breakfast with me tomorrow?”

“Maybe,” she said, smiling, “if I’m up.”

The next day, she met me for breakfast at the M & G Diner. I was sitting there with my boys, sure she wouldn’t show, and then she walked in and I just knew. As Common rapped, “It doesn’t take a whole day to recognize sunshine.”

The M & G was on the corner of 125th and St. Nick. It’s closed now, which breaks my heart. Because for me, Ethiopian born, Swedish raised, eating there was the culinary equivalent of seeing Marian Anderson sing at the Lincoln Memorial. M & G was the come correct / can’t be denied / I’ve been done wrong but watch me make it right
execution of an incredibly rich black American culinary history. It had a bright red and yellow logo and a neon sign that let three generations of neighbors know the Southern fried chicken was fresh, hot, and delicious. It could always be counted on for good people and better than good food.

It was at the M & G that I learned just how much Maya and I had in common. Maya, whose given name is Gate Haile, grew up in Ethiopia, the tenth of twelve children. Her family is a double minority in that they’re from the small Gurage tribe and are Catholics in an overwhelmingly Habesha and Orthodox country. She grew up between Addis and the village of Gofrer in a family that was part of the country’s tiny educated upper middle class, often called the Diaspora for how many of their ranks go abroad to study and live.

In order to give her the benefit of a European education, Maya was sent at the age of twelve to live with her oldest brother, Petrus, who was a priest in Holland. Like two of her sisters, Maya went to nursing school, but people asked her so often if she was a model that she decided to give it a try. She left school and snuck off to enter a beauty contest in Frankfurt, and when she won, she didn’t tell anyone in the family. The first agency she went to see signed her, and when we met, she’d been living in New York for only a few months, doing runway work for couture collections.

Maya is ten years younger than I am, but in many ways she’s been exposed to more. She speaks Amharic, Dutch, French, and English, and she’s lived for long periods in Ethiopia, Europe, and the United States. Part of what I loved about her from the start was that she wasn’t jaded about New York or the restaurant world. I’d take her to events, and the way she’d remember people was Daniel, “the nice French guy,” or Eric, “the handsome guy with gray hair.” And just as I was comfortable around women because I had sisters, she had a ton of brothers and took no prisoners when we’d go to play basketball with my buddies. If we went to a black tie event, she knew how to be gracious and meet people and, of course, how to pose for the cameras. Someone as tall and beautiful as she is could easily be intimidating to
people, but Maya is so friendly and welcoming that people are instantly put at ease. In my world, where relationships matter, her people skills count for a lot. She understands that the restaurant business is really about two things: food and conversation.

Gradually I introduced Maya to the New York that I loved. We went to eat everywhere—she was open to everything from dim sum in Chinatown to late-night dinners at Nobu, but she liked Floyd Cardoz’s Tabla best, probably because his Indian spices were closest to the ones she knew from home. For her part, Maya introduced me to Ethiopian culture in a way my
blatte
friends had never been able to. I may know more about African cooking in general, but Maya is a better Ethiopian cook than I am. She knows more about the food you eat on holidays and in certain regions and if you’re from a particular tribe. She will explain how the couscous in Ethiopia is thicker, more like barley than semolina, and how to eat it for breakfast with honey drizzled on top. She crisps injera in the oven and breaks it into chips that we can use with dips, and taught me how to drink coffee with butter and salt instead of milk and sugar.

I lived most of my adult life avoiding real relationships, telling myself that they would get in the way of my cooking, or that my mother and my sisters in Sweden needed me to be the man in the family, or that I didn’t have time for commitments. There was always an excuse, but the real reason was that I was not ready until I met Maya.

That housewarming party was that best damn party I ever threw. It changed my life forever.

O
UR FATHER WAS ALIVE
. Not Lennart, the one who loved and raised us, but Tsegie, the one who’d given me and Linda life. Linda discovered this. For years, she had been researching and retracing our Ethiopian roots. She was a diligent sleuth, and every year or so would turn up some significant new piece of the puzzle that was our past. One year, she got hold of our hospital intake forms from Addis, only to discover
that we were not the ages we’d grown up thinking we were: I was a year younger and she a year older. It may sound silly, but my mind immediately flashed back to being in high school when I was axed from the soccer team for being too small. Knowing that I had actually been a year younger than my Viking classmates made me feel a little better, even all these years later. Pathetic, I know. But true.

Linda then managed to track down an uncle on our mother’s side. He responded to a letter from Linda with stunning news. Our birth father, Tsegie, had not died in the war with Eritrea, as we’d always believed. He was alive and well and living in a twenty-five-hut village called Abragodana, about sixty miles south of Addis.

As it happened, I was due to make my second trip to Ethiopia in a few weeks. I was doing a piece for
Travel & Leisure
about Addis, and I went with the talented and fun writing team of the Lee brothers, Matt and Ted. I would take them to the Merkato, of course, and we would check out Addis’s nightlife scene with a long-distance assist from Mes, whose uncle still lived in the city. But ever since I’d gotten the news of Tsegie, I could think of nothing else. I was going to meet my father. I was not the orphan I had spent thirty years believing I was. Imagine finding out that some fundamental truth about yourself, that you had long accepted, was not actually true. As if you’d grown up believing you were white, and then suddenly finding out you were black. I caught my reflection in mirrors, in the weeks before that second trip to Ethiopia, and marveled at the fact that I would soon be seeing some older version of my face—not figuratively, as I had on the first trip, imagining my older self in the faces of Habesha men on the trip, but literally, the way children do when they look into the face of a parent and see the family lines rendered in flesh and bone.

Mes’s uncle Workasef served as our translator for the trip, and he agreed to come with me to Abragodana. We planned to leave the photographer and the Lee brothers behind—I didn’t want the moment to turn into a circus—and hire a driver. Somehow, Workasef had gotten word to the village, and they would be expecting us. This in itself was nothing short of a miracle, since the village has no telephones, much less running water, gas, or electricity.

The drive—which took hours longer than it would have if we hadn’t been traveling over pitted and dusty unpaved roads, stopping regularly for herds of cattle or donkeys carrying mountains of charcoal lashed to their backs—had to be reminiscent of the journey Linda and I made with our mother three decades before. Looking out the windows of our rattly van, passing through tiny villages and barren landscapes, I went over the details of my life story—at least, what I knew of it.

At birth, I was named Kassahun Tsegie. I was the third child of a farmer and his wife, and we lived in the Ethiopian highlands, in a small village outside of Addis Ababa, the country’s capital. Most Ethiopians farmed or raised livestock; my father did both. He grew lentils and chilies and had cows. Their first child, a son, had died, and after him came Fantaye, my sister Linda, a girl with big round eyes and full brows like our father’s. And after Fantaye, I came along. We belonged to the Amhara ethnic group, not as large as the Oromo, who dominated our area, but still one of the largest of the many, many ethnic groups that made up the country’s population. I was born in 1971—not 1970 as I originally believed—when the country was in the midst of great turmoil. The Eritrean war of independence had been raging for ten years, and Emperor Haile Selassie’s four-decade reign was gasping toward an end while potential successors jockeyed for position. Political strife aside, the country had been ravaged by malnutrition and a tuberculosis epidemic that had infected nearly eight hundred thousand people. If left untreated, more than half of the people who have active TB will die. In Amharic, TB is called
samba necarsa
, cancer of the lung.

By my first birthday, I had contracted TB. So had my sister. So had my mother, and her case was the worst of all. There was no medical help in our village, so the three of us set out, by foot, for Addis Ababa, where there were doctors and modern hospitals. My mother worked some unknown miracle to get us through the lines of sick people outside the hospital to get us the care we needed.

My mother died in that Addis hospital and there was no record of our birth father, just a rumor that he had died in the war. Fantaye and
I must have had less severe cases of TB, or maybe we found help—in the form of antibiotics—before our symptoms progressed too far to be put into check. We were taken in by the hospital, nursed out of crisis and back toward health. However long it took, we had beat tremendous odds. Months later, when we were well enough to be released, the hospital staff faced the question of what to do with us. One of the nurses, Ayem Alem—whose name meant “eye of the world”—stepped up.

“I’ll take them home,” she said. She took us to stay with her and her four daughters in a small house built on a postage-stamp plot of land issued by the government. “I’ll find an adoption center to place them.” True to her word, Ayem found a Swedish field hospital that administered adoption placements, and she convinced them to put us on their list. While she waited for us to find a home, she must have stretched to accommodate and feed two extra mouths. Maybe her daughters felt burdened by our presence when their mother was at work; maybe they liked us, fussing over us or delighting at my sister’s easy laugh or my smile. My Swedish mother has kept Ayem’s letters—which she continued sending to us over the years, long after we’d grown—and the way she tells us how her daughters haven’t forgotten us, and that she hopes we remember our Amharic names, are all telling details of how deep Ayem’s feelings were for my sister and me.

I mulled over these bits and pieces of my story as we passed through small towns and across long stretches of parched, barren land. Through the dust, I saw bright yellow and red signs for St. George beer everywhere. In towns that were having a market day, droves of people filled the road, indifferent to traffic. A man balancing a sewing machine on his head nearly walked into our front bumper, but a friend pulled him back just in time.

Did my mother, whose name was Ahnu, really make this trip alone? With two small, sick children? Perhaps my father went with her, or maybe he stayed with the farm while a brother or uncle accompanied us. I’ll never know for sure. We probably went by foot,
which would have taken days, and we would have traveled in the cool of the evening, and spent our days resting in whatever shade we could find. For food, we would have carried dried injera, and
quanta
, a beef jerky made from long strips of meat, seasoned with pepper powder and salt and left to dry for up to a week. We would have had to carry our own water. That we even made it to Addis astounds me, but of course it was no guarantee of salvation. Hospitals were so overcrowded that people slept in the streets for weeks just to get inside. Did Ahnu ever make it into the hospital? Did a doctor ever see or treat her? I don’t know. What I do know is that she left the village with us and she died. And that she was twenty-eight years old.

B
EFORE
I
LEFT
N
EW
Y
ORK
, I’d gone to the bank. Anyone who has traveled extensively in Africa knows the drill. Cash is king, not credit cards, not traveler’s checks. Just as important as the bank is the run I always make to the sporting goods store where I purchase two dozen brand-new soccer balls. These are the currency I will share with the kids that I meet.

On the plane from New York to Addis, I was so aware that for the first time in my adult life, I was traveling not as a chef, chasing flavors—but as an orphan, chasing history. And yet, I was also piggybacking work on the trip—traveling with a team from
Travel & Leisure
. When I look back on it, I can see clearly that work was a buffer from all the question marks and possible disappointments that might await me in Ethiopia. If I did not get to meet my father, if he was in any way a disappointment, I could change course and focus solely on cooking and the food feature that we were creating for the magazine. But at the time, it wasn’t anywhere near as clear, and I told myself that the day I was going to meet my birth father was merely a side trip, like the afternoon I had spent learning how to make injera with the old women in the hut.

Once our team arrived in Addis, we drove through the city to an old orphanage to meet my father and the woman who had brokered
the deal. It was chaos to get there, as it is chaos to get anywhere in Addis. Goat pimps run across the street, herding skinny goats. You get dust in your eyes. A Mercedes speeds by. A hand is out and begging. At the same time, your eyes can’t quite believe the beautiful embassies and villas that are home to the city’s wealthy residents and the expat elite. And there are runners—both men and women, tearing down the sides of the street like it’s the New York City Marathon. But it’s not a marathon, it’s just a day ending in
y
and Addis is pulsing with the rhythm of three million feet, many of them barefoot.