Yes, Chef (34 page)

L
AST SUMMER
, Zoe and her uncle Josef came to visit me in New York. I took her to Rockaway Beach, Central Park, Chinatown, the Museum of Modern Art. She’s a teenage girl, so she wanted to go shopping, so I sent her off with a Metrocard and a subway map and she explored the East Village and Soho. She hung out with me at the restaurant and I tried to show her that as a chef, my world is the back of the house: It’s hot and noisy, I’m on my feet for hours on end, it’s not glamorous. I also took her to a fancy party at one of the city’s most glorious spaces: the New York Public Library. Zoe was thrilled to meet Kanye West, but I was thrilled that she got a glimpse of the people who make New York what it is: the fashion people, the artists, the gay community, the gay and fabulous community. To cap it off, Liza Minnelli performed.

It was good that we had a night to remember, because the next morning, the moment I’d been dreading—and which I knew was inevitable—arrived. Zoe broke down. She got it all off her chest. She let me have it for all the years I’d been absent, all the disappointment she felt, all the feelings of betrayal and loss. “You didn’t want me,” she said. “Is it true you didn’t want me?”

“No,” I kept telling her. “No, no, no. That couldn’t be further from the truth. If what you’re asking me is whether I was young and scared, then yes, that’s true. If you’re asking me if I am sorry for the way I acted, I am.”

“Why didn’t you ever call? Why couldn’t you come see me? You knew where I was.” She was sobbing.

“I
wanted
to,” I said. “Really. But it was so hard to figure out how.”

“Whatever,” she said, dismissively.

It’s amazing how universal the term
whatever
is. All around the world, teenagers toss it around like Frisbees. But Zoe’s “whatever” had a little more bite. Because I owe her so much, there is a certain
percentage of the time we spend together where I am, in one way or another, apologizing and she is, in one way or another, giving me hell. But that’s the funny thing about the years I spent building my career as a chef. A lot of people have cut me to the core with their insults, and I know why. There’s a part of me that hopes it’s great therapy for Zoe to tell me how she feels, to let me have it. In my head, I’m thinking, Go for it, Zoe. Ask me anything. Call me anything. Say anything. Because while she’s still figuring me out, I know, finally, who I am. I’m a father and I’m a chef, and the one thing I can take is the heat.

I
N
F
EBRUARY 2008
, I
OPENED A NEW RESTAURANT IN
N
EW
Y
ORK
C
ITY
called Merkato 55. It was a pan-African restaurant and it opened to much fanfare. We got tons of coverage from the press: I was on everything from the
Today
show to
20/20
to the monitors in New York taxicabs. John Legend performed at our opening, and from day one, we were doing 150 covers a night. I had picked what I thought was a perfect spot, too: the Meatpacking District, a former warehouse sector along the northern end of the West Village, and the space was roomy and beautiful. I’d had my eye on the two-story building for over a year; I loved how it was in a low-skyline neighborhood of cobblestone streets, how it was slightly off the beaten path but also full of
vitality. The area’s former reputation as a place that trafficked in sides of beef during the day and transvestite hookers at night didn’t bother me one bit. That was ancient history by the time we signed our lease, and the neighborhood was becoming known as the place to hang out. There was the venerable Florent bistro, the new Standard hotel, a new restaurant from Jean-Georges, and the soon-to-be-opened High Line, a stunning pedestrian parkway retrofitted onto a stretch of elevated train tracks that run up the west side a block from the Hudson River. Photography studios and cool boutiques had opened up here and there, which gave another dose of chic to the landscape.

I walked away from Merkato 55 six months later, the biggest failure of my professional life. Plenty of chefs I admire have failed. Alfred Portale couldn’t make One Fifth Avenue work. Thomas Keller’s Rakel didn’t last. The list goes on. But while I’m sure they were passionate and committed to those restaurants, I don’t know if they were as deeply and personally identified with those restaurants as I was with Merkato 55.

Merkato was a part of my life story.

It’s a good thing I don’t drink much or do drugs; this would have been a perfect time for that to spin out of control. I’ve never felt so low, or so humiliated. I’d never in my life had trouble sleeping at night; suddenly, I was waking up at three a.m. with my mind racing, trying to untie the knots of what had started out as a dream, only to become a nightmare.

H
ERE WAS THE DREAM:
I would merge my passions, skills, and heritage with a business opportunity that had been sitting untapped for far too long. I actually began to conceive of an upscale African restaurant while I was working on a cookbook,
The Soul of a New Cuisine
. Sure, the book was a way for me to open up a dialogue with Americans about the flavors of Africa, but to get even more people past the stereotype of Africa as “the needy brother,” and instead to see its bounty and its flavor, I knew they would need a more direct experience. They would need to taste.

One of my biggest hurdles was financing. Investors want a good return on their money, and they tend to feel more comfortable putting their money into a familiar formula. But I didn’t think Manhattan needed another great Italian restaurant or another French bistro. At least not one run by me. I set up a lot of meetings. I laid out my vision a hundred times. No, I’d say, not a soul food restaurant. Not a Moroccan restaurant. An
African
restaurant. London has Momo, I’d explain, and Paris has the Impala Lounge. Each spot offers a way of seeing Africa through modern, sophisticated eyes. We could do the same thing in New York, only better.

People would ask me: “Is it in bad taste to have an African restaurant when so many people are starving there?” And every time, no matter how many times I heard it, the question was like a punch in the gut. I got versions of it on a weekly basis.

If I’m feeling charitable, I guess I can sort of understand where it comes from; if you live in the United States, the images of Africa that come across TV screens and newspaper headlines sometimes seem to be all about war, corruption, and impoverishment. Everyone’s seen the pictures of small, malnourished children with flies walking across their faces, crowding around Red Cross sacks of rice. All of that is true. I know there is great need, and I know it because I visit orphanages every time I go to Ethiopia. I’ve come face to face with the images that make comfortable Americans turn away. So I understand why my pitch wasn’t a gimme. But what I also knew was that this view of Africa as only deprivation was a distorted view. It was a lie. There are middle-class Africans. There are sophisticated restaurants in cities from Johannesburg to Cairo. Even among the poorer people, there are rich traditions of celebrating with food. I wanted to bring some of that to American audiences, to show there’s not just one version of the African food experience. I wanted to capture African cool.

If I’d been interested only in delivering authentic, traditional dishes, I would have left that to the existing African restaurants, the ones that are cordoned off into ethnic enclaves, down a few flights of steps from the street, serving to expat cabdrivers and budget-conscious but adventurous college students. But what I wanted was to
show the many ways in which American and West Indian food links back to Africa, how strong the flavor connection is between Senegal and North Carolina, how the cuisine of Mozambique resembles the foods of Portugal.

Where better than New York to try it?

After nearly two years of pitching and countless dead-end meetings, I finally found an investor who understood my vision. Probably not a coincidence that he was African American, a banker who had made it big and was ready to try something new.

“Are you sure?” I asked him for the twentieth time, just before our lawyers were about to draw up papers. “Restaurants are tough. We don’t know how this will turn out.”

“Marcus,” he said, “it would be my honor to be part of this project.”

Two days later, he died of a heart attack.

As always in the restaurant business, the mourning did not stop the making of the meal at hand. There was personal grief—this was a man I had tremendous respect and affection for—but this was also a major setback for the project. Things had moved far enough along, however, that I’d developed a relationship with the landlord of the building I wanted, and when I mentioned one day that I was still looking for a backer, he suggested I talk to a guy named Ramses, a Haitian American club promoter he knew who had a bunch of investors lined up, but no project to attach to. I knew Ramses and his brother Maxime from my occasional dips into the nightclub scene.

“We should do something together,” he’d always say, which I figured he said to people as often as he said hello.

Ramses and I met. He was a very sweet guy. I hadn’t even gotten halfway through my spiel when he was nodding his head and saying that he wanted in, that my concept was exactly what he and his group had in mind.

“If you want to do this,” I said, “you have to let Townhouse Group run the project. I’m talking about building a restaurant, not a club; if it even comes close to a club I won’t do it.”

“No, no,” he assured me. “I want to do this.”

We worked out a deal and signed the papers. I’d have a tiny ownership stake, less than 5 percent, but they would hire Townhouse, the management company I owned with Håkan, to design and run the restaurant for a fee. Part of running it meant that I would put in the staff, spearhead the marketing, and use whatever brand power my name had built up to attract people. Ramses and Maxime’s crew would be silent investors. I didn’t know then that there is no such thing as a silent investor.

At first, the partnership ran smoothly. We all loved the name we’d brainstormed: Merkato 55, a tribute to my favorite spot in Addis combined with the street address of our site. Ramses found a great Dutch architect, Menno Schmitz, to do the space. Menno was a young guy who had never been to Africa, but I liked that about him; he was starting with a clean slate. I also liked that he wasn’t a regular on the New York restaurant design circuit—the last thing I wanted was to look like we’d teamed up with half a dozen other restaurants to bulk order our fixtures and paint. With capacity for 150, we were 50 seats smaller than Aquavit, but the open-plan duplex made the space feel vast. We turned the first floor into a pub, with the bar flowing into a seating area. You could sit anywhere and see the rest of the room, which fit with the people-watching that is such a part of African street life. The second floor, accessed by a double-wide spiral staircase, was more of a proper dining room, with leather booths and folding privacy screens to break up the space.

Inspiration for the decor came primarily from two sources. The first was early 1970s Africa, a time of great style and hope. Many recently decolonized countries were excited about self-rule, and that sense of a burgeoning autonomy could be found everywhere, including pop music. You can see it in the work of photographers like the great Malick Sidibé, or in one of my favorite movies of all time, the documentary
When We Were Kings
, which is about the 1974 Ali–Foreman fight that took place in Zaire. The fight was billed as the “Rumble in the Jungle,” and all of the background footage shows a
liveliness and cool that couldn’t be more appealing to me. In the restaurant, we tried to translate the modernity of that era with colors and textures and patterns. We hung giant silkscreens of African faces on wall panels. We used large woven baskets as pendant lamps over the bar, and in stairwells and alcoves we hung photographs taken over the course of my travels. The one thing I would not allow was African masks. That was too much of a cliché for me.

The end result, I thought, was magical. But I also know you can’t succeed on the space alone. To communicate the sense of a vibrant, sophisticated Africa, I had to be very precise in my food. I knew I should aim for fun—not fine—dining. In fun dining, flavor—not concept—is king. You’re providing more comfort than challenge, so you have to make it easy for the customer to understand what he’s eating, and to know how to eat it. There’s precision in that, too, as weird as it sounds. Aquavit is a more cerebral dining experience, where part of the meal’s pleasure may come from wondering how the hell we put those flavors together. With Merkato, I wanted full flavor, accessibility, and a range of appealing dishes, so you could take a picky nephew there and find something he’d like. Some dishes I made in a fairly straightforward, old-school way.
Doro wat
, the chicken stew that comes from my own Amhara tribe, was made the same way I’d been taught on Bole Road, but we upped the quality of the ingredients and used only chicken legs in order to guarantee the most flavorful, juicy meat. We didn’t mess with the recipe for traditional
piri piri
, a tangy hot sauce that’s used in Mozambique and other countries as a dip or marinade: Why fiddle with perfection? We put it on grilled shrimp, leaving the shells and heads on. That dish was an instant success.

Maybe my next African restaurant would be a fine-dining experience, with fewer seats and a more specifically matched wine list. But Merkato would be a starting point. Merkato would open the door.

I
SHOULD HAVE KNOWN
something was up when our investors had trouble making it to our regularly scheduled meetings. At the time, I
just brushed it off as the price of working with club guys—they ran by a different clock. I also felt like they were meeting their basic commitments; when the project ran over budget, they always found the money we needed; they always came through. Besides, I couldn’t dwell on the worries too long. I needed to focus on the seemingly endless work that still needed to be done and also the overflowing plate in front of me and Håkan. In less than twelve months, we were scheduled to open eight new restaurants, including Aquavits in Stockholm and Tokyo.