Yes, Chef (36 page)

OK, two hands if you count the chefs who cook only on TV.

The business of being a chef, whether your goal is to run the kitchen of a top restaurant in New York or to open your own establishment anywhere from Atlanta to Anchorage, is still an old boys’ club. Making it is a combination of hard work, luck, mentorship, and opportunity. And while I have met hundreds of young black chefs who aren’t afraid of hard work, for far too many of us, the luck, the mentorship, and the opportunity are hard to come by.

The problem with somebody like my friend Michael from the Olive Garden isn’t what he can or can’t cook, it’s what he has and hasn’t tasted. When I hired him at Aquavit, he’d never tasted
yuzu,
he’d never tasted sushi, he’d never tasted real saffron. He could execute the dishes we were doing, but if you don’t know how these things should taste, what we’re trying to go for, then the learning curve is beyond steep. But what Michael had, what made the difference, is that he was humble as shit. Humble, humble, humble, humble, humble.

When Michael came on, he wasn’t ready for Aquavit. So I started him at Riingo, a more casual place that Håkan and I had opened … and he never went away. He just kept getting better and better, bouncing higher and higher, full of energy. Every time there was an extra shift or an opportunity to work a special event, he was there. His work ethic was amazing.

One thing I believe with all my soul: Don’t try to guess somebody’s ceiling. I’m never going to be the one to tell that girl she can’t get a record deal, or that guy he’s never going to write a best-seller. I would never be the one telling what you can or can’t do. Same deal in food. Who was I to tell Michael he didn’t have what it takes to succeed? I brought him along, never knowing where his limit was. I figured that when he couldn’t keep up anymore, it would show. Next thing I knew, guys started to fall off left and right and all of a sudden Michael was
sous-chef
at Aquavit. Which was a
huge
step up. A guy who’d cooked at Houlihan’s and Olive Garden—who’d never even been to Canada, let alone Europe—was the one teaching the Swedish guys to make Swedish food.

I told Michael that in order to take that next step, to become an executive chef, he needed to dine. He needed to explore. When I came to New York, all of my money had gone into learning about food and flavors. But back in the day, I was all about figuring things out: What’s so hot about Vong? I’d save my money, go to Vong, and then I’d be broke again. But I knew I needed to have that experience to become a better chef. You might just taste three or four appetizers. You’re sitting there to deconstruct how the hell this lemongrass tastes so good with this piece of fish. You’re not drinking wine because you can’t afford it. You’re not eating, you’re not belonging. You’re
tasting
. You’re there to study, learn, get it, and own it.

Today, Michael is the executive chef at my Harlem restaurant, Red Rooster, and what’s more, he’s my right hand. He’s incredibly curious and creative. These days, I’m the one asking
him
stuff: “Michael, let’s find out how to do this,” and he will go off and research and find out. “OK, Marcus, this is what will happen if we cook this
sous-vide
, and this is what will happen if we cook it this way. These are our options. You tell me left or right.” Taking somebody from a very humble background, and watching him become fluent in the language of food—French terms, Italian terms, Japanese terms—that makes me happy to do what I do. It’s not just that I believe in food that is global. I believe there’s a door that opens from inside any great kitchen, a door that opens out and gives us the world.

I
PROBABLY SHOULD HAVE ENDED
my partnership with Håkan when we moved out of the old Rockefeller townhouse and into the new space on East Fifty-fifth Street in 2004. I was young, hungry, and ready to rewrite the rules on my own terms. Even then, it was clear to me that my mission was to bring guys like Michael in and to change the game on the plate and in my hiring practices. Håkan was older than I was, and his main concern often seemed to be, How can I protect my retirement? Those are two completely different approaches to life. It doesn’t mean that one is right and one is wrong. He was in his fifties and I was in my thirties. We were bound to clash.

I never had my guard up as a chef. When I debuted at Aquavit, I was twenty-four. So for me, doing the cooking and being known as a chef were the same. Håkan, at the end of the day, was the one who brought me along, gave me the PR, and showed me how it was done. In the beginning, he was the one that wanted to push me and my story. As long as I told a story about myself in the context of his restaurant, he loved it. I didn’t know the first thing about PR. Håkan was the one who gave me all of these tools.

Then came the most shocking twist. In 2008, as I tried to assert some independence, Håkan and his lawyers argued that the only reason the name Marcus Samuelsson had value was because of its association
with Aquavit. So if I wanted to leave Aquavit, or do any work outside of the partnership associated with my name, he would be entitled to a percentage of the money. This was tough to swallow. Yes, Håkan had trained me in the world of restaurants. Yes, he had afforded me the kind of opportunities most young chefs would kill for. Yes, he had treated me very well. But I had also brought something to the table. I had been tireless in my pursuit of excellence and I had expressed gratitude in word and deed. The idea that he could own a piece of anything I did that was associated with my name forevermore was ludicrous.

I consulted a series of lawyers, and they all confirmed that he had a case. Unless I provided him with a hefty financial settlement that would take the place of future earnings, I would be like an indentured servant trying to work off a debt that would never be repaid. There was apparently no way around it: Not only was I going to have to buy my way out of this partnership with Aquavit—buy my freedom, as it were—I was going to have to buy back my own
name
. And the more press I did, the more expensive my name got.

I was so used to thinking of Håkan as a big brother, a mentor, the guy who gave me my break. But I was starting to realize that ours was a friendship that thrived only under very particular circumstances. Some things were going great. Aquavit Stockholm was going gangbusters, but Aquavit Tokyo was tough. I was in Tokyo when the market crashed and I saw the dramatic effect it had on the restaurant; it was clear that it simply wasn’t going to survive. Our midtown New York restaurant had been hit hard, as well. The Merkato deal imploded. Our little empire was under siege, and we were getting ready to go at each other for whatever was left.

T
HE INVITATION TO COMPETE
in Bravo’s
Top Chef Masters
was what ultimately forced me to make a decision about getting out of Townhouse for good, and buying back my name. If I stayed with Håkan and did the show, all the exposure of being on TV would probably make my name exponentially more expensive. Sarah, my PR rep, called me
and said to bite the bullet and buy out Håkan. My agent said the same thing, and yet I was not convinced. I’m an orphan from Ethiopia. In the most improbable of ways, I was adopted by a caring Swedish couple and given a nice middle-class Swedish life. I worked my way up from the bottom of so-so kitchens in Gburg to the bottom of some of Europe’s greatest kitchens to the top of Aquavit. It was not at all easy for me to write that check to Håkan and to get nothing back in return but my name.

I began to consider going back to my Ethiopian birth name, Kassahun Tsegie. Who
was
Marcus Samuelsson after all? That was just a name that was given to me by Swedish parents. I was fond of it, but it was a name, nothing more. Maybe for the sake of my pride and my bank account, I needed to give myself another name so I could be free.

In the end, I emptied my bank account to Håkan and I bought the rights back to “Marcus Samuelsson” because it’s the name that people know and it’s a name people remember. And because it’s part of my story.

In return, I got a stack of paperwork that proves something most Americans never have to think twice about: I am the sole owner of my name. I never once thought that when I came to New York with three hundred dollars in my pocket I’d have to fork over my entire life’s savings for my name. When I was first interning at Aquavit and my citizenship status was far from clear, if somebody would have offered me a green card and a new name, I would have gladly taken it. But what I know now that I didn’t know then is that our names are our stories. We sew our experiences together to make a life and our names are both the needle and thread. “Marcus Samuelsson” is more than the name of a chef who has done X, Y, and Z. It’s a name that reflects my life: where I started, each stop along my journey, and the man that I’ve become.

F
OR MONTHS AFTERWARD
, I would look at my diminished bank account—the life savings that I had brought proudly into my
marriage—and wonder if I had not made a terrible mistake. Was Aquavit the pinnacle of my success? Could I make it without Håkan’s help? Without the perch of that storied restaurant and my well-salaried position there, who was I?

After I left Aquavit I was a chef without a kitchen to cook in and feeling more rootless than I had in a long time. I spent a lot of time thinking and dreaming. I had a vision for the next restaurant I wanted to open—Red Rooster, a new incarnation of a legendary Harlem hotspot—but after the Håkan transaction I didn’t have anywhere near the money it takes to make it happen. My experience with Merkato had taught me to be careful whom I did business with, so I made myself be patient until the right partners came along.

During this time, my mother worried a lot about me and Maya. She was older, in her seventies, and even if she was young in her mind, her body was aging: She’s got a bad back and bad knees and it hurt me just to think about it. I called her every Sunday and I tried to allay her concerns.

She asked, “So where are you cooking now?”

I told her, “I cook more than ever, Mom. I do a lot of events and demos.”

She asked, “When is Red Rooster opening?”

“Soon,” I lied.

We had the same conversation over and over again. Each time, it was like she forgot. I didn’t want to keep explaining. It was the same with Zoe and also my father in Ethiopia. This industry and my place in it were hard enough for them to understand. I tried to convey that I was not really unemployed, that I would have a restaurant again; everything was going to be OK.

For more than a year, the Rooster lived only in my imagination. I kept myself busy with corporate gigs and charity work, but there was more empty time in my day than I’d ever had in my adult life and, not knowing how to fill it, I spent it exploring my neighborhood. From the time I first arrived in New York, I knew of Harlem’s reputation as the mecca of black America. I had seen the photographs of Harlem in
its glory days—stylish men in bespoke suits, women so well dressed that they’d put the models in
Vogue
to shame. I knew that Harlem was music: from the Apollo to the jazz clubs that were incubators for new renditions of blues, improvisation, and swing. I knew that Harlemites loved to dance, to pray, and to eat. I made my way to the churches and the clubs, the restaurants and the old-school saloons.

But for the first time, I began to notice how
beautiful
Harlem was, how magnificent its architecture. During the neighborhood’s first boom at the end of the nineteenth century, some of New York’s greatest architects flocked to Harlem and did some of their most inspired work. Architect Francis Kimball did a row of townhouses in Harlem on West 122nd Street. James Renwick, who designed St. Patrick’s Cathedral, did the All Saints Roman Catholic Church in Harlem. Beaux arts titans McKim, Mead & White, responsible for such New York landmarks as the old Penn Station and the Morgan Library, designed the 139th Street portion of the area known since the 1920s as Strivers Row, “the most aristocratic portion of Harlem,” as Wallace Thurman wrote in 1928. In those early days, when I was dreaming about Red Rooster and walking the neighborhood, I would end my day with a stroll down Strivers Row, marveling at its pristine brownstones. It was Strivers Row more than anything that made me feel I could open a fine-dining establishment north of 125th Street. Yes, it was true that decades of drugs and poverty had decimated a lot of what was once glorious about Harlem, but one need only walk down Strivers Row to be reminded that there are jewels in the crown of Harlem that never dimmed.

I
FIRST MET
T
HELMA
G
OLDEN
, director and curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, when she was a young hotshot at the Whitney Museum and I was just a legend in my own mind at Aquavit. I hadn’t yet earned three stars, but I was swinging for the fences every night. The Studio Museum houses a trove of great artists, from Romare Bearden and Loïs Mailou Jones to present-day greats like Kara Walker and
Glenn Ligon. Thelma’s journey to the top of her field had a lot in common with mine. We both left very established, very elegant, east-side institutions for Harlem—a move that takes a certain kind of maverick sensibility and willingness, sometimes, to be content shouting as a voice in the wilderness.

Thelma was invaluable to me logistically and professionally, in a step-by-step “this is how business is done in Harlem” way. But more than that, she helped me frame the bigger picture in my head. How many of us were either too young or too far away to have experienced New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but longed to be part of that incredibly creative time in the city? How many times had my friends and I wondered what it would have been like to hang with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, to dance with Madonna at Danceteria, to see Bad Brains and the Ramones at CBGB?

What Thelma helped me see was that Harlem was not just black USA in a snow globe; it was one of the last bastions of New York City as creative people long for it to be. Harlem is not a playground for rich bankers and consultants. It’s got students of all colors. It’s got old people who keep history and tell tall tales. It’s got musicians and artists and I swear I know a guy who is the next incarnation of Prince. (He’s completely unknown, but to quote another renegade musician, he’s a bad mamajama.) It’s got foreigners and fifth-generation families. It’s got million-dollar brownstones and sprawling housing projects. Like any place with edge, it has its dark side, too. Soho has stores, Harlem has street life. People are selling stuff on every street corner. (This is, for me, the Africa in Harlem.) And the ones who are lucky enough to own real brick-and-mortar stores aren’t just standing behind a counter, waiting for you to stroll in—they stand at the doorway in order to badger and cajole you into shopping. Harlem may not be high-tech, but it’s an
interactive experience
. People speak to each other on the street in Harlem. They’ll tell you when they like what you’re wearing and when they disagree with the slogan on your t-shirt. Men compliment pretty women and the women either respond in kind or tell them to keep on stepping. All you have to do is stand outside on a
summer day in Harlem to get a sense of what it means to hear people sing the Amen Chorus.