Marcus Samuelsson was 24 when the New York Times gave his restaurant three stars, 27 when he arrived in Minneapolis to open the upscale Aquavit in the IDS Center, and 33 when he was named Best Chef: NYC by the James Beard Foundation. Oh, and there was that cooking gig for President Obama's state dinner at age 39.

But those are just numbers that, for most Scandinavians, don't mean much in the real world once the klieg lights are off and the reporter's notebooks are packed away.

What does matter is that Samuelsson's mother died of tuberculosis in Ethiopia while carrying her children -- Marcus, 2, and his 4-year-old sister, who were also sick -- under a hot sun to a hospital 75 miles away. This is where his remarkable tale begins in "Yes, Chef: A Memoir."

"I have never seen a picture of my mother," he writes in a chapter that moved this reader to tears. "My mother's family never owned a photograph of her, which tells you everything you need to know about where I'm from and what the world was like for the people who gave me life." One year later, the next journey takes the siblings from Addis Ababa to Göteborg, Sweden, where they start a new life with another family.

Samuelsson's tale has been told in shorthand whenever he wins an accolade or finds himself standing at yet another microphone. But never has it resonated with such stark simplicity and pathos as in this memoir, in which he takes the reader on a journey from the kitchen of his beloved Swedish grandmother to restaurants in Switzerland, Austria and France before heading to New York City where, many years later, he calls Harlem home.

He talks candidly in his memoir about race and growing up as a nontraditional Swede. About tales from the culinary underbelly where, unlike so many cooks, he stays clear of drugs. Of finding family members in Ethiopia and of unexpectedly fathering a child. His is a story of hard work, focus and determination to be the best in whatever he did, all told with enthusiasm, optimism and modesty, and a Scandinavian can-do attitude.

"'Yes, Chef' sort of encompasses all that journey, the ups but also the downs. I didn't want to create a book that was a victory lap: I won five awards here," he said in the interview. "I didn't want to do that male, sort of very one-noted way of an athlete. The downs are probably just as important as the ups."

In a phone interview, Samuelsson talked of his time running the Minneapolis restaurant, of the celebrity factor and his future.

Q I remember when you came to Minneapolis, you were talking about getting Minnesotans interested in sea urchins, among other things. How did you find the reception here?

A Minneapolis, for me, was an important steppingstone for me to grow in America, to be outside of New York. It was an eye-opener for how the rest of America -- and how the Midwest -- worked. I think we had a lot of success. The fact that the restaurant was so big wasn't Minnesota's fault. We took on a big, ambitious space. When I think about all the cooks coming out of Minnesota now and Minneapolis, I think in some part we were part of that journey.

I still remember my friends like J.P. [Samuelson] and I see Andrew [Zimmern] all the time. So it's like that generation of chefs is still very influential, and of course there are younger, new chefs coming up, which is great. But it was activated, and I feel like I was part of the transition between just sort of concept restaurants into this more fluid, chef-driven restaurant. And maybe we were part of getting people over that bridge. At the end of the day, it's part of that beautiful landscape of Minneapolis restaurants you have now.

Q Aquavit Minneapolis opened at a time of change in the local restaurant business. You definitely upped the ante for everyone.

A Even then you saw that alternative restaurants were important. Now alternative is the new normal. And that scene was just starting, and I think that's great. Each city should have its own type of restaurant. Everything that we gave had an imprint, a footprint, in the city.

Q When you were first starting in New York and then in Minneapolis, the whole celebrity factor in chefs was just beginning. What do you think of the celebrity attention now?

A It's always been about the craft for me, and enjoying the craft. I started cooking for the love of cooking and I am going to keep cooking whether there's a celebrity aspect to it or not. I do think it's great how young and old people can talk about food. It's such an interesting bonding factor that they can do that. If it means that it spreads the conversation around food, around cooking, then fantastic. If it means more young people are going into the field, or know more about ingredients because it has more of a platform, that's great.

But if you enter the field thinking you're going to become a celebrity chef, then you enter it the wrong way because you're not going to make it. You're just not. That's what I talk so much about in "Yes, Chef." It's a long road, a long journey. You look at Andrew Zimmern, and he cooked for a long time before he could travel the world and tell people what food was weird or strange or whatever. But there's a lot of knowledge there before he got to this.

If I ever doubted my love for cooking, I wouldn't have a chance to, 30 years later, 20 years later, to have this conversation with you. It's about the love for the craft.

Q When you were here in Minneapolis, you were 27. At the time you seemed to be an incredibly ambitious young man. Do you feel you can go off in other directions? Have you reached whatever it was you were looking for at that young age?

A I still feel like I'm beginning in many ways. I feel like there's a lot of tasks in cooking that I want to master, that I want to do better. But I definitely feel that working a long time and being able to express myself in food is a privilege. I've been able to do that in Europe, in America and in different places, through different ways, whether it's through restaurants or through cookbooks. I can take a lot of pride that I can launch cookbooks and there's an audience out there that supports that. It takes me years -- five years -- to do a cookbook.

So at 27, I was maybe singularly focused on the restaurant, but today at 40 there is restaurant work, there is charity work, there is cookbook work and now there is the memoir. It's a larger body of work, but it's all done with authorship and sensitivity and respect of love of the craft.

Q You have a very different personality than many chefs on TV who are ranting or over the top.

A I think it's the connectivity of Africa. It's very humbling. When I'm there, we're dealing with the most basic level of food, which is how to get clean water, how do we teach people how to work with ingredients so they don't outgrow the land. It's cooking with potatoes and things like that. It's the most basic, the most fundamental.

My grandmother's cooking was very family-oriented. The fine dining culture is just one aspect of our industry, not the only aspect. I'm engaged in food on so many levels, and I love that. So my work, my craft, is around food, and writing is one aspect of it, communicating a narrative, cooking online is one aspect of it, solving the food chasm that we have in Harlem and finding a farmers market is another one, and all of them are equally exciting for me.

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