The sign above the kitchen at Red Rooster restaurant in New York City's Harlem is stark in its simplicity: "H. Jönsson." It's a nod to Helga Jönsson, the Swedish grandmother of chef Marcus Samuelsson, one of his many culinary influences.
Samuelsson has found comfort and inspiration in his kitchen connections that stretch from his youth in Sweden to his ancestral roots in Ethiopia to the Harlem brownstone he shares with his wife, Maya Haile, and all the stops in between for this well-traveled chef who trained in European kitchens.
Minnesota also served as a home for Samuelsson, however briefly, during his stint as executive chef at the former Aquavit in downtown Minneapolis. He's back in the Twin Cities for a book signing and class (the latter is filled) on Friday.
His latest cookbook, "Marcus Off Duty: The Recipes I Cook at Home" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 336 pages, $35), steps back from his restaurants to provide stories and recipes that offer a peek into his home life, whether it's Helga's meatballs or roast chicken, the street food he adores or kid-friendly recipes.
Q: Your new book is focused on the home cook and making things doable. What does home mean to you?
A: I'm home in Harlem right now. The food we're doing in the restaurant [Red Rooster] is very home-inspired, so a lot of dishes start at home and I walk them over to the restaurant.
I've never cooked from that point of view before. Life is so often about transforming yourself. I feel like I'm coming back to where I started in food, cooking at home with my grandparents and my sisters. Food from my grandmother and sisters is now in the restaurant. Before I never dared to put those dishes in the restaurant. But all you want when you go to a restaurant is to have a personal experience, so I maybe didn't start it the right way before.
Q: Why do you improvise in your home kitchen but not in your restaurant?
A: At home the pantry becomes such a go-to because you have what you have until you go out next time and buy something. You learn also from your pantry. If you don't have Dijon mustard, you can add another mustard and add a little bit more heat to it. Maybe it becomes horseradish and mustard. A restaurant essentially is a stage where you are cooking for an audience that is paying and obviously wants value for that. That level of mistakes and risks you don't want to do at the restaurant. But at home, "Oh, I'm going to add pomegranate to the salad because I have pomegranate seeds." You wouldn't do that move at the restaurant.
Q: Repetition is at the heart of chefs learning their skills. What kind of encouragement do you have for the home cook?
A: The whole idea of the book is to encourage the family to cook early. Cook early in life. Cooking and eating are something you are going to do your whole life. To start cooking as an adult is really hard if you don't have any memory for doing that. It's really about encouraging early steps and repetition, repetition, repetition. And not only cooking repetition but taste buds. From there you have more exposure: repetition from eating, from cooking. Then once you have that, you are more willing to take risks.
Q: This book differs from your others in that it offers a lot of how-to lessons: how to grill or how to work with the stove.
A: What I call the "scribbles" is where I get very personal with the tips. At the end of the day, if you have enough knowledge as a chef, it's all about sharing. Like anyone, I've done more mistakes in cooking than successes, so I want to share that. The scribble gets me to slow down the book.
Q: You often refer to your tribe. Who is your tribe?
A: My tribe is cooks and people who enjoy to eat and create memories around food. They come from all different parts of the country and world. It's delicious and puts a value on eating together and cooking. If people say, "I don't really care what I eat," chances are I'm not going to hang out. It's really there that I have my best moments with anyone, over a bowl of noodles or over a great taco or at someone's house.
Cooking is tribal. It's terroir. It's also a window into another culture or country or spirituality that maybe you wouldn't even talk to otherwise. That's an incredible opportunity to pick up. The opposite of that is to just stay in your lane looking at food as just filling your stomach. Or to say you're above that and you're not cooking, you're just ordering in. Then you're missing all the good stuff.
Q: How have ingredients for home cooks changed during the time you've been cooking in this country?
A: It's much more democratic today. Restaurant chefs and home cooks actually are more even than ever because ingredients are available at market or online. That's great. Now it's really anyone's game.
We've started to put really good value into meals back in America. There are people who cook and care about that. There are some people with economic needs and those who don't see it as part of their entertaining or being social. That's a tough one.
But there's a huge population excited about this — and not just New York and L.A. You see it across the country, people who want to learn about the new Americana pantry and new flavors and delicious food, wherever it comes from. And that's really the tribe I want to communicate with and cook for.
Follow Lee Svitak Dean on Twitter: @StribTaste.
