Notes from a Young Black Chef
Kwame Onwuachi with Joshua David Stein, Knopf, 271 pages, $26. This rip-roaring tale of ambition is also a sobering account of racism in and out of the food industry. Despite coming "from a long line of restaurateurs" on his mother's side of the family, Kwame Onwuachi, as a young black chef from the Bronx, was forced not just to seize his opportunities but to conjure them out of thin air and "bootstrapping hustle," he writes in "Notes from a Young Black Chef." After bottoming out as a self-described "drug kingpin," Onwuachi raised money to start a catering company by selling candy on the subway. Catering led to the Culinary Institute of America, where he continued to run his business even during a prestigious but punishing externship at Per Se. When he was only 26, he founded the ill-fated Shaw Bijou restaurant in Washington. Undermined by increasing tensions with his over-budget investors and more than a hint of discrimination, it closed after only a few months. What's most striking about his story is its unorthodox trajectory from rapid ascent to spectacular failure. Rather than ending on the usual triumphant note, this insider's look at the food world concludes with the chef's ruminations about his future and his dream of creating "a kitchen full of white, yellow, brown and black faces." Onwuachi's eventual success lies beyond the book's pages, when — unsurprising, given the man we meet in this fierce and inspiring memoir — he became executive chef at Kith/Kin in Washington. He was named Rising Star Chef of the Year for 2019 by the James Beard Foundation.
NEW YORK TIMES
