Triumph of Ethiopian chef
By Craig Seligman |
July 29, 2012, Sunday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
FOR years Marcus Samuelsson had a high-concept ID that made him an easy figure for New Yorkers to remember: He was the black Swede who cooked at Aquavit. You figured there was a story there.
"Yes, Chef," his blandly titled but otherwise beautiful memoir, begins in rural Ethiopia, where he and his older sister were born to an impoverished woman named Ahnu. By his first birthday, in 1972, all three of them had contracted tuberculosis. The sick woman walked or carried her children the 75 hot, dusty miles to Addis Ababa, where she died. She was 28. Marcus and Linda, as they were soon to be called, were hospitalized and then adopted by an upright couple in the Swedish city of Goteborg.
This background is set forth, simply and movingly, in the opening chapters. Only Samuelsson's name appears in the byline, but in the acknowledgments he thanks his friend the author and journalist Veronica Chambers: "The fine touch on the words is all hers." Whoever provided it, "Yes, Chef" is written with sparkle and grace.
By Samuelsson's own account, he's a driven man. In his adolescence he played soccer with such fanatical passion that when he was dropped from Goteborg's team, at 16, because of his small size, it was the disappointment of his life. ("I sometimes think of myself more as a failed soccer player than as an accomplished chef.") When he altered his sights to the world of fine restaurants - for years he'd enjoyed cooking at his grandmother's side (and Helga's Meatballs are still on his menu) - it was with the same demonic resolve. The middle of the book recounts his slow (though in retrospect not that slow) climb up the rungs of the cooking ladder. The work was grueling and the treatment hideous. In the kitchen of the top-flight Swiss hotel where he received much of his classical training, the stress level was so punishing that every morning he would quietly slip out to the bathroom to vomit.
His Ruby Keeler moment came in 1995, when he was 24 and cooking at the Swedish-themed Aquavit in New York. One terrible weekend, the chef died of a heart attack; after a short search, the restaurant's owner put Samuelsson in charge. Four months later, Ruth Reichl awarded the restaurant three stars in The New York Times, and he's been on the food-world map ever since.
His rise is gratifying to read about, partly because he never sounds as if he's crowing. The book ends with a chapter on Samuelsson's Harlem restaurant, Red Rooster, a venture that encapsulates his ecumenical thinking, and not only about cooking. "I have no big race wounds," he declares early on. But that doesn't mean that he hasn't thought about it intently, or that it hasn't shaped his ambition to prove "that food dismissed as 'ethnic' by the fine-dining world could be produced at the same level as their sacred bouillabaisses and veloutes."
"Yes, Chef," his blandly titled but otherwise beautiful memoir, begins in rural Ethiopia, where he and his older sister were born to an impoverished woman named Ahnu. By his first birthday, in 1972, all three of them had contracted tuberculosis. The sick woman walked or carried her children the 75 hot, dusty miles to Addis Ababa, where she died. She was 28. Marcus and Linda, as they were soon to be called, were hospitalized and then adopted by an upright couple in the Swedish city of Goteborg.
This background is set forth, simply and movingly, in the opening chapters. Only Samuelsson's name appears in the byline, but in the acknowledgments he thanks his friend the author and journalist Veronica Chambers: "The fine touch on the words is all hers." Whoever provided it, "Yes, Chef" is written with sparkle and grace.
By Samuelsson's own account, he's a driven man. In his adolescence he played soccer with such fanatical passion that when he was dropped from Goteborg's team, at 16, because of his small size, it was the disappointment of his life. ("I sometimes think of myself more as a failed soccer player than as an accomplished chef.") When he altered his sights to the world of fine restaurants - for years he'd enjoyed cooking at his grandmother's side (and Helga's Meatballs are still on his menu) - it was with the same demonic resolve. The middle of the book recounts his slow (though in retrospect not that slow) climb up the rungs of the cooking ladder. The work was grueling and the treatment hideous. In the kitchen of the top-flight Swiss hotel where he received much of his classical training, the stress level was so punishing that every morning he would quietly slip out to the bathroom to vomit.
His Ruby Keeler moment came in 1995, when he was 24 and cooking at the Swedish-themed Aquavit in New York. One terrible weekend, the chef died of a heart attack; after a short search, the restaurant's owner put Samuelsson in charge. Four months later, Ruth Reichl awarded the restaurant three stars in The New York Times, and he's been on the food-world map ever since.
His rise is gratifying to read about, partly because he never sounds as if he's crowing. The book ends with a chapter on Samuelsson's Harlem restaurant, Red Rooster, a venture that encapsulates his ecumenical thinking, and not only about cooking. "I have no big race wounds," he declares early on. But that doesn't mean that he hasn't thought about it intently, or that it hasn't shaped his ambition to prove "that food dismissed as 'ethnic' by the fine-dining world could be produced at the same level as their sacred bouillabaisses and veloutes."
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