The air is so warm in D.C. tonight, it still feels like summer. It’s October, it should be night already, but the sun is taking her sweet-ass time leaving the stage. It’s just too beautiful a day to say goodbye. From where I stand, on the fifth-floor balcony of the brand-new National Museum of African American History and Culture, the city spread below seems full of promise. Across the North Lawn, American flags flutter in the wind around the base of the Washington Monument. To the east, the Capitol building, with its impressive dome, is bathed in bright light, and to the south, the White House sits like a perfectly proportioned dollhouse. In the distance, the red and blue lights of the carousel at National Harbor glitter in a tiny festive constellation against the pink-fading-to-blue sky, guileless and beautiful.
Standing above the scene in my chef’s whites, I feel like an orchestra conductor peering in on my pit as the musicians tune up. Under the ruby sun, everything glimmers and shimmies with excitement. Next month is a historic election. Next month I’ll open my dream restaurant. Next month I’ll step into the life I’ve always wanted. So though it’s late in the day, it feels like the dawn of something new.
“Chef!” A voice behind me cuts short my daydream. “Where should we put the allium shoots?” The voice belongs to Jong Son, one of the team of nine young chefs I brought to cook at the museum with me tonight. “Next to the Ossetra caviar in the reach-in fridge,” I tell him. Behind me is a hive of activity as cooks rush to finish their premeal preparation, called mise en place, before the guests begin to arrive. My mind turns to the spreadsheets and to the lengthy lists of tasks and quantities through which even the most sublime food—in fact, especially the most sublime food—must pass before it can be made whole again. I turn my back on the view and head in to the kitchen.
With the opening of my first restaurant, the Shaw Bijou, less than three weeks away, my mind churns on overdrive. For the past two years, the project has come to consume my life. It is, by far, the most ambitious thing I’ve ever been a part of, the most logistically complicated and the most precarious for me personally. It is the expression of years of busting my ass, of constant forward movement, of seizing opportunities manufactured to be beyond my grasp. Though my culinary journey started like so many other chefs’, as a child in my mother’s kitchen, opening a fine-dining restaurant of my own is the goal toward which all my efforts have been oriented. I’ll need every bit of luck, every scrap of knowledge, every shred of strength. I’ll need to call on every single connection I have, and tug on the thread of every story I can tell, to open the doors to my very own place.
The experience and knowledge I’ve gained since graduating from the Culinary Institute of America I hope will help me. My time at some of the best restaurants in the country I hope will prepare me. That I won a national dining competition called Dinner Lab and that I appeared on Top Chef has hopefully given me a national audience that will translate into customers. But you never know. Everyone is famous to themselves. Whether the audience on the other side of the television screen will show up at the Shaw Bijou, I’m not sure.
When I arrived in Washington, D.C., from New York two years ago, I thought by now I’d be the prince of the D.C. restaurant world. Things haven’t gone exactly as planned. All ambitious restaurants suffer setbacks, but it seems we were dealt a particularly crummy hand. Already, my partners and I have blown through a handful of opening dates and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Everything that could go wrong has, from broken water mains to boneheaded zoning laws. I’ve found out that, just as L.A. is a city that’s run on movies, D.C. is a city that runs on red tape. But, somehow, we’ve toiled on and finally we have a date—November 1.
D.C. is a city whose culinary landscape has long suffered from the preferences of deep-pocketed politicians for the unchallenging, dick-swinging food of steakhouses. There is, of course, a small vanguard of fine-dining chefs, but as a young black chef from New York, who has worked in some of the most acclaimed restaurants in the country, my arrival was greeted with a lot of excitement and anticipation.
As the weeks turned into months that turned into years, the food media’s fascination with the Shaw Bijou has only grown. Bijou, as we call it, has become like a destination resting somewhere between myth and reality. As each detail leaked out—Washington, after all, is a city with no shortage of leaks—interest grew. There would be only eight tables. True. There would be a members-only club on the second floor. True. We would sell tickets, not take reservations, and those tickets would be nonrefundable. True. That I had parlayed my fifteen minutes of fame on Top Chef into a million-dollar restaurant. Not true. My partners and I were already deep into opening Bijou long before Top Chef ever came along. But there’s a lot out there about me that’s untrue.
I took a ton of heat a few months ago, when I announced that dinner at the Shaw Bijou would cost $185 per person, not including tax, tip, or wine pairing. The price tag made us one of the most expensive restaurants in D.C., and it immediately made me a target for populist rage. Who was I, the city’s critic class howled, to charge so much? How dare I, new here and so brazen, compete with José Andrés, whose flagship, minibar, was our closest equal, pricewise? To whom had I paid my dues?
I could have responded that our food costs were high and our margins were low. I could have pointed out that $185 is pricey, but when you look at cities with more established fine-dining scenes, cities like New York, a city with five Michelin three-star restaurants, to D.C., where the guide hadn’t even arrived yet, $185 is not ridiculous. I could have shown the haters the $150,000 worth of reservations we had presold and said, “Well, the public begs to differ.” The truth is, I could have said whatever I wanted to but nothing would have helped. It was an audacious move; part of being audacious is dealing with the blowback.
But the real truth, the truth I keep under lock and key, is that I also sometimes wonder if all the haters are right. This fear I haven’t shared with Mya, my fiancée, or my mother, Jewel, or even fully with myself. I haven’t dared to give shape to these thoughts with words. But damn, $185 is kinda pricey for a first-time chef in a new city. Who do I think I am?
It’s a question I can’t afford to pose so close to opening night. Lately, my life has taken on the rhythms of a boxer in the lead-up to a title fight. I’m in the restaurant, in motion, head down for twelve hours a day. This morning began with me on my knees, for instance, grouting the tiles in the kitchen. Later I crawled into the phone-booth-sized office in the basement to finish assembling recipe books for my cooks. My eyes ache from peering at microcress and obsessing over the angle of a rice chip on a piece of lamb sweetbread. But in the high-wire act that is fine dining, these things matter. Well-grouted tiles matter. Millimeters matter. This frenetic pace is only broken up when I sit down with curious journalists for interviews in which I attempt to appear relaxed, confident, and charming as I make the case about why people should root for us. Then there are the meetings with my partners, in which I try to calm their nerves even as mine fray. Lately these have turned heated but I chalk it up to preopening jitters. And sometimes, maybe once a week, I see Mya, who lives with me a block from the restaurant but whose face I’m more likely to see when scrolling through Instagram or Facebook than in real life.
There are so many moving parts—from staffing and training to menu development to purchasing ingredients—that I shouldn’t even be at the museum tonight, but it’s too meaningful an opportunity to pass up. One of the lines of attack that pisses me off most in the backlash against the Shaw Bijou is the objection that I haven’t paid my dues. To all the morally outraged critics who say I haven’t, I want to clap back, “What were the brutal days working for little or no pay at blue-chip kitchens like Per Se and Eleven Madison Park, if not paying my dues? What was hunching my shoulders down toward the cutting board to weather the abuse of a fire-breathing chef but an act of supplication to the fine-dining gods?” Maybe it’s that I’m too young, that I haven’t been “a member in good standing” for long enough to deserve this chance. True, at twenty-six I haven’t put in decades in kitchens around the world, spending the years when I have the most energy, drive, and horsepower in someone else’s kitchen. I haven’t waited to be summoned for my big moment by a tap on the shoulder from a mysterious, benevolent stranger. It doesn’t work that way where I’m from. You make your own opportunities where I’m from.
But more infuriating is the question about to whom I should have been paying dues. It seems like the only ones keeping track are the white guys with tall hats. And how did those guys get into the club? By paying dues to older white guys with even taller hats. As for the thousands of black and brown chefs—dubbed cooks, domestics, servants, boys, and mammies who were kept out of restaurant kitchens or overlooked within them—they were beyond consideration. Their work, like them, was invisible. Invisible men and invisible women cooking invisible food for invisible children. So I get that it must be confusing for those who criticize me as an ingrate upstart—how can I pay dues to people who don’t exist?
They exist to me, though, and tonight I’m standing on their stories. In an immediate, physical way, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, on the last undeveloped plot on Constitution Avenue, is both oppressively and upliftingly powerful. Inspired by the angular shape of a Yoruban column from Nigeria, the museum is a three-tiered structure that looks like a futuristic wedding cake. The frame is wrapped in an intricately cut metal shroud that mimics the ironworks found on the gates and balustrades of cities like Charleston and New Orleans. At one time, these ornamental ironworks were fashioned by slaves and installed on the buildings of their masters. But those chains are broken now, and the museum celebrates those who lived bound by them, those who broke them, and all we’ve done as a people since.
Why am I here tonight? A few months ago, the champagne maker Dom Pérignon asked me to create an “African American”–themed menu for a dinner to celebrate David Adjaye, the Ghanaian British architect who designed the building. At first I balked at the request. I don’t do “African American–themed” menus. I am an African American chef, so if I cook my food, isn’t every menu I create African American by default?
On the other hand, why quibble? This is a media dinner, not a thesis on race. And anyway, I was gearing up to open a restaurant. Any press is good press, and good press is especially good press.
There’s a lot riding on my performance tonight. It’s not that a critic might walk through the door (I’ve checked the guest list for both real names and known pseudonyms). It’s not that I’m cooking for forty-seven of the most influential tastemakers in D.C., the people I need to evangelize for me in the name of the Shaw Bijou. It’s that I’m cooking for all the people, and to tell all the stories, told and untold, remembered and forgotten, housed in the floors below me.
Before we started prepping, I had a chance to wander the empty halls. Though the building is massive, rising hundreds of feet above the ground, the most harrowing exhibits are housed in three subterranean galleries bluntly called the History Galleries. Dug deep into the soil, the first level—the lowest, the earliest, the most base—is given over to the horrors and heartbreak of the American slave trade. Like any black man in America, I’ve felt the effects of enslavement through time. Though for me the shackles have been figurative, they’re nonetheless very real. In ways spoken and unspoken I bear the offspring of the wounds, welts, and scars whose victims are memorialized beneath me.
Like them, I live with the contradiction between what this country says it is and what it really is, as my mother and father have, as my brothers and sisters have, and as my ancestors have too.
But to come face-to-iron with actual shackles, rusty and real, that once bound the wrists of a kidnapped African child; to see a whip, its leather worn supple with cruelty; to see the splinters on the rough-hewn whitewashed walls of a slave cabin, reassembled here from its home on a Charleston plantation; to see a stack of bricks as high as a man, each representing a slave owned by Thomas Jefferson, is to mainline history straight into my bloodstream. Exhilarating. Edifying. Important. Infuriating.
The misery of the Middle Passage, the transformation of people into property, the anger I still feel when confronted by so much freedom stolen, all are intensified by the contrast between the sadistic insanity visited upon my ancestors and the richness of the lives in Africa from which they were ripped. I have seen both sides. I have been T’Challa and I have been Killmonger. I have grown up in the knockabout projects. In the Bronx, I’ve been the kid on the corner, but I have also spent time in Nigeria with my grandfather, an Igbo obi, where there were no projects, no blocks, no corners.
A long table with a black tablecloth sits on the balcony, with chairs around it and on top an array of slender-stemmed glasses ready to be filled with thousands of dollars’ worth of vintage champagne. The empty plates wait for me. Cards with the names of the city’s powerful art and culture glitterati are written in elegant gold type. They were placed there by a stressed-out PR woman in a similarly elegant gold dress. A man furiously studies the printout of the names and faces of guests soon to be arriving. Many of the faces are black or brown, a rarity as far as my own experience with black-tie events go but one of the things that first attracted me to D.C. People here talk about Washington and D.C. as two separate cities. Washington is a city of monuments, marble, and men making deals. D.C., on the other hand, is a city of vibrant culture, with a long-established and flourishing black elite. Harlem had its renaissance, but D.C. never needed a comeback.
Since the National Museum of African American History and Culture cannot and does not attempt to resurrect the stories of all the millions of African Americans, enslaved and free, it is up to us—not just me, not just my guests tonight, but all of us living—to keep the names and stories on our lips. We must realize that those few stories told on the floors below stand for the many that aren’t. In my own way, I am trying to do the same through cooking. Keeping their stories alive.
Tonight I’m using the allium shoots (Allium being the genus name for onions) Jong asked me about, as a garnish for a reimagined gumbo we are serving as a second course. They are one third of the “holy trinity,” the mirepoix of celery, bell peppers, and onions that form the base for much of Creole cuisine. These are the flavors I grew up with. These are the flavors and scents my mother, Jewel Robinson, grew up with. Her father, Bertran, was Creole, an old penny-skinned deep-voiced man by the time I met him in the galley of a ship on the Mississippi, but his daughter filled our Bronx kitchen with his recipes. Gumbo kept me company growing up. As I sat on my fire escape outside our apartment in the summers, the smell of it wafted out the kitchen window. Its taste kept me cozy when it turned cold and the windows were closed and we kept the heat low to save a few dollars.
This is what the bone-tired cleanup crews I cooked for in the aftermath of Deepwater Horizon had grown up with too, the same scent I conjured on a ship’s galley floating in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico that transported them back to their own kitchens hundreds of miles away.
Now I am upgrading it with luxury furnishings and a few amenities, but trying to keep the spirit alive. Gumbo’s got good bones. These allium shoots, whose flavor is more subtle than that of the more common bulb, sit atop a version made with a rich crustacean broth that will be poured tableside over a knuckle of new-shell lobster, two morsels of king crab, and a quenelle of Ossetra caviar. Though run through the ringer of fine dining and elevated technique, the flavors—rich seafood essence cloaked in a silken roux—would be instantly recognizable to any south Louisianian, and they hold special resonance for a black one.
Gumbo, in its essential form, arrived shortly after 1720, carried in the taste and muscle memories of enslaved West African people. The word gumbo comes from the Gold Coast Twi term ki ngombo which means “okra” (itself an Igbo word, the language of my grandfather and my father). It was a staple up and down West Africa, from Benin to Ghana and Nigeria. Ripped from their own country and planted in a new one, these enslaved people sought out what was familiar to them in the fields of Louisiana. In cabins just like the one reassembled below me, these slaves ate their ki ngombo mixed with rice, another staple from their homeland. As the okra gave their stew its supple texture, kernels of rice gave it body. This was the start of what we now know as gumbo.
Like stolen labor, this stew became part of a Southern culture whose origins rest on the corrupt scaffolding of slavery. Nothing about what it has become undoes this fact, though the dish never stopped growing and evolving. When Germans arrived in Louisiana, they introduced spicy andouille sausage. When the Spanish took over in the late eighteenth century, they threw in their famous jamón and added a salty meatiness to the stew. And after the Spanish government brought fishermen over from the Canary Islands in the late 1700s, shrimp and crab pulled from the Gulf of Mexico were added, and seafood gumbo, my favorite, became common too.
The gumbo I’m making tonight, a preview of what I’ll serve at Bijou, is almost ridiculously extravagant. The crustacean broth is made of caramelized lobster, king crab, and shrimp bodies. I’ve added a dark roux made with the holy trinity, garlic, and thyme, plus my mom’s spice blend. The king crab arrived last night from Norway. The new-shell lobster, which tends to be more tender and flavorful than late-season ones, came from Maine and is much more expensive than its hard-shelled kin, and the Ossetra caviar is $395 per seven-ounce tin. If I were a white chef, this luxurious riff on a gumbo might come with a whiff of cultural appropriation. If I were a black chef serving it only to white folks, I would feel uneasy too, as if somewhere in my fancifying lay a secret shame that black folks’ food needed fixing. But tonight I’m a black chef serving black-tie food to a largely black crowd, with a black president sitting in the White House a few blocks away. I am proud of this menu, proud of this moment, proud of this museum, proud of my people, dammit, proud of myself.
Every dish on this five-course menu is a part of me, a taste of my past remade for the future. The yams, for instance, I had first known candied in holiday spreads in the Bronx and—later on, in their larger, whiter, and less sweet form—as a deep-fried street food in Nigeria, where as a ten-year-old I was sent to live. Tonight I’ve transformed the yams into a velouté, a velvety soup thickened with a blond roux. I’ve cut the sweetness with the muscular earthiness of black truffle puree and added a few toasted pepitas for texture. Instead of marshmallows, which I used to think were the worst part of candied yams, I’ve made a savory Parmesan foam. The orange, white, and brown Bakelite casserole dishes from my childhood table and these custom-made, matte-finished porcelain soup tureens could not look any more different. But these dishes are anagrams of each other. These flavors—all of them—are my first language, even if the syntax and grammar have evolved with time.
The fifth floor of the museum holds the administrative offices—and some challenges for a chef. There’s a lot of carpet we can’t mess up and fluorescent light good for board meetings but not really for cooking. Also, a little detail: there’s no kitchen. So my team has set up in the cramped freight elevator well; the rest are working in a few conference rooms in a tiny alcove where we’ve put together a makeshift line. Two tall refrigerators and a hot box we wheeled in this morning hold most of the mise en place, and I haven’t slept more than a few hours in the past three days working to fill them. There were thirty pounds of lobster to be broken down, poached, cleaned, and chilled for the gumbo. Last night, I was up at 2 o’clock grilling and braising Wagyu short ribs in the kitchen of my apartment to accompany a red-bean sofrito. Everything I own now smells like delicious meat. Not a bad thing at all.
This is the first night the whole Shaw Bijou team—the team on which I’ve staked my reputation and nearly everything I own—is in it together. We’re a mixed bunch, mostly young, all hungry, halfway between strangers and friends, who will be growing more intimate every night in the cauldron of the kitchen. I’ve known my business partner and general manager Greg Vakiner since my days back at the Culinary Institute of America. We worked together at Eleven Madison Park, lived together in New York, and trust each other completely. Other than that, welcome to the world of social media: most of my team came to me through Instagram or Facebook. A few weeks ago, we posted a listing for cooks. Immediately we were flooded with young chefs, many of whom were people of color looking for a kitchen environment where they might, finally, fit in. There’s Jarren, a quiet sous chef with midnight skin from D.C., and Russell, tall and timid. There’s Janny and Jong, who reached out via Facebook; Gisell Paula, the head of pastry, was working at Mast Brothers in Brooklyn. Gisell and I had met, officially, only a week before but she’d already become a leader in the kitchen. Tonight she’s typically ambitious, preparing not one but four desserts, including a beet butter cake served with cream cheese sabayon, chocolate malt snow, and sorrel; a mignardise consisting of a banana pudding tartlette; a yam doughnut fried to order; and a chocolate-covered praline. She’s had to produce all of it in the cramped space near the elevator, tucked beside a deep fryer, an immersion circulator, and a dishwashing station. But she’s still found time to assert herself to the rest of the team. As I walk by, I hear her telling the other cooks, “Guys, if we fuck up this carpet, we’re fucked.” She’s not wrong.
The kitchen staff around me resembles nothing I’ve seen before. Not in fancy restaurants, not in the classrooms of the Culinary Institute of America, not on the set of Top Chef, nowhere. Fine-dining lines are as white as the tablecloths that cover the tables and the patrons that sit around them. And, from my experience, being the only black guy on the line makes you stick out like a minor note on a major scale. No one lets you forget you don’t belong. Though it’s gaining more exposure now, the kitchen is about as immune from racism as it is from sexism. I’ve felt this firsthand in every single kitchen I’ve worked in, from the closet-sized belly of a cleanup ship to the gleaming stainless-steel show kitchens of three-Michelin-star restaurants. Sometimes racism takes the form of ugly words and actions. Other times it remains unspoken, communicated by hostile looks and secret snickers. But the most corrosive form, and often the hardest to address, is not being seen at all.
Now that I’m building my own kitchen, I’m not interested in the lip-service inclusivity you read in bullet-pointed lists in employee orientation manuals. Stock images over stockpots and tokenism aren’t going to cut it. And I don’t want them to. As one of the very few African American chefs in the world of fine dining, it’s my responsibility to be inclusive. When I look around tonight, I swell with pride. As a team, we’re young, we’re gifted, and we’re black and brown and caramel and yellow and white.
But just because we’re a rainbow coalition doesn’t mean it’s all going to work out. An inclusive kitchen isn’t worth anything if you can’t put up good food.
The way these dinner things always work is that you begin with one number of guests and then that number steadily creeps upward. Tonight we were meant to be cooking for thirty-six. Then someone important absolutely needed a plus-one. Plus one turns into plus three. Thirty-six becomes forty, forty-five, and then there are the local society journalists, invited for cocktails but not dinner, who throw a fit, so add two there and all of a sudden there are forty-seven demanding, very judgmental people who must be served four courses with multiple elements each on a limited amount of flatware by a finite number of hands. Brotherhood and solidarity get you goodwill, but nothing stokes discord like an appetizer served late.
The stakes are high but I wouldn’t have it any other way. In the kitchen, jittery and pumped up just before the curtains rise, I’m in my element. I am the son of a caterer, and ever-expanding parties are my birthright. I remember my mother’s outward calm when a client would call to say the party just doubled in size, moments before she loaded chafing trays of mesquite chicken wings and jollof rice into her van. Catering is like low-grade war games: hope for the best, prepare for the worst. So I prepare for nearly every eventuality. I’m so organized my systems have systems. A successful kitchen runs on plastic quart containers and paper towels, strips of tape and Sharpies. On the doors of my fridges are taped elaborate spreadsheets breaking down each dish into its component parts and assigning each element to a team member. Now I just have to trust the system.
Dinner was supposed to start at 7:00 p.m. but it’s 7:15 now and the guests are still happily mingling on the floor below, so we hurry up and wait. As they eventually begin to file in, the two tables that serve as our pass are spotless. Six of us chefs stand behind it wearing our custom-made dark-purple Shaw Bijou aprons. We project calm—excited, let’s-crush-this calm, but calm nonetheless. But past the conference room in the narrow vestibule to the elevators and out of view, it’s all rattle-and-hum. Every square inch of space is occupied. Empty crates for the glasses and plates form cardboard towers. The space is crowded with people. Sylvia, our dishwasher, has set up her station at the only industrial sink in the kitchen. John Gray, Lester Walker, and Pierre Serrao, from the Bronx-based cooking collective Ghetto Gastro, have stopped by to lend support, and also because those guys love a party with free champagne. Lester, with his phone out, is narrating the entire evening for his followers on Instagram. Pierre is working on the line and Facebook Live simultaneously, and John Gray is looking for a spot to crash tonight, if they go to sleep at all.
I step off the line to review guest aversions with Greg, who is heading up the team of servers. It’s up to him to connect what comes out of the kitchen with those for whom it is intended. This is simple if no one dies when they come into contact with peanuts. It’s much harder when dropping a plate can result in death. “Kwame Onwuachi Murders Society Doyenne” is not a headline I need right now. Anyway, this is good practice. We live in the era of the bespoke. One reason I feel comfortable charging so much at the Shaw Bijou is that we’ve made a promise to our guests that we will work around them. Dinner will be truly customized, so it’s best to get in practice now.
Tonight is typical. There’s a red-meat aversion, a dairy aversion, and a few gluten aversions. Maybe a few years ago, it would have been enough to just lose the Parmesan foam in the first course, sub more red-bean sofrito for the Wagyu short rib, and serve the butter cake without the cream cheese sabayon. But we’ve moved beyond that. It’s not a matter of taking out a piece of the puzzle; we’re making a whole new puzzle.
For the red-meat aversion, I’ve brought two squab that have been dry-aging in my fridge for a week. I grab a sauté pan and switch on the induction burner. I reach for the butter but the butter is gone. Sheepishly, a cook tells me the butter sauce broke and he used all our backup to remake it. I’m pissed but I don’t yell. I’ve been yelled at enough to know that anger breeds anger, not excellence—and anyway, it won’t bring the butter back. This is an opportunity, I think, to show my team what they can expect from working for me. I’ll talk to the cook later; for now I just have to get this squab ready.
“Arrosé that shit, bro!” says Lester. “Add some herbs, man!” I take his suggestion. I add a few tablespoons of grapeseed oil to the pan, throw a sprig of rosemary in, then the squab, quickly basting the bird with the fat it releases. I cover the pan with a quart saucepan, allowing the smoke to infuse the bird. I pray the smoke alarm isn’t sensitive.
By seven forty-five the mingling is over, the sun is setting, the candles are lit, and the beautiful people are finally seated. It’s go time. My squad lines up on both sides of the table, ready to work. Every member of the team performs a small but necessary task that if they don’t do perfectly every single time, the system breaks down. There are forty-seven bowls, custom-made for us by a ceramicist in Virginia. Each must be warmed with a blowtorch. A cold bowl is death for a warm soup. The warm bowl will be spotted with two dots of black truffle puree, allotted five toasted pepita seeds, filled with two ounces of velouté, and finished with five grams of Parmesan foam.
Plating one dish at your own pass, with your own heat lamps and your own pickup system, is a high-stakes solo act. Nine people simultaneously plating forty-seven dishes with four elements apiece takes a virtuosic ensemble. So we reach over each other—dotting here, dropping there—a tangle of hands and fingers, each relying on muscle memory to tell us what is exactly two tablespoons, or five seeds, or five grams. With so many servings even small errors accumulate, until the poor bastards served last are a few pepita seeds short and search in vain for the black truffle puree they were promised. As each velouté is plated, the dish as it is meant to be served begins to decompose. “Let’s go!” I tell the team. “Pick up!” I tell the waiters, who are also new to me and shuffle by without a sufficient sense of urgency for my taste. “Let’s go!” I say. “Let’s fucking move!”
The servers head out the door, carrying a small bowl in each hand. Two—with bowls for seats 14 and 36—are for the dairy aversions: “Fourteen and thirty-six!” I call out to them as they leave, “don’t forget!” Once the waiters pick up, we immediately start plating the gumbo. I twist open the tin of caviar and begin parceling out the beads with a tiny spoon when the PR lady in gold asks if I can come out to speak to the guests. I almost forgot. It’s time for that Kwame.
There are two of me—well, more than two, but two have starring roles for tonight: Chef Kwame and Kwame All Smiles. Both are me, but not all of me. As any artist with patrons knows, there’s a song-and-dance to be done for the guest. Luckily for me, I’ve spent my life modulating which Kwame to show the world. There was the Kwame of his father’s house and the Kwame of his mother’s kitchen; Kwame at school and Kwame in Nigeria; Kwame the drug kingpin and Kwame on television. The only Kwame I haven’t yet settled on is Kwame Alone, with no one else watching. I’m still figuring out who that one is.
For now, I remind Jong about the caviar—“Only five grams or we won’t have enough”— then push out the door onto the balcony. By now, the sky has turned dark. The candles flicker on the tables, casting light onto glasses and the faces that turn toward me. They’re filled with pleasant expectation. A tall man from Dom Pérignon, wearing a well-fitting suit, stands up and taps on his glass. He speaks with a French accent. His skin is smooth and tanned. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he says, “it is my pleasure to introduce to you chef…” He pauses, turns to look at me and then back to the crowd for comic effect. Apologetically, he says “I’m not going to say this right but…Kwame?” He says it correctly. He knows how to say it. I briefly tell the story of what candied yams meant for me growing up. Because of where we are, I mention something I won’t say to guests at the Shaw Bijou when it opens, that what brought yams to the country in the first place was slavery. But even though this is the story of the people that’s told at the museum we’re gathered here to toast, I know I need to lighten up. Kwame All Smiles reads his crowd. “For this course,” I say, “I made a yam…” I pause and turn to the tall Frenchman who introduced me, and say, “I’m not going to say this right but…velouté?” He nods. Of course I know how to pronounce velouté too, but the crowd laughs, in on the joke, and he feels benevolent. I take the opportunity to rush back toward the kitchen to prepare the next course.
But just before I head inside, I pause for a second to take it in the enormity of the moment and my small role in it. Five stories up and I’m still standing on hallowed ground. Caskets and chains and splintered beams of slave ships, knives and forks and salt shakers, Woolworth stools and mammy figurines, freedom and blood, progress and pain, voices raised and voices silenced, courage. The purpose of this museum is to resurrect the dead, to honor their lives, to celebrate their progress, to remember their suffering, to never forget their stories. This building is an argument that these stories, traditions, this suffering, this history, matters. In three weeks, I will open my restaurant and with it, I’ll have a chance to add my voice to that chorus. To prove that my story, like the millions of voices behind and beneath me, matters. As I push open the kitchen door, the last of my smile fades and I get back to work. I’m standing on stories, and this is my own.