Before Top Chef, when I had returned from the Dinner Lab tour, I was full of ideas, bursting with hope and beaming with pride. Greg and I were still living in Astoria, and we used to hang out on the roof of our apartment drinking beers and planning our glorious future. He’d been with me, as a friend and a business partner, since our days at the Culinary Institute. I had relied on him for support at EMP, and he never once let me down. He was nearly the only person I could say that about. Now that I was on the cusp of a new opportunity, I knew that whatever I did, I’d be doing it with Greg.
Dinner Lab had taught me a few things. It gave me confidence in my talent in the kitchen and my ability to connect with guests in the dining room. Some chefs, no knock, are skilled on the line and even leaders in the kitchen. But it’s like Field of Dreams: When they emerge from the back of house, their personalities all but disappear. They become unbearably shy or surly in public. That wasn’t a problem I had at all. After years of adapting to new and difficult situations, I was at ease transitioning from one presentation of myself, as, for example, the no-nonsense chef, to another, a charming storyteller.
The second, more important, lesson I had learned from my experience with Dinner Lab was that my life story could actually be translated into food and that audiences, guests, diners, wanted to consume both. I had found a way to convert, through food, not just the warmth and love of my upbringing but also the struggles I’d faced. Whatever my next step was, I knew I needed to capitalize on this.
Even before the tour wound down, I had received an offer to start a bar with an accompanying menu with a well-established Nashville restaurant group. The idea was that eventually I could expand into a more ambitious food program. It was a good offer, generous financially, and Greg and I both really liked the guys running the project. But just before we signed on and moved south, a Dinner Lab guest got in touch with me.
“Kwame,” she wrote, “I was at your dinner in D.C. I loved it. My friend is trying to open a restaurant here. Would you want to talk to him?”
I emailed back that I was already opening a place in Nashville, but I’d be happy to consult.
“Just hear the guy out,” she responded.
Not one to say no to an opportunity, I agreed. That’s how I met Glenn Paik and Kelly Gorsuch.
The first time we spoke by phone, Kelly and Glenn told me they wanted to open a fine-dining restaurant serving southern comfort food. Ugh, I thought, of course. The idea of doing upscale riffs on mac and cheese, fried chicken, and collards was not only a played-out concept, it was a step backward for me. More than one step. The belief that African American cuisine couldn’t rise above the Mason-Dixon line was exactly the sort of stereotype I wanted to destroy. Though southern cooking had played a huge part in my own upbringing, it wasn’t the entire story. To emphasize only that aspect would mean becoming an actor in the long and ugly play of degrading black culture for the benefit of white people. I politely thanked them for thinking of me but said I wasn’t interested. I was about to hang up when Kelly said, “Wait, wait, wait. What do you want to do?”
In all my conversations with potential partners, this was actually the first time anyone had asked me point-blank what I wanted. Now was my chance. I laid out what Greg and I had discussed so often on our rooftop in Queens, an extension of what I had been doing at Dinner Lab. The idea was clear—my autobiography told through food—but by now I had come up with a name. I would call the restaurant Bijou. The word is French for “jewel,” and it would be both a homage to my mom and a nod to the painstaking execution and flawless technique I’d bring to the table. “It’s a fine-dining, modern American, globally influenced restaurant that tells my life story through food,” I explained, allowing the words to roll off my tongue like the smooth pitch it was.
Glenn and Kelly, who were already a little familiar with my narrative, were enthused. I walked them through a few of the courses I had developed during Dinner Lab—steak and eggs made with beef cheek and quail eggs, reimagined fisherman’s pie, a lamb sweetbread seasoned like the chicken and rice I had eaten at halal carts growing up—ending with Butterfinger mignardise, small hand-made versions of the candy bars I had sold years ago on the subway. When I finished there was a pause on the other end, then both Glenn and Kelly said at once, “We love it!” I couldn’t believe how receptive they were to the idea. Two strangers were willing to invest in my life, my story, my vision.
Excited about taking the next step, soon Greg and I were on the train down to D.C. to meet the guys. We met up in a coffee shop in Shaw, the neighborhood in Northwest D.C. where Kelly lived and worked. Glenn was a low-key middle-aged Korean American businessman. What I learned later is that his is a classic immigrant story. His parents had emigrated from Korea and he grew up in Baltimore and made his money in private equity. Now he ran information technology for government agencies. Glenn was clearly the business side of things. He exuded a sort of good-natured competence that was comforting, especially after the collapse of Dinner Lab’s funding. Here, I thought, was a man who knew his way around pivot tables and PnLs. Glenn was a family guy who lived out in Alexandria. He was quiet and unobtrusive, no flash. Unlike many of the big-watch, hair-gelled bankers I had met on tour, he didn’t seem interested in milking the hospitality life for personal glory. That was a good sign.
Sitting next to him was Kelly, an almost comic contrast. Kelly is a big guy with a red beard who owns a slew of businesses in D.C. He’s a scion of a local hair salon family and runs a bunch of them in and around the city. Kelly imagines himself a dynamo and has a personality as big as his beard. In some ways he’s like me, ambitious and restless, always looking for the next move. As soon as we sat down he told me he saw his salons as a jumping-off point for an entire lifestyle and hospitality brand. He already makes scented candles, furniture, and lighting fixtures. Fine dining, he said, was the next domain to conquer.
Greg and I were pretty straightforward as we reiterated our vision of Bijou to the guys. Greg would be in charge of all things in the dining room. I had to have creative control and absolute discretion on both the concept and the menu in the kitchen. We still had the Nashville option waiting for us, so neither of us was in the mood to compromise. It turned out that we didn’t have to play hardball at all. Both Kelly and Glenn seemed totally on board with our conditions. And it got better. As we were finishing up our coffee, I mentioned money. My idea for Bijou was not cheap. Considering staffing, food cost, and presentation, it would require major investment and it was not without risk.
“What budget do you have in mind?” I asked Kelly, trying to sound casual about it.
“Money’s no object,” he replied, immediately. “Sky’s the limit, bro.”
“Yeah,” I said, “but you want to make money, right?”
Kelly replied, “As long as the quality is up to my standards, I don’t care if it ever turns a profit.”
Greg stepped in to say, “We’re going to need some time to develop the idea.”
“That’s okay,” said Kelly. “Take all the time you want.”
In fact, he even offered to put us both on salary as we developed the concept, $70,000 a year. That was way more than I had been making at EMP. I tried to contain the crazy excitement I felt inside.
At Kelly’s suggestion the four of us went for a walk before Greg and I hopped on the train back to New York. As Kelly explained while we walked past blocks of quaint rowhouses, the Shaw neighborhood was founded as a free slave encampment in the 1800s. It had been home to D.C.’s black cultural elite for decades. It was a hotbed of jazz and art in the 1920s and 1930s, a sort of Harlem of the South. That burned bright straight through until the 1960s, when D.C. was hit by riots, and by the crack epidemic in the 1990s. Since then, for nearly the past thirty years, the Shaw has been on a slow road to recovery, a road that has sped it toward gentrification. In the past five or six years, Shaw, like so much of D.C., has been rushing toward the new, with fancy condominiums springing up every week. Coffee shops have displaced community centers. Yoga studios have supplanted storefront churches. But the old Shaw still showed through in spots, and certainly in the modest yet beautiful rowhouses that lined the streets.
We walked past rowhouses under construction, and a sign proclaimed that they’d soon be the home of the Carter Woodson Center, devoted to Shaw’s own Father of African American History. Kelly hadn’t let on where we were going, but he stopped in front of a two-story townhouse on the corner of Q and 9th NW, with dark blue walls covered in ivy.
“We’re here,” he announced.
“What?” I asked. “Where?”
“This is Bijou.”
What? Was he kidding? He already had the place picked out? Sure enough, Kelly produced a set of keys from his pocket and pushed the door open. He had bought the building a few years ago and was living in it until he could figure out what sort of business to use it for. Even as I gazed at Kelly’s belongings, I could feel that this sun-flooded room would be Bijou. It felt so right to open up my restaurant in this neighborhood. I would be a continuation of Shaw’s proud black culture. In retrospect, I have to admit that Kelly could have pushed open any door pretty much anywhere in the world and I would have seen Bijou. The check he offered was blank, and my dream was so close, I could have imagined Bijou anywhere I looked.
As Greg and I returned to New York, we were stunned at our luck. We had come in hard, but still I don’t think either one of us thought these two guys, one a salon entrepreneur and the other a financier, would go all in so fast. Perhaps that should have set off warning bells—it definitely should have set off warning bells—but I wasn’t in the habit of saying no to wish-fulfilling genies or passing up an opportunity because it looked too damn good.
Greg and I signed papers with Glenn and Kelly shortly thereafter. We would all be partners. Though Glenn and Kelly would be investing the money—exactly how much I didn’t know—Greg and I would be in charge, as per the agreement, of everything that took place within the four walls of the restaurant. The four of us sat around a table at Izakaya Seki, one of D.C.’s best Japanese restaurants, drank sake, and toasted our forthcoming success. “Here’s to opening the best restaurant in D.C.,” I said, hoisting a glass high.
Greg and I wrapped things up in New York. He gave notice at Eleven Madison Park and we gave up our apartment that spring, moving into a place around the corner from the restaurant and exploring our new home’s neighborhoods on bright red bikes, laughing and pointing like two dudes in a bromantic comedy.
For the first few months it was like Christmas every single day. True to their word, Kelly and Glenn were incredibly supportive and never stinted on money. As soon as Greg and I got situated, the four of us began an endless dining tour of the best restaurants in D.C., from Rasika, chef Vikram Sunderam’s brilliant haute Indian restaurant, to Tom Power’s upscale Corduroy, to the granddaddy of all D.C. fine dining, José Andrés’s minibar. Sure, the meals were useful in getting to know our competition, but they were also useful in our getting to know each other, and to be honest, a whole lot of fun. Glenn revealed himself to have a sly sense of humor. Kelly was just as gregarious as I had imagined, and wine only brought out more gregariousness and an almost hilarious self-regard. Over these dinners we’d dissect what we liked and what we didn’t at each restaurant. We admired the silverware at Kinship and the lighting at Rose’s Luxury, the bathrooms at minibar, the plates at Maketto. They all pointed to the fact that D.C. was ready for an ultra-high-end dining experience.
From the start, my mind had gone to the fine-dining model I had been taught at Per Se and EMP: small, intricate plates—actually small amounts of food on big plates—using high-end ingredients, served in a tasting menu format. Kelly and Glenn were only too happy to push me toward even finer dining. There would be only eight tables at the Shaw Bijou, an insanely low number. These tables would occupy what was now the parlor but would eventually become the dining room. What had been a backroom we would turn into a state-of-the-art kitchen. The basement we’d transform into a prep kitchen that housed the walk-ins, laundry, my “office” (really the crawlspace underneath the stairs), and storage. The second floor, where Kelly’s bedroom was, would be completely demolished. In its place we’d install a bar, and we planned to transform the larger space, closer to the street, into a members-only club. Kelly envisioned a place where the elite of D.C. could come to relax and let loose, with twenty-four-hour access and complete discretion. Membership would start at $2,000 a year. I had my doubts. For one, I didn’t want to open a place I couldn’t afford and wouldn’t feel comfortable in. Second, we could really use the space for more seating. Although I argued for a bar and lounge open to the public, Kelly was firm and I eventually gave in.
Presiding over these changes, I watched the whirl of construction crews and the flurry of schematics. Drawing from every element Greg and I had lusted after or experienced or had read about, we were transforming this old 1860s house into an over-the-top den of luxury. We sat with a ceramicist to craft the plates, since each course would have its own flatware. We collaborated with a woodworker, one of Kelly’s friends, to create impressive wooden doors with undulating ridges. Repurposing wood from an old Nashville barn, we built the bar upstairs and surrounded it with chairs covered in Icelandic sheepskin. In the kitchen, custom ranges ran along one wall, and underneath the wooden island stacks on stacks of pots and pans grew taller each day. In the prep kitchen in the basement, a battalion of immersion circulators and dehydrators shared space with two walk-ins and a wine room we also used for charcuterie.
We had planned on opening Shaw Bijou in October 2016. But as it turns out, converting a home into a commercial enterprise is a massive logistical and bureaucratic nightmare, one that none of us were ready for. There were zoning issues and infrastructure issues, outdated plumbing plans filed with the government that resulted in torn-up streets that in turn added months and many thousands of dollars onto the build. Even as our opening was delayed, Kelly and Glenn kept Greg and me on salary, and we never lost hope.
When I got the call from the producers of Top Chef and took off for two months in the middle of planning, the guys held the line. Both Kelly and Glenn (as well as Greg) had been supersupportive. They guessed correctly, win or lose, that my star would only continue to rise. The exposure would keep the Shaw Bijou on everyone’s lips, and that couldn’t hurt business.
While I was gone I tried to check in as best I could, but all my phone calls were monitored and could, I knew, be televised. So the team was on its own. Nevertheless, with Greg as my proxy, the restaurant inched closer to completion. When I got back from California, I had to keep the outcome of the show a secret. But people in the industry knew that I had been a contestant, and they also knew what Greg and I were planning. D.C. is a small scene and, even though we hadn’t opened our doors yet, we were big fish. So as we began to form a small community among D.C. chefs, our reputation—my reputation—preceded me. As a new chef in town, especially one who like me who was coming from New York City to a smaller market, you never know exactly what to expect. Reception can sometimes be rocky, especially if anyone senses an attitude of superiority. Luckily for us, though it was smaller than New York’s scene—perhaps because it was smaller—we found many friendly chefs who made us feel right at home, frequently inviting us out for drinks at their restaurants, drinks that continued long after their doors closed for the night.
Most of the chefs were supportive, but some weren’t. I remember going out with a local chef named Haidar Karoum. I didn’t know Karoum well. After a few drinks he turned to me and out of the blue said, “Your restaurant’s gonna fail, homeboy!” in a tone that was playful, but just barely.
I tried to laugh it off. “Man,” I said, “shut the fuck up. You’re just jealous.”
“No, seriously,” Haidar said, his voice turning unfriendlier. “Who do you think you are, homeboy?”
I took a beat. “Don’t call me fucking homeboy,” I said.
“You’re the only homeboy here,” he snarled.
Telling me my restaurant was going to fail was already a dick move. Adding a “homeboy” to it just wasn’t going to stand. It wasn’t as bad as calling me “boy.” but it was in the same vein, threading race, if not racism, into a taunt. I wasn’t going to let it slide. I got right up in his face, so close I could smell the vodka on his breath and see the broken red veins in the whites of his eyes. I could remember the satisfying feeling of beating the piss out of all those punks who stiffed me at Bridgeport and of the solid telltale smack of fist against jawbone. I thought of Boobie back at Webster, of rolling kids from the block. Who was this asshole who thought I could be trifled with? Then I felt Greg’s hand on my shoulder. “Kwame,” he said, “forget about it.” I snapped out of it. I came to, the room opened up again, and I remembered who and where I was. I didn’t need a headline right now about getting into a chef brawl.
“Fuck you, Haidar,” I said. “You just wait and see.”
Despite isolated incidents like the fight with Haidar, I walked on sunshine that summer. The press was hyping us and it felt good to be part of D.C., a city getting its groove on. The Michelin Guide was coming, and the restaurant scene finally had some serious swagger. Or rather, people were finally waking up to the talent that had been coming up for the past decade. Not only that, but good vibes were in the ether. We were in the victory-lap years of the Obama administration and were all looking forward to greeting the next president, Hillary Clinton. The spirit was hopeful and happy. Most newspapers and bloggers greeted my arrival with excitement.
Then came calamity. Just as Greg and I were sprinting toward the finish line, Glenn made a startling announcement during an operations meeting. He said we had been running behind in our payments to the construction crew and contractors. It wasn’t anything to worry about, he assured us, just an issue of money flow and liquidity.
Nevertheless, obviously, I was worried. For the past year we had been operating in accordance with Kelly’s assurance that money was no object, and we’d had no feedback from Glenn. I never saw an invoice or a work order, but Glenn assured us we were on track financially. This was the first I had heard that we were in any sort of trouble, and it came as a huge and scary shock.
“We owe them thousands of dollars if they’re going to finish the job,” said Glenn.
“Why,” I asked, trying to make sense of what I was hearing, “are we having this discussion now?”
“We need money now,” said Glenn. “We’re going to have to use the ticket sales to raise the money.” Like many high-end tasting menu restaurants, we had decided to presell tickets in lieu of standard reservations. That way we could guarantee the number of covers we’d have each night and protect against no-shows.
“No way,” objected Greg. “That’s too risky. If we do that we won’t have any buffer when we open. That was the whole point of ticket sales in the first place.”
“Do you want to open the restaurant or not?” Kelly jumped in. Apparently he had known that we were hard up.
Greg and I looked at each other. We felt trapped. We were in too deep to walk away. Already we had given years of our lives to this project.
We had no choice but to agree. But we still hadn’t settled on the price for the menu. In my mind, I had suggested a hundred dollars, with service included, which would make the Shaw Bijou one of the more expensive restaurants in town but not the most expensive. And even that was a bit above what I had initially wanted. I had always had a $60–$70 price point in mind, along the lines of Contra, a restaurant on New York’s Lower East Side I very much admired.
Kelly shook his head. “That’ll never work. We can’t raise enough.”
$125?
No.
$150?
No.
After a pause, Kelly, who had clearly had a number in mind all along, said, “It needs to be one eighty-five for the numbers to work. No tip. No tax. No wine.”
Greg and I both objected immediately. “That’s way too much, man,” I said. “We’re gonna get killed.”
“We need that money to open,” said Glenn. “It’s one eighty-five or nothing.”
Ultimately, Greg and I had to agree. I tried to justify the price to myself. After all, I knew from having dined at three-star restaurants while still living in the projects that if someone really wanted to eat our food, they could save up. So $185 it was.
When The Washington Post published an article that mentioned the price for a meal at Bijou, the news was greeted as if I had murdered someone. Immediately it became the only talking point. If you know anything about our restaurant, you probably know that it was extremely expensive. For a dinner for two with drink pairings, you’d probably be looking at close to $1,000. It didn’t matter that we had a choose your wine pairing starting at $20 and curated by our sommelier David Blackburn from bottles rarely sold by the glass.
Now, $185 for fifteen courses, without tax, tip, or wine, is admittedly steep. I had never made any secret of the fact that the Shaw Bijou would be a fine-dining destination, and this fact was amply covered—and celebrated—by the press. D.C. had a small but growing cadre of expensive tasting menu restaurants, led by José Andrés minibar. It was in this small but rapidly growing segment of the dining scene that Greg and I wanted our restaurant to exist. But still, $185, with no tax, no tip, no wine.
Soon the tide of D.C. turned against us. “The Shaw Bijou’s price tag leaves a sour taste,” wrote a journalist at Washington City Paper. “Something doesn’t feel quite right.” Commenters were less discreet: “I have never wanted a restaurant to go down in a spiriling flame than this one,” wrote one. (Sic, obviously.)
Because of the high price, nearly every food journalist in the D.C. area, not to mention legions of food bloggers, were already pissed at us by the time we opened. I understood it. A chef like José Andrés has earned his right to charge as much as he does. Who were we—who was I—to charge as much?
The pricing left me in an awkward position. Publicly I had to defend it, no matter how much heat we took from the press. After all, I couldn’t very well go out and say, “Look, we’re actually already broke and we need the money upfront.” What’s more, I didn’t want to undercut the entire premise of Shaw Bijou by appearing apologetic before we even started. But at the same time even I knew it was tone-deaf, so when given the chance to defend ourselves, I tried to blunt the impact by explaining the price in terms of food cost.
What I said then—and it’s still true now—is that we were well within standard operating procedure when it came to covering our food and labor costs. In fact, $185 was a bargain, comparatively. In most restaurants, a tasting menu is about 28 to 30 percent food costs. We were operating at 35 to 40 percent food costs. That argument is true on one level, but at the same time no one forced me to use king crab or American Wagyu or uni bottarga. No one dictated that a tasting menu must stretch to more than a dozen courses. No one demanded that we have only eight tables. Or a kitchen staff of ten or a dining room staff of just as many. No one made me order custom-made flatware or aprons or anything. That was on me. Had I known we were broke, I would have made different decisions every step of the way. But I didn’t. I wanted to be the best I could be. I wanted the Shaw Bijou to be the best it could be. Given a blank check, why not reach for the stars? Why not upgrade at every turn, select the most expensive, the rarest, the most luxurious ingredients I could? That was, after all, what I had seen at Per Se and at EMP and on my fine-dining travels, and all those restaurants were showered with accolades.
I am certain that the preopening backlash would not have been as fierce had my skin been lighter and or had my food been drawn from the same style of New American, modernist, or nouvelle cuisine that other top-dollar restaurants favored. None of the other high-priced tasting menu restaurants in town came in for the kind of vicious criticism accorded the Shaw Bijou. Not even a little bit. Maybe it was because I was young. Maybe because it was my first restaurant. Maybe because I was new in town. But the thought still lurks that the hate had something to do with the fact that I was making food that came from my culture, from black culture. I was saying that this culture is worth something, worth a lot, actually. That I was worth something. Underneath the reaction to the price tag, this was the white-lash rage that seethed.
Despite all that, opening night that November began auspiciously. A deep plum purple was the official color of the Shaw Bijou, and everything from our aprons to the custom-fabricated range was that hue. The logo, a blackberry, was set against a purple background. I thought it a good omen that on our opening night, the autumn sky was this exact color. The evening was cold but not bitterly cold. A gentle wind blew, and the air crackled with excitement (and the pounding of a jackhammer as the Department of Buildings finished some last-minute repairs on the water main in front of the building). The Shaw Bijou had been two years in the making, and now it was finally open.
A million thoughts ran through my mind on the eve of that first service, everything from how many quarts of chicken jus were in the walk-in, to how many logs of bottarga we had left, to whether the goat faces in the combi oven were crisping up properly. I could envision the entire night’s guest list—forty-eight people in two turns, or sittings, who had bought tickets months in advance. There were three birthdays, two pregnancies, a gluten aversion, a dairy aversion, and a dairy-but-soft-cheese-is-okay aversion. I visualized the fifteen-course tasting menu the way a high diver does before he jumps into the pool. I closed my eyes and could see each element of every dish come together. I had been imagining this moment for years.
What I didn’t think about, really, was the curious chain of events, years of bootstrapping hustle and sheer luck, that had landed me at age twenty-six in this time, at this place, with these people. I was scared that if I did look back, I’d be like Wile E. Coyote caught in midair, realizing there’s no solid ground beneath him.
Without a doubt, this was the most important and significant service of my life. I was finally becoming the restaurateur and chef I knew I could be. I stood at the pass in my own kitchen, as the head of my own staff, as a leader, an enforcer, a coach, the interpreter of centuries of my people’s traditions, the guy people said “Oui, Chef” to. “Chef Kwame Onwuachi” was written on my jacket. “Chef Kwame Onwuachi” was written on the menu. No one doubted that I was in charge. It was my ass on the line if things went south, and I’d get the glory if things went well.
In my immediate field of vision I could count at least a score of people who relied on me for their livelihoods. Some, like Greg and Paz, were my closest friends. Others were near strangers. Regardless of where they came from or who they were, they depended on me as much as I depended on them. From porter to commis to sous chef to server, I rode them all hard, but it was me who felt the most weight on my shoulders. My staff, both back and front of house, had picked up their lives and packed up their belongings to come here, to be in this spot right now. They had come from around the country and arrived at the doors of the Shaw Bijou with ambition and limitless hope. It was my responsibility not to leave them out in the cold.
Why did they come, for this punishing life of little pay and less sleep at a new and unproven restaurant, for a chef they might have seen on television once or twice but about whom they knew almost nothing? Quite simply, they had come because I had publicly proclaimed and damn well meant to open the best restaurant in Washington, D.C. Me, a black kid from the Bronx, new to this town. Yes, that was something I was going to do. It was audacious, ballsy, maybe a little arrogant. But everything I had learned and all that I had experienced had confirmed my belief that I couldn’t wait until someone gave me an opportunity. I had to make things happen on my own. I had to force the situation. I’ve always had to. At Shaw Bijou, all that hustling had paid off. Finally, I had made it. It lasted for all of twenty minutes.
Things began to unravel when I saw D.C.’s most important restaurant critic, Tom Sietsema’s, joyless face appear twenty minutes after we had officially opened the doors. Thanks in part to what the man clutching a leather valise and appraising our kitchen with a cold eye would write a few days later in The Washington Post, and in part to the cowardly incompetence of my business partners, and in part to my own pride—no getting around that—the restaurant would close its doors after just three months.
When I look back at the three months the Shaw Bijou was open, at the bright months preceding them and the angry ones following, it all gives me a headache, breaks my heart, fills me with intense pride, makes me want to shout and dance and cry with all of the emotions. I’m not old now by any stretch, but I was so young when we started working on the Shaw Bijou. I was green, and confident that the arc of my life would be a simple and elegant curve upward. In the story I told myself at the time, I had tunneled through adversity and narrowly avoided bad breaks to emerge triumphant at the apex of fine dining. It was a simple rags-to-riches tale, a narrative as smooth and solid as an on-ramp. I had, in short, come to believe not only in myself, but in the Kwame story I told others. In this telling, the Shaw Bijou would be my home run. Foolish, I now know, and wrong too, to think a story could have a happy ending before it really even began.
By the time Sietsema arrived in the kitchen, he had already been attended to by our burly and bearded bartender Zach on the second floor. He had already enjoyed the first course, a few slices of jerk-marinated duck prosciutto, accompanied by a pastry cigarette full of La Tur cheese and hazelnut oil, served on a small but thick wooden plate custom designed for us by one of Kelly’s friends. The duck prosciutto, a nod to my dad’s mom, a stern Jamaican woman named Gloria, had been cured, marinated, and then left to hang for two weeks in the walk-in. Sietsema had then been led down the back stairway to continue his meal in the kitchen. Afterward, he’d continue to his dining room seat. This was the progression all diners took when they came to Bijou.
The stairs led to the end of the line. I stood on the far side, expediting at the head of a wooden island. At my back was a wall of spices in neatly labeled Ball jars, from lavender buds to ají amarillo. To my right was a combi oven full of crackling sheep faces and dry-aged quail, and to my left you could see the dining room through a short hallway. In front of me were three chefs working the hotline and two on garde manger. Jong Son was on the second course, the first served in the kitchen proper. Jong was small, funny, with thick glasses and a furious work ethic. He was supereager and, like the rest of us, nervous as hell.
Jong didn’t recognize Sietsema. And at first neither did I. The critic is meant to be anonymous, but as he entered the kitchen a GM from a restaurant around the corner who wanted a job at Bijou snuck in and whispered into my ear who it was. By that point there was nothing I could do but watch Jong and pray he didn’t mess it up. I was trying to eye him furiously while at the same time not let on that I knew who he was serving and all the while making sure the kitchen didn’t fall behind. Jong, I knew, was a people pleaser, and when he got anxious he tried to please more. I was freaking out, because as I knew firsthand, there’s nothing less pleasing than a pleaser trying to please. If he had just been handing the guest a plate, it would have been no big deal. But I had asked each chef to preface the dish with an autobiographical vignette from my life that situated it in my life story. This was the same approach I had used so successfully at Dinner Lab.
“Good evening,” Jong began. “Chef Kwame”—here he pointed to me at the end of the kitchen—“often enjoyed chicken or lamb and rice from halal carts while living in the Bronx. This dish is a homage to those days. What we have here are lamb sweetbreads glazed in chicken jus with Kashmiri chili, atop a basmati rice chip, with a smoked sesame seed emulsion.”
I shuddered. What had sounded so normal and friendly in preservice run-throughs came across as a little creepy and a little cultish. That I was just a few feet away from him gave the whole spiel a little bit of an “Our Great Leader” feel. This obviously wasn’t what I had intended, but there was nothing I could do but watch.
Sietsema listened politely, nodded, and popped the bite in his mouth. His jaw was the only thing that moved, back and forth, back and forth. I knew the food was good, bursting with flavor, but no smile crossed Sietsema’s face. Just chewing back and forth.
He brushed by me, barely making eye contact, and walked into the dining room.
Fortunately, I didn’t have the luxury of time to dwell on what had just happened. It was one moment among many, and was soon erased by the next guests, a smiling couple clearly excited to be there. “We bought tickets the first day,” said the lady. “Can I take a picture?” asked her date. We all smiled for the camera. Now, this was more like it.
Opening night and the three nights before the review came out were some of the best of my life. After some initial hiccups, which were to be expected, the team was finding its groove. The restaurant was sold out, and we were firing on all cylinders. I thought that despite all the troubles we had run into before opening, we had made it through the hard part. Importantly, we were having fun. Greg and I had talked about taking everything to the next level, and now we finally had real live guests to try things out on. Greg would research the people coming in, pass me whatever intel he could find, and it was up to me to create something special for them. One night a woman told us her husband had just gotten a tattoo of a beet, so between the courses I snuck in a serving of camembert and beet mole on a flatbread. On another night, a guest mentioned something to her server about being so comfortable she wanted slippers when she walked in. So, during her meal I had my fiancée, Mya, run out to TJ Maxx and return with a pair that we presented on a silver platter.
I could count the hours I slept that first week on two hands, but every morning I woke up excited. My mantra was “Every Day Is Day One,” and as I walked the few blocks from my house to the restaurant, I almost jogged I was so eager to get there.
To his credit, Sietsema didn’t keep us in the dark about his feelings for long. We opened November first. His review ran on the fourth. I read it in the alley behind the restaurant with Greg. It was not good. “Shaw Bijou serves a few delights and several duds. Is that worth $500 a head?” ran the headline on WashingtonPost.com. Though he lauded a couple of our dishes—the king crab poached in garlic butter, my haute riff on Steak & Eggs—he slammed the sunchokes, thought the squash velouté was a cliché, the foie was too salty, the service was shoddy, and he hated the desserts. “A waste of tamarind and cranberry powders, not to mention palm oil,” he wrote. Most damningly, he took issue with the portion size, which went straight to our price point. “None in my party are linebackers,” he wrote, “but all of us end the meal less than sated.”
The review came out on a Friday morning after a really good service. We’d had no misfires, no missed aversions, no botched orders, nothing oversalted, nothing panicked, little chaos. We were feeling good. Then, boom, a morale bomb. Of the team, probably Gisell, our pastry chef, got hit the hardest. Jon de Paz was gutted because he was on the foie station and I had asked him to watch his salt on the marmalade in prep that night. And though I tried not to let it bleed out, I was hurting too. A lot.
Some elements of his review were undeniably true. The foie, I knew, was too salty. The service was rocky also. The only defense I had is that he didn’t even give us an hour. He gave us a twenty-minute grace period. I had never gone from feeling so high to feeling so low so quickly. The review was what it was, demolishing, and it was up to us to pick up the pieces.
I called a meeting as soon as the staff had arrived to lay out our situation. As we gathered in the dining room, both the dining room and the kitchen staff, it was on me to motivate the team.
“This fucking sucks, guys,” I began. “I know. I feel it too. But this is my dream, this is the shit we’ve all been working for for months. No one, not even Tom Sietsema, can take that away from us. Use this as a fire under your ass. Use this as motivation. Get angry and use that anger to make the best fucking food in D.C. From here on out, no mistakes. Cook with your heart and fucking crush it. Okay?”
The room echoed with a very loud “Oui, Chef!”
In the days immediately following the review, the vibe inside the kitchen became one more of defiance than defeat. We knew it was unfair to be reviewed based on your first hour of service. We knew there was work to be done. But we all felt that this was a chance to show Sietsema and all the other haters what and who we were. We could get through this.
My optimism was not shared by the other partners. Greg and I were quickly called in to a meeting with Kelly and Glenn. Kelly was furious. He told me he had never liked the desserts anyway and had always thought the menu was too expensive. This was total bull, which he knew as well as I did. He was the one who forced us to price it at $185 to recoup cost overruns. Nevertheless, he gave me a list of things to change. His big idea to save the restaurant was lunch. I told him we couldn’t run the restaurant we wanted while serving a whole extra meal. As it was, we were there all day every day prepping for dinner. The sunchokes and the dessert had to go. I told him that he had explicitly given me full rein in the kitchen. He replied, “Everyone has a plan until they’re punched in the face.”
The review really brought out some ugly, long-simmering tensions between me and Glenn and between me and Kelly. In the run-up to the opening I had been doing a lot of press. On one television appearance on Fox’s local affiliate, I had worn a T-shirt with the words “We Out,” attributed to Harriet Tubman, as I did my cooking segment. The shirt was a lighthearted but earnest homage to her escape to freedom in 1849. The segment went well, nothing that notable, but when I got to the restaurant afterward, I saw Glenn waiting for me. This was a little unusual, since he didn’t make too many visits.
He pulled me into my own office, a tiny space in the basement, saying, “We gotta talk.”
“You can’t be spewing your political viewpoints,” he said point-blank.
“What political viewpoints?” I countered.
He gestured to my shirt. “Those!”
This was during probably the most heated moment of the presidential campaign cycle, when Donald Trump was broadcasting his hate speech at an increasingly loud volume. Nevertheless, it was news to me that publicly celebrating Harriet Tubman had become a political statement. I had thought it was celebrating a shared history.
“Glenn,” I said, “if you think this is political, it’s on you.”
“It’s a subtle jab, Kwame. You don’t see me with my MAGA cap on, and yet I’ll be the first in line to vote for Trump.”
I was taken aback. Not that Glenn supported Trump; I didn’t agree with him, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t work together. What bothered me is that he wanted to control me, to stifle my voice even as I was drawing attention to an American hero.
To make matters even worse, I was experiencing the same dynamic with Kelly. I can’t count the times that he’d come in during the build-out and make some comment clearly designed to rile me up. Once, when the subject of Trayvon Martin arose, Kelly actually told me that he thought Trayvon had ruined George Zimmerman’s life. “That kid was, like, six foot nine and was running at Zimmerman. Wouldn’t you be scared?” Was he saying this just to goad me or because he honestly believed it? Which one is worse? I told him I wasn’t having this conversation with him, but it gnawed and gnawed at me. Between that and Glenn’s outburst, I was genuinely confused. How, I wondered, could these guys truly support a restaurant like the Shaw Bijou, which was based on the idea that at least one black life mattered, while generally dismissing the idea that all black lives matter? I had the sickening feeling that I had gotten myself into a situation where I wasn’t considered a master but a servant. I had been used to this in other kitchens, but that this could happen in my own kitchen was, I don’t know how else to put it, soul crushing.
The postreview meeting made this dynamic undeniable. To be fair, some of the changes were for the better, and the sunchokes were on the way out. We were going to add another course that was served in the kitchen, to make the meal more of an “experience.” But to have these changes demanded imperiously by Kelly made them all the more difficult to undertake. I felt under assault from within as well as without. I had to ask, or rather tell, Gisell to change the desserts completely. She wasn’t happy, but she did it. I increased the portion size. It ate into our margins, but I had to address the criticism, both internally and externally.
Nevertheless, we made the changes—except the lunch part—and soldiered on. When the review first hit, we got some cancellations but not too many. And I don’t know if those we did get were in response to the review. The piece went live two days before the presidential election, and all of D.C. had entered a state of shock.
Reservations began to seriously taper off in the beginning of December. And because we were already in the hole, we had no reserves to draw on. In the first few weeks we were doing sixty covers a night, two full turns of the dining room. But by December first, sometimes we’d have just five covers the entire night. It was a ghost town. For a chef, there’s nothing more demoralizing than an empty room when you still have to present a happy face. No one wants to eat with a loser. The magical experience we were going for at Bijou relied on the idea that I was a young, supersuccessful phenom. The food, the hospitality, the sense that it was my home, these aspects were so heavily autobiographical that when it became clear that I wasn’t this perfect inspirational model, the whole thing, I think, became unappetizing.
I grew deeply depressed. Greg and I were both drinking heavily. We’d split a bottle of whiskey a day, starting at nine in the morning and polishing it off before we shut down. I assume that the rest of the staff had their own ways of getting by—drugs, drink, whatever. I was in no shape to be a leader and wasn’t one. But I was with the staff, suffering with them. And amazingly, even though I couldn’t see straight by the time service rolled around, we weren’t missing ticket times, we weren’t making errors on dishes. We were running just as smoothly as before. But now there was hardly anyone to notice.
Over the past two years Greg and I had met many times in the alley behind the restaurant for a quick cigarette. Now we’d meet back there to cry. Shivering in winter sun, me in my chef’s whites and he in a gray suit, we looked at each other, shell-shocked.
“Shit, I guess black people shouldn’t have their own fine-dining restaurant,” I told him one day.
“Don’t say that, man,” he responded.
“Feels true, though, doesn’t it?”
“Whatever happens,” he told me, “I’m here for you.”
We finished our cigarettes in silence, ground them into the dirt, and headed back inside.
The visible decline of the Shaw Bijou exacerbated tensions among all of us. Glenn and Kelly were not immune. The two men had known each other for years—Kelly had cut Glenn’s hair for a decade—but this was the first time they had been in business together. Money doesn’t change you; it just reveals who you truly are. And as it turns out, these two guys didn’t like each other much. When things were going really well with the Shaw Bijou, the dynamic was papered over. But when things got tough—and they got extremely tough—the friction ignited a fire.
Glenn was our day-to-day contact during the build-out and in the first month after opening. Kelly was intended to be more of a silent investor. It turns out that he was both loud and silent in the worst way possible. Because we still needed his sign-off for major expenditures it was imperative that we could get in touch with him. He ran a number of other businesses and lived in Richmond, Virginia, an hour away, so I understood that sometimes contact was tough. But starting a few weeks before we opened, Kelly began to disappear more often and for longer and longer stretches. He began to act strangely too. Shortly after the review hit, Kelly told Greg and me we were not to contact him directly; if we needed to get in touch, we should go through Glenn. That was a problem, since we relied on Kelly to cut the checks for everything from payroll to deliveries. When neither Kelly nor Glenn was reachable, Greg and I were forced to pay our staff, bills, purveyors—everything—from our own pockets. The situation was clearly unsustainable.
I drove out to Richmond to meet Kelly and talk face-to-face. There was no way Bijou would survive if we couldn’t resolve this. Sure, our relationship had grown contentious, but it was nothing, I thought, that should endanger the business. We went out to lunch at a diner near his house, and though Kelly never apologized nor explained his long absence, he told me that Glenn was trying to sell the restaurant to another investor. At first I didn’t believe him. Why would Glenn do that? I didn’t think he would take such a drastic step without talking to me or to Greg first. But then Kelly showed me the emails, and I had no choice but to believe him. I had been so head-down during the opening I hadn’t realized it, but the two men were barely on speaking terms. At least that partially explained Kelly’s going dark in the past few weeks.
I drove back to D.C. infuriated and quickly called a meeting with Glenn and Greg to force the issue. At first Glenn denied that he was trying to sell, but when I told him I had seen the emails he broke down weeping and admitted that it was true. Then he finally leveled with us. Like a lot of first-time restaurateurs, he had gotten into the Shaw Bijou for fun. He had a high-paying job and close to a million dollars to spend. But as the years wore on and expenses mounted, he told us, his savings had become depleted. He had lost his job and had already dipped into his children’s college savings. He and his wife had two young kids and had fallen behind on their mortgage and sold their house. Now they were living in a tiny apartment. In a very concrete way, the Shaw Bijou had ruined him, and he had to get out.
He apologized for lying. I was still mad, but it’s hard to stay mad at a guy who is broken. He told us he had agreed to sell his share of the business—close to $700,000—back to Kelly over the next seven years in annual installments. A pit of dread opened up in my stomach. Now Kelly would hold all the cards, and if the drama of the past few months had taught me anything, it’s that this was bad news for me.
As the three of us sat upstairs on the fur-covered chairs in the Shaw Bijou, we all mourned a dream that was coming apart before our eyes. Before he left, Glenn asked Greg and me each for one thing, a souvenir, from the restaurant. I ran downstairs and grabbed my chef’s knife and gave it to him. Greg brought him a few Zalto glasses. When he walked out the door, it was the last I would ever see of Glenn.
Miraculously, on those long winter nights we managed to put out the best food we ever had. The chefs, to their credit, never flagged or complained, not once. Every morning they came in, to make their mise en place by hand from scratch, and every night they’d have to throw out the bulk of it and begin again the next day. Meanwhile I trotted from table to table during service, thanking our guests for coming in and trying to project an air of confidence when I felt anything but.
Kelly was freaking out. In one of my last meetings with him, shortly before the restaurant closed, he demanded that I fire half the kitchen staff. I told him I couldn’t do that so close to Christmas, but he insisted. Eventually I told the team, each of whom earned about $26,000 a year, that I had to halve their salary. Stay if you want, but if you go, I said, I don’t blame you. They all stayed. I also agreed to reduce the menu to just seven courses for $95—ironically, what I had wanted from the outset. I wrote a press release at the time that read in part, “Humility creeps up on you when least expected, and the opening of this restaurant has taught us just that. This being our first restaurant, and for some a first business venture, we had a substantial amount of learning and adjusting to do. And we have, immensely.” I hated writing that letter, and I disavow it today. Did we make mistakes? Of course we did. I did. Did I think I needed to publicly humble myself, trot out my apology like a captured runaway slave, promise that I had learned my lesson and that, yes suh, I knew my place? No, I definitely did not. I opened a business that didn’t work. I didn’t murder anyone. But in Kelly I was working for a guy who once told me Trayvon Martin had what was coming to him, the same Kelly who had initially wanted a high-end fried chicken joint, Kelly who had no interest in my story, who despite what he had said earlier cared only about the money. What makes that statement I issued so infuriating to read now is that it was false and futile. If you want to know the truth, I’m still not humble. I still believe in myself and in my potential. I’m still ambitious, and if the Shaw Bijou taught me anything, it’s to pick better partners, never apologize for who you are, and always come out of the corner guns blazing.
If it hadn’t been for Kelly, I’m sure the Shaw Bijou would have found its footing. During the last months, despite everything, it was already happening. In the first days of January we saw an uptick in business. Corby Kummer, another critic, gave us a largely positive review in the Washington. The staff’s spirits, which had flagged toward the end of the year, began improving. We were all in this together, me and them. I had found a new way to lead that felt more authentic, that involved listening as much as it did commanding. I let each cook put up a dish of their own that would accompany the tasting menu. Since they weren’t getting paid well or getting proper credit—I felt—for their work, I at least needed to make them feel part of the team. And it worked. The kitchen staff was buoyant, and in the dining room the new tasting menu was bringing in huge volume. When I went out to talk to tables, I had that same feeling I did the first few days. I felt good and the room felt good. We had found our groove. We were doing more than $15,000 on the weekends. With those numbers we could sustain a business. I started to allow myself to feel hopeful again.
Not that Kelly was there to see any of this. He had ghosted us. We were used to this, but since payroll was about to hit, whatever was going on had to come to a head soon. With Glenn out of the picture, we were even more reliant on Kelly. The night after what turned out to be the last service, Greg and I went out with the entire kitchen staff for drinks at a local bar. We felt like warriors who had made it through a bruising battle and emerged alive.
I woke up hungover early on Sunday morning to find an email from Kelly to me and Greg. “Meet me at Bijou,” it read. I rolled my eyes, not in the mood for another tense conversation with him but we needed to work this out. I texted Greg, but he was still sleeping off the previous night.
I arrived to find Kelly sitting in the dining room alone. I pulled up a chair and sat down across from him.
“Where’s Greg?” he asked.
“I dunno,” I said. “What’s up, Kelly?”
He was looking down at the table, trying to avoid eye contact. I had a feeling about what was coming.
“Kwame,” he said, “I’m closing the restaurant.”
I’d been waiting for the news for the past month, but still, to hear him say it was painful. And yet at the same time I felt a wave of relief wash over me, that I didn’t need to fight anymore, I didn’t need to worry, the story had come to an end.
“When?” I asked.
“Yesterday,” he said.
I looked at Kelly for a beat, then took one last look around the dining room, at the beautiful lights we had obsessed over for hours, at the curving hand-carved credenzas, beyond the dining room to the wall of spices I had planned to draw from for years to come, and to the spot at the head of the island where I had stood nearly every night for the past three months. I wanted to cry, obviously, but wasn’t going to give Kelly the satisfaction of seeing me upset. Nor was I going to give him a handshake and pretend it was all cool. Kelly had absconded with my dream. I turned around and walked out the door. I never looked back and never entered the Shaw Bijou again.
I made my way straight to Greg’s apartment, pounding on his door until he woke up.
“Greg,” I said, “it’s over. Kelly closed Bijou.”
Before he could really react we started getting text messages from the staff wondering what was going on. As soon as I had walked out the door, Kelly called an all-staff meeting for later that day to tell them. Greg and I weren’t invited. On the spur of the moment, we invited them all to come to my house after the staff meeting for what was essentially a wake.
Greg and I just sat there with so many emotions—rage, sadness, despair, shame—coursing through our bodies that we felt numb. We had failed, and that was that. With the restaurant closed, the game was over.
I headed back to my apartment and soon Jong, Gisell, Paz, Jarren, Russell, and the rest of the staff showed up en masse. All were upset. I didn’t know quite how to relate to them. They were once my team and I had been their leader. But now that relationship was over, so I was touched that they still referred to me with respect as “Chef.” And I was touched that when I called for silence, there was silence. I told them how deeply grateful I was that they had given their lives over to the Shaw Bijou for the short time it lasted. I told them to never be sorry for doing something different, for trying and failing. That every day is day one.
In the days that followed I fell into the toxic cycle of what-ifs. What if Tom Sietsema had returned for a full review in a few months and lauded our ability to right the ship after a rocky start? What if Greg and I had asked sooner about the financials? What if Kelly wasn’t an asshole and Glenn hadn’t run out of money? What if Hillary had won? What if I had salted the foie myself? What if? What if? What if? What if all the critics were right? What if my story actually isn’t worth being told? What if I am exactly as hubristic as they say I am? And what now?
I wish I had answers, but the truth is, when you go through something as traumatic as a restaurant closing, you’re left with a quiver full of clichés to comfort you. Well, I say, I tried my best and that’s the best I could do. I told myself that it was short but sweet. I told myself that it was a learning experience. I told myself that I’m stronger for it. None of those things are untrue. None paint the whole picture, either. None of them really captures the heartbreak and the bruises, the excitement, the pride, the despair or the humiliation or the joy or the shades of emotion in between.
After the Shaw Bijou was closed, Greg moved back to Pittsburgh, the team disbanded, and the press moved on. There was nothing for me to do but keep on going too. But how? Everything had been stripped away. All my worst fears had come true. For the first time in my adult life, the Kwame story didn’t end happily, and I didn’t have any clue what the next chapter would be.