As soon as the Shaw Bijou closed, I was pretty much paralyzed with depression. I felt humiliated, angry, and sad. It also didn’t help that I felt like the entire city—a city I had moved to for the sole purpose of opening this restaurant—seemed overjoyed to see that I had failed so miserably. Just as bad, the sense of personal shame was compounded by a biting frustration, that I had unwittingly played into the narrative of the young black chef who didn’t know his place. I was certain that news of the Shaw Bijou’s closing was greeted with a self-satisfied roll of the eyes and a snide “Well, I hope he learned his lesson.” To be honest, though, I never heard anyone disparage me outright. I didn’t have to. There was a part of me that was saying the same thing.
For the first few weeks I just stayed in bed in the condo I shared with Mya, staring into the mirrored glass of the facing apartment complex. I tried to work out in my head what had gone wrong. Clearly it was more than just one thing, more than the price point or the lack of back-office support; more than the precarious financial positions of my partners; more than the fact that the city’s food media hadn’t been on my side. Maybe it was my cooking, maybe it was me, that didn’t measure up. That was the hardest possibility to contemplate, because if I started to doubt myself, everything I had built would crumble. It was my own hustle that had landed me here, with some amount of financial stability (though that was questionable without a job), some amount of fame (or infamy). But it’s the end of a hustler if he starts questioning himself. So I didn’t. I know I’m a damn good chef.
I could see that one easy way to redemption was to crawl back into the public eye, humbled and chastised. I could play the part of the wayward son who has learned that it’s the tortoise, not the hare, who gets ahead, that it is he who pays his dues who ultimately finds success and that respect is not given freely but must be earned over time. But even as I laid low, I couldn’t bring myself to do that. It just wasn’t true. I hadn’t “learned my lesson.” The Shaw Bijou failed for a lot of reasons, but if we’d been given more time and been allowed to stay the course, we would have eventually succeeded. I have no doubt that within the year we would have been the best restaurant in D.C. The only lesson I learned in the aftermath of our closing is that there are a bunch of people who seem real concerned about my education, as long as that education is the lesson they want to teach me.
Mya was supportive at first, but, like my mom did back in Baton Rouge, soon enough she pushed me to get off the couch and back out into the world. When I opened my computer and started sifting through unopened emails, I was gratified to find that buried among the sympathetic notes were a few from potential investors. A restaurateur in Oakland was interested in resurrecting the Shaw Bijou with a lower price point. There was an offer to open a fast-casual concept in San Francisco. A deep-pocketed investor in New York dangled carte blanche before me. Then there were the D.C. possibilities: a consulting gig for a local pizza chain, an opportunity at a new hotel being built by the Wharf. Of course, none of these were full-blown or formal offers yet but rather examples of the industry nosing around to see if there was still flesh on my bones or fight in my heart. The answer was that there were both. I wasn’t ready to be a has-been at twenty-seven.
Slowly I eased back into the world. I took meetings, listened in on conference calls, responded to emails. I wasn’t fully recovered; I still struggled with how to present myself as an up-and-comer when I knew most of the world saw me as a down-and-outer. But I dug deep, remembering the days of selling Butterfingers on a hot subway car in New York City and all the times I stood in front of potential clients during my catering years, when I had absolutely no idea what I was doing yet through sheer bravado convinced people to entrust me with their weddings and meetings and birthdays. I thought back to stories Granddad told me of my ancestors in Ibusa all those years ago: never changing, never shrinking, stoic and steady.
Mya is from Boston and was itching to get closer to home. Boston would be great; New York would be better. The pull of the five boroughs was strong. Returning to the city would be a homecoming, maybe not as triumphant as I would have wanted, but if I made it in New York, restaurant capital of the country, the failure of the Shaw Bijou would be quickly forgotten. San Francisco, where I hadn’t been since filming Top Chef, didn’t sound too bad either. Now there was a market that could handle high-priced tasting menus. But of all the offers, the Oakland option seemed the most tantalizing. I could return to fine dining and do so in a city with deep resonance for African American culture. Oakland Bijou had a nice ring to it.
Even as I contemplated relocating, something didn’t sit right. It seemed I wasn’t done with D.C. yet. To move now would be an admission of defeat, one that I would carry with me for the rest of my life. It wouldn’t matter how much success I found elsewhere; the failure to make it in D.C., where I’d given everything I had, would gnaw at me. As tantalizing as those offers were, I turned them all down. I would stay and finish what I’d started.
The next step after figuring out where I’d be was figuring out what I’d be. From a purely financial and workload standpoint, consulting would be the easiest gig. I could come up with a few toppings for pizzas, get paid a couple thousand dollars a month, and have plenty of free time to audition for television shows, or hang out with Mya, or chill with my friends. After hustling nonstop for the past decade, it would be nice to take a little break, sleep more than five hours a night, and not wake up in a panic about who was going to miss their shift.
Nah. That wasn’t me either. If the Shaw Bijou had taught me anything, it was that I relished being a leader in the kitchen. What I’m most proud of from that whole debacle wasn’t actually the food but the kitchen I—we—had created. Though there was a hierarchy, every voice was heard, and many voices were present. The kitchen of the Shaw Bijou was full of people of color, the kind of kitchen I never saw in fine dining before. That I had had some part in bringing that team together, that I may have given them a model of how to succeed and thrive in a fine-dining environment, means that no matter what, to me the Shaw Bijou was a success. For the past decade I’d been a loner, moving so fast through my career that I hadn’t fully experienced what it meant to lead a team, to create a culture. Now that I knew how, I wanted to do it again. A consulting gig would have been fun, but I didn’t want to be a solo agent anymore. To be a chef was to be a leader, and to be a leader you needed a team. I realized that whatever my next step was, I wanted the chance to create the kitchen and dining staff I had wanted to see for so long: a diverse and motivated group of people. Who knows, maybe there’ll be a future Kwame among them.
That still left a huge blank spot about what kind of food I’d cook. If it had worked out, the Shaw Bijou would have been confirmation that my thesis—transforming my life into fine dining—was viable. In the wreckage, I found myself questioning that premise. Maybe I should have said yes to Kelly and Glenn’s original idea: southern comfort food. Maybe that producer was right all those years ago and the world just wasn’t ready for a black fine-dining chef.
I toyed with what it would look like for me to go from the Shaw Bijou to shrimp and grits, mac and cheese, and fried chicken. I have absolutely nothing against that good ol’ southern food. It’s what I ate down in Baton Rouge, what I ate for most of my childhood. But it isn’t me; it’s simply what the world expects of me. And I would never submit to that.
For as long as I could remember, I had struggled to balance how I saw myself versus how the rest of the world saw me. Whether it was teachers, cops, fathers, chefs, business partners, or restaurant critics, I had been told so many times that I wasn’t worth it, that I was too much trouble, too ambitious, too proud. Maybe I was. Maybe I am. But I will never believe that my culture, black culture, African culture, Caribbean culture, the blood of my father and my mother and my granddad, of Auntie Mi, Mother, and Gloria, of Cassie and Bertran, of Boobie and Ruger and Jaquan, doesn’t matter. I know that if I cook this food, food that is in me already, the world will come to eat it. All I have to do is stay true to myself, to be the Kwame I am when no one is looking.
Whatever I do, this is what I want to see: I want to see a kitchen full of white, yellow, brown, and black faces—open faces, not faces closed by fear like mine was for so many years. I want to see a world in which not only the food from the African diaspora but the food from Africa is given the respect it deserves. When I push open the kitchen doors, I want to see a dining room full of diners, but especially brown and black diners, who, looking at their plates, feel seen, celebrated, and recognized. And when I look in the mirror, I want to see a young black chef who made that world a reality.