Notes from a Young Black Chef
Ratings10
Average rating4.1
15
Ratings10
Average rating4.1
“Kwame Onwuachi’s story shines a light on food and culture not just in American restaurants or African American communities but around the world.” —Questlove By the time he was twenty-seven years old, Kwame Onwuachi (winner of the 2019 James Beard Foundation Award for Rising Star Chef of the Year) had opened—and closed—one of the most talked about restaurants in America. He had launched his own catering company with twenty thousand dollars that he made from selling candy on the subway, yet he’d been told he would never make it on television because his cooking wasn’t “Southern” enough. In this inspiring memoir about the intersection of race, fame, and food, he shares the remarkable story of his culinary coming-of-age. Growing up in the Bronx, as a boy Onwuachi was sent to rural Nigeria by his mother to “learn respect.” However, the hard-won knowledge gained in Africa was not enough to keep him from the temptation and easy money of the streets when he returned home. But through food, he broke out of a dangerous downward spiral, embarking on a new beginning at the bottom of the culinary food chain as a chef on board a Deepwater Horizon cleanup ship, before going on to train in the kitchens of some of the most acclaimed restaurants in the country and appearing as a contestant on Top Chef. Onwuachi’s love of food and cooking remained a constant throughout, even when he found the road to success riddled with potholes. As a young chef, he was forced to grapple with just how unwelcoming the world of fine dining can be for people of color, and his first restaurant, the culmination of years of planning, shuttered just months after opening. A powerful, heartfelt, and shockingly honest story of chasing your dreams—even when they don’t turn out as you expected—Notes from a Young Black Chef is one man’s pursuit of his passions, despite the odds. “This is an astonishing and open-hearted story from one of the next generation’s stars of the culinary world. I am so excited to see what the future holds for Chef Kwame—he is a phoenix, rising into better and better things and showing us all what it means to be humble, hungry, and daring.” —José Andrés
Reviews with the most likes.
Fun and engaging writing and a fascinating journey through the world of fine dining (with some detours into reality TV and cooking for oil rig cleanup crews). I wish it were a little longer, especially given Kwame's recent success with his second restaurant, but I guess there's always room for a second memoir.
I really enjoyed this memoir! I'm currently employed as a line cook so I really related to a lot of whole industry stuff. I loved following Kwame's journey to the chef he is today, and it helped remind me why I do what I do.
Thank you to Random House Children's, Delacorte Press, and NetGalley for providing me with an eBook copy to review.
To boil this memoir down to ‘a tale of triumph over adversity' feels like a disservice to all that Onwuachi shared. To give it ‘happily ever after' vibes would, I think, risk readers closing the book and not thinking further about big problems that are not solved just because one Black man made it out of obscurity, gang violence, drugs, financial uncertainty, unstable and/or dangerous home life (not to suggest that this is THE one and only Black American experience).
I did look into the timeline between where the book ends and the publishing date, and the author bio included in the back of the book, which reinforces my belief that Onwuachi ended his story as written where and when he did to shine a stronger light on the racism, structural and individual, industrial and personal, that he has experienced.
While I was glad to see my curiousity satisfied about the journey a person goes on, from an interest in cooking to qualifying as a professional chef, I think the big takeaway is there are a few different ways to get there, and in this case it's infuriating to contemplate how many extra barriers there were in Onwuachi's early and later education and professional life, how often a lack of understanding existed, how often opportunities were that much harder to come by, how endless hustle was required because support was unavailable.
On the lighter side, I am so happy Onwuachi could recognize the toxic patterns of behaviour, the violent rage in his father and traditional fine-dining head chefs, that he did not want to bring into his life, his generation, his kitchen. That he found healing in cooking, and saw in it the ability to care for others while doing something that also comforted himself. 😌
I am grateful to him and his co-writer for creating a book whose message will stick with me.
⚠️ racism, mental/emotional and physical child abuse, animal death
