My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Thanks to several reality cooking shows, the working world of fine dining has gained quite the reputation as harsh place. Iron Chef and Gordon Ramsay’s shows have all shown just demanding a career being a chef can be. Unfortunately, like many professions, people of color face unique barriers to becoming chefs, not the least of which includes a prejudice that they either can’t be fine dining chefs or a belief that they can only do variations on stereotypical foods. The great benefit of this book is to directly challenge those prejudices and confront the racism that can be just beneath the surface of the fine dining industry. At the same time, Mr. Onwuachi writes a wonderful memoir that reminds the reader that, much like the author himself, it is not always a straight line to our dreams.
The descendant of both Nigerian and Jamaican lineage, Mr. Onwuachi grew up with a mother in the catering business. Though he has known cooking from his earliest days, as this book shows, it was not straight line from there to celebrity chef. Indeed, he was sent away to live his grandfather in Nigeria for two years and at one point in his life he was going down a dark path of selling drugs. And yet, this winding path led him to cooking on fishing boats in the Gulf Coast, being a student at the Culinary Institute of America, and apprenticing and working at some of the finest diners in New York City. Mr. Onwuachi, with the assistance of co-author Joshua David Stein, writes a deeply personal and reflective memoir. While he writes in great detail how he busted his butt to get to where he is, he’s also not afraid to reflect on how some lucky breaks came at just the right moments to set him on his path. As said before, this is a great reminder that our journey’s through life are not always glorious or straightforward. There can be ups and downs throughout and nothing is guaranteed.
Another valuable aspect of this book is how it calls out the racism that is just beneath the surface of the fine dining industry. Sadly, like many industries and professions in America, there is not a great deal of diversity with some of the most famous chefs being primarily white. Mr. Onwuachi helps reveal why that is by cataloguing each instance of either subtle or outright racist behavior he had to face. Whether it was a potential investor telling him outright that people can only think of a black chef making fried chicken meals, as though he could not cook anything “serious”, or the abusive behavior from a head chef that was frequently racist in tone and behavior, Mr. Onwuachi directly and indirectly calls out the racism that is prevalent within the system. While this is not the central focus of the book, it is nonetheless a valuable reminder that so much of a culture de facto segregated, even though we would like to think it is not.
The only complaint I have about this book is that it feels incomplete. Mr. Onwuachi notes that he is a young chef, 27 by the end of the book, and he only just opened and closed his first restaurant in Washington, D.C. So, the end of the book finds him at an in-between moment in his life and career. He is certainly still determined to open a new restaurant in D.C., which, according to my limited internet research, he did not long after this book was published. Still, it does leave this book at an interesting and, slightly, unsatisfying place. I do hope there will be a follow up to this book in the future where Mr. Onwuachi writes about his life and career from this point onward. In spite of that, the transitional ending does not diminish my overall enjoyment of this book too much and should not diminish yours either.
Written with confidence and reflection, Mr. Onwuachi takes the reader on a journey through his life while also revealing the hurdles for young black chefs in the fine dining world. If you are a fan of food memoirs, but have read too many by older, successful white chefs, I recommend this book to you.
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