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Title details for Notes from a Young Black Chef by Kwame Onwuachi - Available

Notes from a Young Black Chef

A Memoir

by Kwame Onwuachi
Joshua David Stein
Audiobook (Includes supplementary content)
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available
“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 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.
Includes a PDF of recipes from the book.
“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

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    April 9, 2019

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781984839909
      • File size: 219420 KB
      • Duration: 07:37:07

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      What if your dream to open a fine dining restaurant came true and then died as it closed three months later? Kwame Onwuachi is memoirist turned narrator. His style is characterized by an unblinking honesty through which he reveals the story behind one of the most talked about new restaurants in Washington, DC. Onwuachi's indignation at the restaurant industry, and chronicle of his life as the child of Nigerian immigrants, is told at a rapid pace, laced with simmering critiques of both. Listeners who are unfamiliar with his story will find themselves cheering as a wayward child from the streets of the Bronx makes good on his love of food. Fans of the cooking world, including shows such as "Top Chef," will be entranced. M.R. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
    • AudioFile Magazine
      Narrator Malik Rashad captures the highs and lows in the life of an ambitious young chef. In this adapted memoir, Kwame Onwuachi recounts his early years as a child of Nigeria, Louisiana, and the Bronx and how they prepared him to succeed as one of the few Black chefs in fine dining. Rashad occasionally hesitates over French-derived restaurant slang but does an excellent job finessing both Onwuachi's inner voice and his brash presentation to the world. A tone of sadness and frustration reflects Onwuachi's pain at early abuse by his father and racism he frequently encountered in the kitchen. These difficulties are complemented by his exultation at his successes in the culinary world. N.M. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from March 11, 2019
      Chef and former Top Chef contestant Onwuachi wonderfully chronicles the amazing arc of his life, beginning with his challenging Bronx childhood in the 1990s with his African-American mother and his absentee Nigerian father. As a teen he began dealing drugs, and was later sent to Nigeria to live with his grandfather in order to “get out of my mother’s hair.” He returned to live with his mother, who had moved to Baton Rouge. There, he learned to cook at a local barbecue restaurant and took a job as a cook on an oil-spill response ship in the Gulf of Mexico; he eventually moved back to New York City, where Tom Colicchio hired him at Craft. In 2016, he opened his restaurant Shaw Bijou in Washington, D.C., which for him represented “years of busting my ass, of constant forward movement, of grasping opportunities manufactured to be beyond my grasp.” For his customers, he writes, “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.” Onwuachi includes Pan-African recipes throughout, inspired by the flavors of the African continent, the Caribbean, and the U.S., such as egusi stew and chicken and waffles. In the vein of Marcus Samuelsson’s Yes, Chef, this is a solid and inspiring memoir.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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