#amreadingmemoir

[lonbergwrites]

The Lesson

This is part of a multi-part review and commentary on the book Notes From A Young Black Chef by Kwame Onwuachi.

There isn’t much new that came out in this final chapter of the book, it was largely a summary and an epilogue-like take on what’s next for Chef Kwame. So I’ve included here my Goodreads Review of the book as a whole.

…

4/5 stars:

I don't usually rate or review books on Goodreads. It is my policy because I don't want to color my future memories and reminiscing of a book with concrete details from when I read the book originally. Over time ideas mellow and develop like beer in a barrel. Edges smooth over, new ideas come out, and books have a strange way of associating themselves into your life in unexpected ways. There are books that I loved in the past that - under scrutiny - would crumble. But they were important to me, and I want to remember them that way. There are others that gain nostalgia, love, and an appreciation that wasn't there when I first read it. I don't want to spoil that either by reading something different from the past. Once we read a book, it is ours, and it changes as life changes us.

This book is different because of how much I've glomed on to it from moment one. I used to be a chef. I've worked in Manhattan. I've put in the 60 and 70 and 80 hour weeks year after year. I have a lot of post-traumatic stress associated with being a chef. It is only now, years later, having worked as a brewer and gotten away from the fire of the kitchen that I can start to read foodie books and watch foodie shows again. This book was the door that I cracked a jar to see if I could take it. And it turns out I could. It even led me to taking up with Top Chef again - season 13, with Chef Kwame.

Cooking is personal. Cooking is life - a certain kind of life at least, and a life that used to be mine. I think that Chef Kwame did a good job giving non-chefs a taste of what it is like to come up on the life, to go to culinary school, to be sure of yourself (too sure, to be sure), to get opportunities, to take them, to grow and learn, and to ultimately fail. But to use these opportunities, experiences, and yes, failures, to grow and better yourself. It not just take what life gives you, but to carve out something for yourself.

I think he also did a good job writing a book for chefs, speaking to his experiences, and giving those of us who are not chefs of color a view into what it is like to be a person of color in the world of fine dining in the USA. It wasn't always comfortable, but it was always valuable.

I give this book four stars. It has a lot of the things that a good memoir has: dirt, intrigue, insight. Chef Kwame gives us a fairly unvarnished look at his life from some criminal activities in his youth to the knocks he took coming up in kitchens. He showed his clear effort and passion. He showed his failings. He faced his embarrassment. He owned up to (some of) his wrongs, and showed us where the system failed him. And the system certainly fails a lot of chefs of color like him.

Notes from a Young Black Chef misses that fifth star for what it does lack: full personal accountability and clarity on what perks he's been given in life.

There were moments in this story where he cast himself as the poor kid who is battling to get ahead like everybody else, and in the next breath he's talking about using all of his salary to buy the most expensive clothing. How he spent all of his money on travel and food. And then he had to sell candy to get by, and skipping over why he didn't just work his high paying job again another term or two and have all the money he needed. He talked about his poor mother, but then mentioned how she flew up, taking time off of work, to help him open a catering business, when she didn't have savings for food. I know my mother would have never been in a position to help me like his did, and we weren't as poor as he made their family out to be. It didn't add up for me. He talked a good game about the failing of the Shaw Bijou, but didn't fault (or originally question) himself for his part in spending every dime of his investors when he was originally given carte blanche. There's no thrift in Kwame, and that's okay, but I do feel like he is still so young that he's missed some of the biggest lessons from his own life that I - the reader - can tease out of the narrative, especially since I've been through some of the same things that he has. But, to be a truly five star read, he'll need some more time in the cask of the kitchen to develop into his full potential as an author.

...

This has been a fun and meaningful book review for me, not to mention a very personal one. Thank you for coming along on this journey. I know it has been a lot of me unpacking my own experience as a chef. This book will live with me for a long time as that key that I needed to reclaim my own life as a chef. I’m looking forward to following Chef Kwame for years to come - and to finishing up his run on Top Chef season 13. It is good to be enjoying cooking shows again.

~BPL

[elisalromagnoli]

I’m digging into a book from my December TBR list (link in bio): ‘Red Scarf Girl’ by Ji-Li Jiang. So far the book is really good and I’m enjoying it immensely. . Who’s looking forward to seeing ‘The Last Jedi’ in theaters? I don’t think I’ll be seeing it this weekend, maybe next though. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . #starwars #amreadingmemoir #readingnook #bookblogger #toberead #photographyworld #writerssoul #womenofcolor #bloggersofig #readersofig #readersworld #memior #culturalrevolution #bookgram #currentlyreading #vscophotos #winterstyle #writewritewritewritewrite #igbookish #scribbles

[lonbergwrites]

Dominoes

This is part of a multi-part review and commentary on the book Notes From A Young Black Chef by Kwame Onwuachi.

…

This chapter was all about Chef Kwame’s life before high school. He attended private schools for years, and he describes his family’s situation as one where they were poor enough to get scholarships and other assistance, but had enough resources to know how to access the system. In a diverse city like NYC, that put him in with a lot of achieving people from various ethnic backgrounds.

His friends growing up were twin white boys. He often played at their house - it has a safe place to be in an uncertain family situation, especially with his dad. A mostly indifferent student, dominoes were something that he put his attention, patience, and passion of play into.

But that wasn’t the part that really grabbed me. He grew up in a family with a rich culinary tradition, and his family’s food was bursting with spice and flavor. The first meal he ate at his friend’s house was London Broil. He says that marinated and very rare, he loves the dish, but that the twin’s mother was an indifferent cook, and while they had plenty, the food was mostly flavorless. He asked “what’s wrong with this?” to the mother, and greatly offended her - obviously.

Food memories from different families is something that interests me a lot. In the past, I remember the dad of my childhood best friend cooking us breakfast after a sleepover. His dad was cooking for us! I grew up with only my mom, and so to begin with, I was somewhat uncomfortable with a man in the house. But, even with my grandpa, uncle, and male cousins, I had never seen a man cook. I didn’t know it was a thing they(/we) could do.

I also remember a sleepover with an Indian friend of mine - one of only a handful of POC at my elementary school, and certainly the only person from the Subcontinent - that opened my mind to what food could be. Their house smelled, and while other (white) friends were put off by it upon arriving, I felt like I had arrived, and loved that I carried a perfume on me when I went home the next morning.

But the thing I slightly worry about with my own kids also has to do with food. Not to brag - just telling the truth here, I am a professionally trained chef - but my food is amazing. My kids always eat food that is properly seasoned. We do not have salt and pepper on the table. That happens in the kitchen. I know there will come a day when they eat at a friend’s house and as, “What’s wring with this?”

~BPL

[lonbergwrites]

From Old Guard to Start-Up

This is part of a multi-part review and commentary on the book Notes From A Young Black Chef by Kwame Onwuachi.

…

Have you ever heard of Dinner Lab? No, I hadn’t either. I haven’t always lived in hip NYC. Not that it stuck around. These chefs got around. Imagine opening a restaurant overnight, serving at said restaurant for a few nights (maybe only one), and then packing it up and moving on. That’s what Chef Kwame did. Over and over again with Dinner Lab.

To me, this doesn’t sound like fun, though maybe it would have when I was his age. He took the show on the road - I seem to remember him mentioning hitting up something like 19 cities. He was supposed to win a gigantic prize after winning the prize of most well-scored chef from diners across the country... but they ran out of funds and went belly up.

But, he did make a lot of contacts, and that’s what opened the door to him opening his own place in DC...

But before that, he was approached by Top Chef. And, they didn’t think that America was ready for a black chef that didn’t do soul food. Yep, high end food is very racist. If you’re surprised, you shouldn’t be. Did you read what I wrote about the externship/stage system? How many people can afford to not make money while doing drudge work in order to learn, yes, but mostly in order to cut the line?

Anyway... he wasn’t going for it at first, but his business partner convinced him because any press is good press.

[This was a short chapter]

On to Top Chef...

~BPL

[lonbergwrites]

Blood On The Eggshells

This is part of a multi-part review and commentary on the book Notes From A Young Black Chef by Kwame Onwuachi.

…

I have experience walking into a big-time restaurant. Chef Kwame entered Per Se in NYC as his externship restaurant from culinary school. Seriously impressive. This is one of the very top of the top restaurants in the world. I’ve worked at some famed places under some celebrity chef’s you’d know the names of, but this is the biggest of the leagues.

One note here for readers: he mentions the “paid” aspect of these externships. Not for a lot of people. Not for me, in fact. I worked 35 hours a week at my externship - completely unpaid - and another 35 at a wine shop on the Upper West Side in order to afford my share of rent in a sublet in the outer boroughs.

Kwame landed his position through what is called a stage. This is an unpaid stint of work that chefs almost always have to do to prove that they can cut muster at a restaurant. I did this during my spring break before I was to graduate from the classroom and be sent on to my externship. I had to prove myself this way in order to get a full-fledged externship at a very famous restaurant in NYC (far from where I’d been living and studying). I’ve staged at every chef job I’ve ever gotten, and I’ve done it for fun and for experience at many other restaurants over time.

[Note 1: externship is just an internship. I don’t know why this is the preferred term in culinary schools, but it is.]

[Note 2: his externship was between the first and second semesters, whereas mine was at the very end of the school program. This is interesting, because I think on the one hand, it does give students a better idea of what they are getting themselves into and drives them on in their future classes; on the other hand, having it at the end does propel students into the job force, and doesn’t give them whiplash going back into a school environment.]

Per Se was rough on his. He was treated like crap, given the lowliest of jobs, and rarely if ever allowed to cook the line. I know this feeling. I spent hours cutting mirepoix, breaking down pigs heads to make Testa (fancy head cheese), make panna cotta, though after a time (I spent 3 months on my externship) I did get to do some of the cool stuff reserved to the sous like making mortadella (seriously hard), curing dried sausages, and making artesan rabbit and wild hare sausage (wild hare smells seriously terrible - and as an interesting note, US-caught game is illegal in the US, so we had to import ours from the UK). I was even snuck onto the line by the garde manger cook several times before the sous found out - and while I did a good job, they claimed liability issues meant that I couldn’t work a station (liability because I wasn’t an employee and wasn’t being paid, so if I got hurt - or caught - they were on the hook for some serious lawsuits).

And as far as being treated like crap - at first I thought things were going well. I did my work, was always on time... but like any green student, I was slow - much slower than they were used to. I got my only non-A in all of culinary school in the first of my two sections on externship, and I wasn’t getting the feedback to do better until my first review. One of the reasons I ended up getting a B? I took lunch breaks (ten minutes sitting down) with the actual linecooks, instead of just eating standing up and working during my completely unpaid 8 hour shift. Yea. Fun.

I did eventually build a good report with the sous chefs, and I was given a lot more responsibilities after I learned what was actually expected of me... but I gave a lot to that place, so I very much know what he went through.

Chef Life is a tough life.

Blood on the Eggshells, you ask? He had to hollow and clean eggshells for presentation purposes at Per Se. Always the gruntiest of the grunt work for the least-well paid, I always say!

~BPL

[lonbergwrites]

The Block

This is part of a multi-part review and commentary on the book Notes From A Young Black Chef by Kwame Onwuachi.

…

So this story gets more interesting the longer I read it. Chef Kwame is a tough guy. He’s not a nice guy - at least he’s spent a lot of his younger life not being a nice guy. It is hard to hear about his fights and his “collections” stories when I am so rooting for him in reading this memoir.

I don’t know what it is about me that finds this kind of story so romantic. I guess it is because I come from a pretty straight-laced background. The thought of slinging drugs, joining a gang, and getting kicked out of college is so foreign to my experience. It bizarrely seems romantic. He’s lived a life I’ll never know, and one that is truly interesting. At least to me.

I think it takes a young person to live so much. I know now, between habits and physical stamina, I couldn’t start getting into a life like this, even if I wanted to. I suppose that accounts for some of the appeal of Breaking Bad. I often think I would like -to have had- the experience. A great scale for fun I’ve heard says that there are three types of fun:

Type 1: Fun that is actually fun in the instance that it is happening. Fun!

Type 2: Something that is fun only after it is all over. Fun memories.

Type 3: Something that is fun only when hearing about other people doing it. Fun stories to hear.

This kind of life is definitely Type 3 fun... but sometimes, it seems a tempting Type 2, if only so I could be the one telling the stories. I hope this doesn’t make me sound horrible or glib. I have the utmost respect for Chef Kwame getting his life together the way he has, and truly lament the fact that people are put into/get themselves into situations like these. I wish these stories didn’t happen - but being an author, they are alluring.

I’ll be honest in saying that, while I was riveted to this section of the book, nothing in it really spoke to me or my experience, so I’m going to keep this chapter’s musings short and mostly impersonal.

~BPL

[lonbergwrites]

Ancestors

This is part of a multi-part review and commentary on the book Notes From A Young Black Chef by Kwame Onwuachi.

…

One of the best parts of every fantasy novel with a young protagonist is the beginning, where the poor kid is thrown into a brave, new, magical world. You as a reader cling to the narrative. That’s this chapter.

When I was a kid I had a pretty boring life. I had a happy enough childhood. A lot of it was spent in front of a TV. It was safe. We weren’t by any means rich - closer the opposite - but we were never hungry, and the utilities were never turned off. I was loved. I had what I needed, including opportunities and support. But there were no adventures.

Most school’s have that kid (or many) who get to go on those grand adventures over the summer. Maybe Alaska. Maybe Disney. Maybe their family comes from somewhere “exotic” where they get to go and visit family. My family almost entirely lived within an hour’s drive of me, so I had nowhere to go, and my family had no money to get me there anyway.

So I had happy enough summers, but never magical ones. Not like Chef Kwame. Though his situation was such that he was abandoned by his mother for two years to relatives who had previously not been close to the family. He was living with his grandfather, his grandfather’s two wives, and some other relatives in a tribal compound in Nigeria. I don’t mean to be disparaging when I say “tribal compound.” This was his description. His grandfather - a highly educated man who was a professor at HBCU and leader in the Black Community - was royalty, and had a ceremonial role and compound in Nigeria. What an amazing family story!

When I think back to my childhood I do so almost exclusively happily, though so much of it is hazy and nebulous, both because it was so long ago, but also because a lot of it melts together without a lot of mile markers.

I am happy that I am fortunate enough to give my kids more travel in their young lives. It is one of the thing I’m most proud of in my ever-nearing middle age. I hope that we can find some real adventures out there.

~BPL

[lonbergwrites]

Egusi Stew

This is part of a multi-part review and commentary on the book Notes From A Young Black Chef by Kwame Onwuachi.

. . .

Egusi Stew - indeed the titular ingredient Egusi seed - is something I had to look up after listening to this chapter in Notes From A Young Black Chef. I’m familiar with a lot of international ingredients, but this wasn’t one. Now I need to hit up the local African grocery once this pandemic lifts, because I need to try out this recipe.

This chapter was a hard one to listen to. Chef Kwame had a hard life growing up in a lot of ways. The abuse from his father is the obvious here. But, he also grew up a working child. This isn’t all bad. His mother - aside from “missing” the abuse his father sent him home with - was loving and taught him well the things she could. But he spent so much of his childhood cooking for the family. I know that child labor has forever been an element in this world, and I certainly make my child participate in household chores. But there is that part of me that eschews the romanticism of children working in the family business. I was quick to join the workforce - I was 15, or maybe an old 14, when I started my first fast food job. I lost a lot of my childhood to that job. I did learn a lot from it, but I didn’t play, or laze, or exist in the ways a lot of my friends did. At 16 I was the boss of several full-fledged adults. It was weird.

I cannot imagine starting work like that at 5 like Chef Kwame did. Not even at the side of my mom. I loved cooking with my grandma growing up, but this is different. Catering for someone other than family is different.

But I digress...

I’ve never made much African food (North African excepted). I remember a homework assignment from 6th grade when I made a West African dish at my grandmother’s house during Black History Month. I remember it tasting nothing like the German farm food I grew up with. I don’t think it was a hit with the older generations of my family, and it didn’t become a staple for us, but I remember it distinctly because of the affect it had in shaking up our routine, and stretching us in our own kitchen. I know that that spirit drove me, eventually, into culinary school, and I’ve spent years excited to get my hands on whatever I can that I’m unfamiliar with - which has mostly been South and East Asian ingredients. I’m in the market to expand that knowledge more fully, and delve more thoroughly in African cuisine.

. . .

Here is Chef Kwame’s own recipe for Egusi Stew:

https://food52.com/recipes/81357-egusi-stew

[lonbergwrites]

Standing on Stories

This will be a multi-part review and commentary on the book Notes From A Young Black Chef by Kwame Onwuachi.

. . .

I don’t write a lot of book reviews. I read a lot, but I usually don’t review books for two reasons: First, I don’t want to color my memories of a book with my thoughts about it in the moment. Thinking back on books I’ve read over the years, my opinions change, and I think of books differently. They mean different things to me over time, even if I haven’t read them again. I don’t want to color this process with my limited thoughts on what a book is to me just now - with who I am just today - while the book is too fresh and not wholly a part of me. Second, I want to be an author one day, and if I don’t like a book, I don’t want to crap on the author, because I’m starting to get an idea of what they - we - go through. I don’t want to put anybody down for following their passion. And, I don’t want it implied that that was my hidden intention if I only skip books I’m not going to glow about.

So, I’m going out on a limb here. Especially because I haven’t finished the book. At this point, I’ve only listened to the first chapter, Standing on Stories, before deciding the take on this mantel.

I used to be a chef. Reading about chefs and watching cooking shows is something I don’t really do anymore. I have some trauma around it, and there’s a lot of exhaustion still seeping out of my bones from years behind the line. I’m hoping that this reading will help me to heal and integrate myself with my past.

. . .

“Anger breeds anger, not excellence.”

This line is what did it; this is the line that made me realize that I wanted to write about not only this book, but about reading this book - about taking it in. I’ve been screamed at in the kitchen. I done the screaming. It is almost always a bad idea, unless the screaming is to warn someone of imminent danger - and that is a distinct possibility. You spend so much time in the kitchen - a place that is so hot and stressful, a place that becomes home and family to you - that you start to become your job. That part of your identity becomes your primary driver.

“There are two of me... Chef Kwame, and Kwame All-Smiles.”

I know this feeling. I was the chef that drilled the line, worked all-out for 13-15 hour days, was that perfectionist, and bled cookery. That was my life. In the case of the book, Chef Kwame talked about being that chef, and then taking on the persona of the all-smiles chef in front of guests at his dinner celebrating the opening of the Black History Museum in DC.

I’ve done the exec chef thing. I know that feeling. But The All-Smiles me wasn’t necessarily the chef in front of your table. I’m not really a jovial guy. I am personable, sure, but I’m not a back-slapper or glad-hander. But my version of the All-Smiles me is the home life me, and that home life me was gone for so much of the day that he was threatening a permanent vacation.

Looking back now on the person that I needed to be in the kitchen, I don’t miss being that person. Sure I miss the camaraderie, and the pressure, and the instant gratification, and the sweat, and the flavors, and... and all of it from time to time. I don’t miss this:

“ ‘Let’s go,’ I tell the team. ‘Pick up,’ I tell the waiters, who are also new to me and shuffle by without a sufficient sense of urgency for my taste. ‘Let’s go!’ I say, ‘Let’s fucking move!’ ”

I don’t miss the stress and I don’t miss the anger. I don’t miss the constant anxiety. I don’t miss the constant criticism - self-inflicted or otherwise.

I miss the celebrities. I miss cooking at events like the one that Chef Kwame does in this book. I miss hearing the stories of the incredible men and women who populate the kitchens I’ve worked in. I miss the family. But I don’t miss the lifestyle. And I don’t miss having my home life me being lost in the walk-in.

But all of that is a part of me. So, join me on my journey reading Notes From A Young Black Chef.

~BPL