Chef's Memoir Tackles What It's Like To Be Young, Gifted And Black In Fine Dining
Kwame Onwuachi's new memoir, Notes From A Young Black Chef, isn't just about his rise from poverty to celebrated restaurateur. It's also a meditation on being a black man in a rarefied world.
It was the morning after the election of America's first black president, and Kwame Onwuachi was hungover. He'd been partying all night. He was dealing drugs to survive after he dropped out of college. He was, he says, lost.
But when he saw President Obama, something clicked. "I thought, I can do anything. And I immediately flushed everything that I had down the toilet and was like, I need to find myself," Onwuachi recalls.
He went to the grocery store and bought ingredients to cook a chicken curry. "I didn't know that I wanted to cook, but it was like, here's something that I'm familiar
