It begins with a simple ritual: Every Saturday afternoon, a boy who loves to cook walks to his grandmother’s house and helps her prepare a roast chicken for dinner. The grandmother is Swedish, a retired domestic. The boy is Ethiopian and adopted, and he will grow up to become the world-renowned chef Marcus Samuelsson. This book is his love letter to food and family in all its manifestations.
Marcus Samuelsson was only three years old when he, his mother, and his sister—all battling tuberculosis—walked seventy-five miles to a hospital in the Ethiopian capital city of Addis Adaba. Tragically, his mother succumbed to the disease shortly after she arrived, but Marcus and his sister recovered, and one year later they were welcomed into a loving middle-class white family in Göteborg, Sweden. It was there that Marcus’s new grandmother, Helga, sparked in him a lifelong passion for food and cooking with her pan-fried herring, her freshly baked bread, and her signature roast chicken. From a very early age, there was little question what Marcus was going to be when he grew up.
Yes, Chef chronicles Marcus Samuelsson’s remarkable journey from Helga’s humble kitchen to some of the most demanding and cutthroat restaurants in Switzerland and France, from his grueling stints on cruise ships to his arrival in New York City, where his outsize talent and ambition finally come together at Aquavit, earning him a coveted New York Times three-star rating at the age of twenty-four. But Samuelsson’s career of “chasing flavors,” as he calls it, had only just begun—in the intervening years, there have been White House state dinners, career crises, reality show triumphs and, most important, the opening of the beloved Red Rooster in Harlem. At Red Rooster, Samuelsson has fufilled his dream of creating a truly diverse, multiracial dining room—a place where presidents and prime ministers rub elbows with jazz musicians, aspiring artists, bus drivers, and nurses. It is a place where an orphan from Ethiopia, raised in Sweden, living in America, can feel at home.
With disarming honesty and intimacy, Samuelsson also opens up about his failures—the price of ambition, in human terms—and recounts his emotional journey, as a grown man, to meet the father he never knew. Yes, Chef is a tale of personal discovery, unshakable determination, and the passionate, playful pursuit of flavors—one man’s struggle to find a place for himself in the kitchen, and in the world.
About Marcus Samuelsson
A James Beard Award–winning chef and author of several cookbooks, Marcus Samuelsson has appeared on Today, Charlie Rose, Iron Chef, and Top Chef Masters, where he took first place. In 1995, for his work at Aquavit, Samuelsson became the youngest chef ever to receive a three-star review from The New York Times. His newest restaurant, Red Rooster, recently opened in Harlem, where he lives with his wife.
Editorial Review
Born in Ethiopia, the author was placed in an orphanage after his mother died from tuberculosis, and the Samuelsson family adopted him and his sister. After becoming a famous chef, the author sought out his roots in multiple visits to his birth country. During one of those visits, he reconnected with his father, and he has kept in touch with his birth family since then. In rich detail, the author tracks his rise as a chef, from the cooking classes at his vocational high school and his first internship, to his appearance on Bravo’s Top Chef, which coincided with his cooking of the White House State Dinner after President Obama’s inauguration. The author chronicles the long and grueling hours in the kitchen and looks at the stiff hierarchy that exists not only among the kitchen staff, but also among head chefs. It took Samuelsson several years of working at Aquavit (where he “became the youngest chef ever to receive a three-star rating from the New York Times”) to be accepted as an equal chef by veterans, like Bobby Flay, already in the inner circle. In 2010, Samuelsson won Top Chef Masters, and he currently owns and runs Red Rooster Harlem in New York City. In addition to plenty of behind-the-scenes details, the author ably captures the feeling of being a young, single (he is now married), ambitious person in New York City. – Kirkus Reviews
The Fight For The Right To Hear, ‘Yes, Chef’
NPR Book Review – June 24, 2012 (Excerpt)
As you walk in the doors of Red Rooster, you immediately see a key piece of design: a bar dominates the front room, nearly touching the street, as if to say to the people of Harlem, N.Y., “Come on in.”
The story behind the restaurant’s owner, celebrity chef Marcus Samuelsson, is more about life than food.
Samuelsson was born in rural Ethiopia. He and his sister were adopted and raised in Sweden. Eventually, Samuelsson became world-famous. But he’s never forgotten where his journey began. His new memoir, which shares these challenges and triumphs, is called, Yes, Chef.
Inside his kitchen at the Red Rooster, cooks are too busy to smile, and the yard bird is a signature dish. Samuelsson says it was very important to get it right.
“Coming to Harlem, I knew my fried chicken had to be better than yours,” he says. “And you had to find authorship in the food.”
Ethiopian spices, combined with different cooking temperatures and coconut milk gave Samuelsson his unique mark.
With his employees, Samuelsson speaks firmly. He is quick to say he’s not asking anyone anything. [Read the full article...]
A Life Spent In Sugar And Spice
The New York TImes Book Review – June 26, 2012 (Excerpt)
The universal rule of kitchen work, Marcus Samuelsson says in his crisp new memoir, “Yes, Chef,” goes as follows: “Stay invisible unless you’re going to shine.” That rule applies to writers too, especially to those who would write food memoirs. Because you like to put things in your mouth does not mean you have a story to tell.
Mr. Samuelsson, as it happens, possesses one of the great culinary stories of our time. It begins in Ethiopia, where he was born into poverty and where, at 2, he contracted tuberculosis, as did his mother and sister. The three of them trudged more than 75 miles in the terrible heat to a hospital in the capital city, Addis Ababa, where his mother died.
Mr. Samuelsson — at birth he was named Kassahun Tsegie — and his sister didn’t know their father. Orphaned, they found themselves on an airplane a year later, adopted by a white, middle-class family in Goteborg, Sweden.
You may know some of the later bits of Mr. Samuelsson’s story. In 1995, while cooking for the Scandinavian restaurant Aquavit in Manhattan, he became the youngest chef to receive a three-star rating from The New York Times. Eight years later the James Beard Foundation named him the best chef in New York City. In 2009 he cooked for President Obama’s first state dinner. [Read the full article...]
Marcus Samuelsson: On Becoming A Top Chef
NPR Book Review – June 28, 2012 (Excerpt)
Marcus Samuelsson owns two restaurants in New York City and two restaurants in Sweden. He’s cooked for President Obama and prime ministers, served as a judge on Top Chef and Chopped, and recently competed against 21 other chefs on Top Chef Masters. (He won.) He’s the youngest chef ever to receive two three-star ratings from The New York Times.
Samuelsson’s journey to some of the most celebrated restaurants in the U.S. was a long one — and started several thousand miles away. He was born in rural Ethiopia, where he contracted tuberculosis when he was 3 years old. His mother, who was also battling the disease, walked with Samuelsson and his sister 75 miles to a hospital in Addis Ababa. Though Samuelsson and his sister recovered, their mother did not. After her death, both Samuelsson children were adopted by a family in Sweden.
Samuelsson details his path from Sweden, where he learned to cook from his grandmother Helga, to New York City and the Food Network in his memoir, Yes, Chef — in which he pays homage to his Swedish family and to food. [Read the full article...]
How to Slice It - ‘Yes, Chef,’ a Memoir by Marcus Samuelsson
The New York Times Book Review – July 27, 2012 (Excerpt)
For years Marcus Samuelsson had a high-concept ID that made him an easy figure for New Yorkers to remember: he was the black Swede who cooked at Aquavit. You figured there was a story there.
“Yes, Chef,” his blandly titled but otherwise beautiful memoir, begins in rural Ethiopia, where he and his older sister were born to an impoverished woman named Ahnu. By his first birthday, in 1972, all three of them had contracted tuberculosis. The sick woman walked or carried her children the 75 hot, dusty miles to Addis Ababa, where she died. She was 28. Marcus and Linda, as they were soon to be called, were hospitalized and then adopted by an upright couple in the Swedish city of Goteborg.
This background is set forth, simply and movingly, in the opening chapters. Only Samuelsson’s name appears in the byline, but in the acknowledgments he thanks his friend the author and journalist Veronica Chambers: “the fine touch on the words is all hers.” Whoever provided it, “Yes, Chef” is written with sparkle and grace.
By Samuelsson’s own account, he’s a driven man. In his adolescence he played soccer with such fanatical passion that when he was dropped from Goteborg’s team, at 16, because of his small size, it was the disappointment of his life. (“I sometimes think of myself more as a failed soccer player than as an accomplished chef.”) When he altered his sights to the world of fine restaurants — for years he’d enjoyed cooking at his grandmother’s side (and Helga’s Meatballs are still on his menu) — it was with the same demonic resolve. The middle of the book recounts his slow (though in retrospect not that slow) climb up the rungs of the cooking ladder. The work was grueling and the treatment hideous. In the kitchen of the top-flight Swiss hotel where he received much of his classical training, the stress level was so punishing that every morning he would quietly slip out to the bathroom to vomit. [Read the full article...]
YES, CHEF A Memoir By Marcus Samuelsson
The Washington Post Book Review – September 28, 2012 (Excerpt)
Once, the celebrated chef Marcus Samuelsson was not Marcus Samuelsson, but a 2-year-old Ethiopian boy named Kassahun Tsegie, sick with tuberculosis and alone with his sister in a hospital in Addis Ababa, where their mother had already died from the disease. The two children were adopted into a white, middle-class family in Goteborg, Sweden. The boy, renamed Marcus, came to adore his Swedish grandmother, Helga, who taught him how to cook.
At age 24, Marcus Samuelsson, working at the Manhattan restaurant Aquavit, became the youngest chef ever to receive three stars in the New York Times. He was named best chef in New York City by the James Beard Foundation and won “Top Chef Masters” on television. He cooked the first state dinner in President Obama’s White House in 2009. [Read the full article...]
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