It is fairly uncommon for a 32-year-old chef to open his personal restaurant in Manhattan. For The New York Instances to decide on it because the greatest restaurant within the metropolis 5 months after it opens? Nicely, that is sort of loopy.
However then, Chef Kwame Onwuachi’s rise to celebrity chefdom has been somewhat loopy. Medicine and gangs have been a part of a troublesome upbringing within the South Bronx. After getting kicked out of faculty, he moved to Louisiana and cooked for a crew cleansing up the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. He’d discovered his calling. Again in New York, he enrolled in culinary college and thrived, graduating straight right into a job on the Michelin-starred Eleven Madison Park.
Kwame’s huge break got here in 2015, when he competed on Prime Chef and received the hearts of the tv viewers, the media and backers who helped him open his first restaurant, the Shaw Bijou, in Washington, D.C. He was 27. His imaginative and prescient was radical: an elevated, high-end tasting menu of the cuisines that form his identification and his roots in Nigeria, the bayou and the Bronx. The financial mannequin did not work and the restaurant closed after solely 11 weeks, however he introduced the identical inspiration to his subsequent gig, a restaurant he named Kith and Kin. There, his execution of an autobiographical Afro-Caribbean menu was rewarded with the James Beard Rising Star Chef of the 12 months award.
When Lincoln Middle invited Kwame to open his personal restaurant final 12 months within the newly renovated David Geffen Corridor, his expression was given free rein. Tatiana is called after Kwame’s huge sister, who sorted him at residence within the Bronx whereas their mom was at work. The restaurant’s delicacies honors household and legacy, with dishes that remember his ancestors and resurrect the histories of the Black and brown communities displaced within the Nineteen Fifties when the development of Lincoln Middle razed the neighborhood referred to as San Juan Hill. It is joyful meals, infused with reminiscences of residence, a beneficiant sprint of affection, and the soul of a younger chef out to vary the world, one dish at a time.
