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n February 2020 Marcus Samuelsson was riding high. He was opening Red Rooster Overtown in Miami, the 13th restaurant in a portfolio that spans from New York City to Bermuda, Montreal, Sweden and farther afield. He had recently launched his second season of “No Passport Required,” his PBS show that explores the multicultural foodways of the U.S., and was in his 23rd season as a judge on the Food Network show “Chopped.” He had also just about wrapped up his eighth cookbook, “The Rise,” which highlights the contributions of Black Americans to American cooking. Then came COVID-19. To anyone outside of New York City, it might be difficult to imagine just how hard the pandemic hit the city. It wasn’t just the fear of the unknown or the weirdness of the silent streets. It was how the air filled with the sound of sirens wailing, the low rumble of refrigerated morgue trucks underlining their urgency. It was how the streets became quieter while the sidewalks got busier, lined with people waiting for meals at food banks, and the distance between reading the news and living it got shorter. The virus’s toll was especially high in Harlem, where Samuelsson lives. People were contracting the virus and dying of it faster than anywhere else in Manhattan. The number of people out of work and standing in food lines also ballooned. Samuelsson, who had to abandon the Miami opening and shutter his restaurants, partnered with José Andrés’ World Central Kitchen to transform his flagship Red Rooster Harlem into a community kitchen. He also galvanized the restaurants that had signed up to be part of Harlem Eat Up!, an annual food festival, to do the same. When I catch him on the phone one September morning, with more than 100,000 free meals served behind him and still no hopes of in-person dining anytime soon, I expect to hear someone exhausted and exasperated by the pandemic, but he sounds preternaturally relaxed, even cheerful. Zion, his four-year-old is shrieking with delight in the background, playing with his mom, Maya Haile—and to top everything off, schools still aren’t in session. But Samuelsson is focusing on the bright side. “Our block has done some amazing stuff, with kids and parents coming up with all sorts of solutions— drum classes, drawing on the street. It’s been a positive out of a really negative time,” he says. While the pandemic has canceled any chance of an in-person book tour, he views the timing of “The Rise” as another positive. “We started this journey four years ago, when I walked into my publisher and said ‘hey, we have to figure out how to broadcast what African American chefs and writers have done for the American food scene,’” he recalls. “Back then, food equity was not the hottest topic. But if there’s ever been a moment to look at what we are doing, it’s now. COVID impacts people of color, it impacts poor people, it impacts Americans with less access to health care in a completely different way [than it does people of means].” Those people, of course, happen to make up the bulk of our essential workforce—the ones keeping the hospitals running, the transit systems moving, the Amazon trucks
delivering, and the farms, restaurants, cafés and grocery stores feeding America. “If we’re going to come out of this, we have to engage with one another as human beings better,” Samuelsson says. For Samuelsson, food is a powerful way to engage, and his hope is that “The Rise” will foster connections by giving voice to people and histories that many of us didn’t know. To cast as wide a net as possible across generations, geography and Black American experiences, he engaged Osayi Endolyn, a young writer focused on food and race, to profile 27 Black Americans working in the food world today. Between these essays, he sprinkles in his own stories, vignettes of people he has worked with and learned from throughout his career. Every one of the profiles is accompanied by a recipe, created with the help of Yewande Komolafe, a Lagos-born, New York-based recipe developer, honoring each person’s personal histories in vivid flavors. The result is a cookbook that’s as fascinating to read as it is to cook out of. It’s likely that you have already heard of some of the featured individuals, like Leah Chase, who fed luminaries ranging from Duke Ellington to Thurgood Marshall and George W. Bush at Dookey Chase’s in New Orleans for the better part of her 96 years; or Toni Tipton-Martin, the first Black American woman to run the food section of a major newspaper, who is now the editor-in-chief of Cook’s Country. Maybe you watched Eric Adjepong on “Top Chef,” or read about Kwame Onwuachi, who won the 2019 James Beard Rising Star Chef award at D.C.’s acclaimed Kith & Kin. Others you may have never heard of—and you may wonder why— such as Eric Gestel, who has been an essential part of New York City’s most vaunted seafood restaurant, Le Bernardin, since 1996. A native of Martinique, Gestel moved to a small town just outside of Paris, France, at age 12 and by 14, he was apprenticing to be a chef. It was while he was working at Joël Robuchon in Paris that he met Eric Ripert, who would go on to become the face of Le Bernardin, cementing its reputation as one of the world’s greats with three Michelin stars and a four-star review in the New York Times. Gestel has been part of that process since Ripert’s early days in the kitchen, and became executive chef in 2015.
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