Marcus Samuelsson - The Red Rooster Cookbook: The Story of Food and Hustle in Harlem

THE FIRST THANKS ARE TO MY WIFE, MAYA, for allowing us to cook up a mess in the house. Without all your support in the Rooster journey, none of the eating, drinking, cooking, mixing and celebrating would be possible.

And to the Samuelsson tribe, here and abroad, for your love, guidance, and support in all things I do.

Thank you to Rux Martin and everyone at HMH who have believed in this book since before the days of Off Duty.

Thank you to April Reynolds for your time, energy and words. You brought this story to life and your dedication shines through.

Thank you to Bobby Fisher, for bringing my neighbourhood alive on the page. Your bold vision, patience and keen eye have taken this book to the next level.

Thank you to Roy Finamore, for being our recipe master making sure every single bite of this book is tasty, every time.

Thank you to Ashley Bode, for your tireless work and dedication.

Thank you to Kim Witherspoon, Leslie Stoker, Victoria Granof, Olivia Anderson and Nick Krasznai, for making this book beautiful and delicious from cover to cover.

Thank you to my Marcus Samuelsson Group family, for carrying the torch and enjoying the ride. And to Derek Evans, Howard Greenstone, Jeanette Cebollero, Jori Carrington, Jeannette Park, Meaghan Dillon, Erica Morris, Stacy Rudin, Jenn Burka, Angela Bankhead and Jono Gasparro. To Derek Fleming, Nils Norn, Tracey Kemble, Mahir Hossein, Christina Wang, Jane Ren, Marisa Blanc, Raul Adorno and Eden Fesehaye, for getting this family started.

Thank you to my Rooster crew, past, present and future, for making this place feel like home. And to my chefs, Patricia Yeo, Adrienne Cheatham, Charlene Johnson, Kingsley John and Cyed Adraincem, for making delicious food every day that fuels the fire of the Roo, and Lissette Tabales, for your expert mixology and keeping everyone in the bar happy.

Thank you to Andrew, Richard and the Chapman family, for helping me create something so much more than a restaurant.

Thank you to Dapper Dan, Lana Turner, Bevy Smith, Mayor Dinkins, Marjorie Eliot, Tru Osborne, Rakiem Walker, Kim Hastreiter, Nate Lucas, Billy Mitchell, Thelma Golden, Melba Wilson and my Harlem neighbours, for lending us your stories and telling us how it really is.

Thank you to Elizabeth Johnson, Sidra Smith, Christina Scott, Cody and Tash, the Rakiem Walker Project, Louis Johnson, Christian Lopez, Daniel Jeffries, AnhDao Nguyen, Fatima Glover, Ulrika Bengston, Angela DiSimone, David Melendez, Ezelia Johnson and all the others for being the stars in our photos.

Thank you to Gillian Walker and the Maysles family, for letting us stir up trouble in your kitchen, and to Rebekah Maysles, for not just her beautiful illustrations but also her stories and friendship.

To the Harlem cooks who came before, Sylvia Woods, Pig Foot Mary, Charles Gabriel and Crab Man Mike, for showing us all how hospitality should be.

Thank you to the Gordon Parks Foundation, for loaning their iconic images and bearing witness.

Hilton Als, writer and critic for The New Yorker, reminisces about his childhood visits to Harlem and how art, music and food lured him back to this legendary neighbourhood.

FIRST WHAT WE WOULD DO was collect glass Coke bottles this was in the late 1960s. You could get refund money for that, a few pennies for each bottle, but that added up. I would put my little brother in the red wagon we both owned a gift from our father, who didnt live with us and then Id load the wagon up with Coke bottles, the baby and glass bottles clanging delightedly on their way to the store. Then, once the cart was clear, Id pool my money with my tough first cousin, Donna she was five years older than me and when big boys bothered me, she beat them up and then, when we had enough dimes and nickels and pennies rolled up, wed sneak away from Brooklyn, where we lived, and take the A train all the way to Manhattan and the Apollo, to see James Brown. We werent allowed to go so far on the train on our own, but we lied, somehow, and once divested of the burden of the truth, there Donna and I would be, sporting our naturals; Donna, the teenager, grown-like and smoking a cigarette, standing with me in the balcony who could keep still? enthralled by rhythms and the feelings rhythms generate, all produced by a genius who spared no physical or psychic expense to express his art, and how our collective heart fit into it. This celebration of bodies and sound we were one with the Apollo audience; we were the body James wanted to wrest love from was my first visit to Harlem, and after that Harlem was always one body to me, a beautiful black mass with many questions, including what was its relationship to the rest of the city, the nation as a whole, all those places outside Harlem that, in the 1970s, didnt give a shit about the neighbourhoods fabled past and raggedy present, while Harlem, one black body, fought for, and sometimes won, a kind of self-conferred dignity. While James sang, Say it loud, Im black and Im proud!, and we did because thats the way we felt in our naturals and dashikis, it was something we had to fight for, too. I remember after seeing James Brown at the Apollo, that I would then go uptown with my older sister, Bonnie, to demonstrate at what was called the site this was in the 1970s an area of Harlem we were trying to save, we didnt want the government to build on it, and we would sleep on the ground with so many other people, all in front of where the State Office Building now stands (President Clinton has his office there now), and what I remember most about that experience is how our collective black body tried to stop that which could not be stopped, but we tried anyway.

And that was the point: to try. Together. To me, as a child, then, Harlem was a village that represented one black body black America which grew through craftiness and invention and intuition, a world where who I was was not separate from who everyone else was, a world where other worlds pertaining to black culture, politics, and so on, nestled deep in the landscape filled with black-owned businesses, the clamour of public debate, and marquees announcing black movies promoting black fantasies. As a student at Columbia University, I rarely went to Harlem; I wanted to be a different self by then. This is the work of youth, to imagine you are not yourself or a self with a past. I did not want to be part of a collective anything; the fantasy was that I was I, and I belonged to me. But things change, and the world teaches you that if you dont belong to any other body than your own, the stars are cold. This changed when I started going to the Studio Museum in Harlem again. When Thelma Golden became the museums director in 2005, I was reintroduced to the world I had left behind and that was on the brink of becoming even more itself than when I became one of the regions prodigal sons. Marcuss welcome table was, of course, the place to herald ones return. I first went to the Red Rooster in the spring of 2010, before it opened officially. Marcus and Thelma were hosting a dinner for the artist Mark Bradford. One saw, on the walls, art by Lorna Simpson and Ming Smith iconic images that described, in photos, painting, and so on, the black body that I once knew but now knew in a different way, in part because Marcus celebrated it in a different way. Without jettisoning blackness, he was introducing blackness to what he knew of the world through his travels in Ethiopia, in Sweden, in London and Paris.