Onwuachi Kwame - Notes from a young Black chef: a memoir

The air is so warm in D.C. tonight, it still feels like summer. Its October, it should be night already, but the sun is taking her sweet-ass time leaving the stage. Its just too beautiful a day to say goodbye. From where I stand, on the fifth-floor balcony of the brand-new National Museum of African American History and Culture, the city spread below seems full of promise. Across the North Lawn, American flags flutter in the wind around the base of the Washington Monument. To the east, the Capitol building, with its impressive dome, is bathed in bright light, and to the south, the White House sits like a perfectly proportioned dollhouse. In the distance, the red and blue lights of the carousel at National Harbor glitter in a tiny festive constellation against the pink-fading-to-blue sky, guileless and beautiful.

Standing above the scene in my chefs whites, I feel like an orchestra conductor peering in on my pit as the musicians tune up. Under the ruby sun, everything glimmers and shimmies with excitement. Next month is a historic election. Next month Ill open my dream restaurant. Next month Ill step into the life Ive always wanted. So though its late in the day, it feels like the dawn of something new.

Chef! A voice behind me cuts short my daydream. Where should we put the allium shoots? The voice belongs to Jong Son, one of the team of nine young chefs I brought to cook at the museum with me tonight. Next to the Ossetra caviar in the reach-in fridge, I tell him. Behind me is a hive of activity as cooks rush to finish their premeal preparation, called mise en place, before the guests begin to arrive. My mind turns to the spreadsheets and to the lengthy lists of tasks and quantities through which even the most sublime foodin fact, especially the most sublime foodmust pass before it can be made whole again. I turn my back on the view and head in to the kitchen.

With the opening of my first restaurant, the Shaw Bijou, less than three weeks away, my mind churns on overdrive. For the past two years, the project has come to consume my life. It is, by far, the most ambitious thing Ive ever been a part of, the most logistically complicated and the most precarious for me personally. It is the expression of years of busting my ass, of constant forward movement, of seizing opportunities manufactured to be beyond my grasp. Though my culinary journey started like so many other chefs, as a child in my mothers kitchen, opening a fine-dining restaurant of my own is the goal toward which all my efforts have been oriented. Ill need every bit of luck, every scrap of knowledge, every shred of strength. Ill need to call on every single connection I have, and tug on the thread of every story I can tell, to open the doors to my very own place.

The experience and knowledge Ive gained since graduating from the Culinary Institute of America I hope will help me. My time at some of the best restaurants in the country I hope will prepare me. That I won a national dining competition called Dinner Lab and that I appeared on Top Chef has hopefully given me a national audience that will translate into customers. But you never know. Everyone is famous to themselves. Whether the audience on the other side of the television screen will show up at the Shaw Bijou, Im not sure.

When I arrived in Washington, D.C., from New York two years ago, I thought by now Id be the prince of the D.C. restaurant world. Things havent gone exactly as planned. All ambitious restaurants suffer setbacks, but it seems we were dealt a particularly crummy hand. Already, my partners and I have blown through a handful of opening dates and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Everything that could go wrong has, from broken water mains to boneheaded zoning laws. Ive found out that, just as L.A. is a city thats run on movies, D.C. is a city that runs on red tape. But, somehow, weve toiled on and finally we have a dateNovember 1.

D.C. is a city whose culinary landscape has long suffered from the preferences of deep-pocketed politicians for the unchallenging, dick-swinging food of steakhouses. There is, of course, a small vanguard of fine-dining chefs, but as a young black chef from New York, who has worked in some of the most acclaimed restaurants in the country, my arrival was greeted with a lot of excitement and anticipation.

As the weeks turned into months that turned into years, the food medias fascination with the Shaw Bijou has only grown. Bijou, as we call it, has become like a destination resting somewhere between myth and reality. As each detail leaked outWashington, after all, is a city with no shortage of leaksinterest grew. There would be only eight tables. True. There would be a members-only club on the second floor. True. We would sell tickets, not take reservations, and those tickets would be nonrefundable. True. That I had parlayed my fifteen minutes of fame on Top Chef into a million-dollar restaurant. Not true. My partners and I were already deep into opening Bijou long before Top Chef ever came along. But theres a lot out there about me thats untrue.

I took a ton of heat a few months ago, when I announced that dinner at the Shaw Bijou would cost $185 per person, not including tax, tip, or wine pairing. The price tag made us one of the most expensive restaurants in D.C., and it immediately made me a target for populist rage. Who was I, the citys critic class howled, to charge so much? How dare I, new here and so brazen, compete with Jos Andrs, whose flagship, minibar, was our closest equal, pricewise? To whom had I paid my dues?

I could have responded that our food costs were high and our margins were low. I could have pointed out that $185 is pricey, but when you look at cities with more established fine-dining scenes, cities like New York, a city with five Michelin three-star restaurants, to D.C., where the guide hadnt even arrived yet, $185 is not ridiculous. I could have shown the haters the $150,000 worth of reservations we had presold and said, Well, the public begs to differ. The truth is, I could have said whatever I wanted to but nothing would have helped. It was an audacious move; part of being audacious is dealing with the blowback.