No Passport Required: Still connecting with food and having a conversation about it with Marcus Samuelsson

Earlier this year, chef Marcus Samuelsson of Food Network Chopped fame took an inspiring journey across the United States in which he explored – and celebrated – the wide-ranging diversity of immigrant traditions and cuisine woven into American food and culture.

On “No Passport Required,” a six-episode PBS/Eater series which first aired across the U.S. during the summer months, Samuelsson visited Detroit, New Orleans, Chicago, New York City, Miami and Washington, D.C. An immigrant himself, who was born in Ethiopia and raised in Sweden, Samuelsson discovered dynamic and creative ways in which a particular community thrives – making its mark, so to speak. He spoke to poets and musicians, business owners and community leaders, as well as artists and home cooks – each who have contributed to enhancing our nation’s culture and its cuisine.

In Detroit, Samuelsson gathered with Middle Eastern immigrants who call the Motor City home and in New Orleans, he learned how the culinary traditions of the Vietnamese have been fully integrated into the fabric of the Big Easy, which has its long-established French and Creole influences. Samuelsson gathered with Ethiopians in Washington, D.C., and with the Indo-Guyanese in Queens, New York. He discovered how Chicago’s Mexican neighborhoods have impacted that area’s food and culture, and in Miami, he was welcomed by the city’s proud Haitian community.

The bottom line in Samuelsson’s adventures – and what I learned from watching – is this: there are many wondrous global food traditions that are waiting to be discovered throughout the United States. Sometimes, we just need a little bit of encouragement. After all, as the title of Samuelsson’s show reinforces, there’s No Passport Required.

 • • •

There’s a great back story about chef Samuelsson I blogged about six years ago that's worth sharing, again. Back in July 2012, he wrote a memoir, Yes, Chef – an incomparable story – about what it means to be an American. Through his cooking, he told a story that in the words of former President Bill Clinton, “reached past racial and national divides to the foundations of family, hope and downright good food.” Gabrielle Hamilton, the bestselling author of Blood, Bones & Butter said that Samuelsson exudes “a quiet bravery, and a lyrical and discreetly glittering style – in the kitchen and on the page.”

Thus, an opportunity to meet chef Samuelsson in person, hear him wax poetically on his life’s passion and get a signed copy of his memoir was too good an opportunity to pass up.

“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.” His memoir, Yes, Chef, became his love letter to food and family in all its manifestations.

As Samuelsson shared his fascinating life’s story at Book Passage’s intimate San Francisco Ferry Building store, he said, “Sometimes, the worst situation can become the best situation.”

In a chapter of Yes, Chef devoted to his grandmother, Helga, Samuelsson wrote: “Mormor (the Swedish word for mother’s mother) treated her house like it was her own little food factory. She made everything herself: jams, pickles, and breads. She bought large cuts of meat or whole chickens and game animals from the butcher and then broke them down into chops and roasts at home. It’s so funny to me how, today, we celebrate braising as some refined, elegant approach, when it’s the same slow cooking method Mormor used. Her menus followed a simple logic:

“You have bread today because it’s fresh. You have toast tomorrow because the bread has gone stale. You make croutons the next day, and whatever bread is left after that gets ground into crumbs that you’ll use to batter fish.

“I don’t think I saw a rib-eye steak until my late teens when I started working in restaurants. At home, we ate mostly ground meat that was rolled into balls and stretched even further by ample additions of breadcrumbs. We ate our own Swedish version of a hamburger: pan beef, a patty topped with caramel iced onions. Sometimes we ate beef Lindstrom: a hamburger patty mixed with onions, capers, and pickled beets before being seared in butter. That’s comfort food where I come from, and it’s damn good.”

• • •

At times, it’s been a struggle for Samuelsson to find his place, both in the kitchen and in the world. At least now, he has the appearance of a man who’s found peace in all the right places – and he’s always with a smile on his face.

“I am an immigrant, not a refugee,” Samuelsson reminds us. “There is a big difference. I am as a patriotic as any American. I am determined and grateful.”

As a chef, Samuelsson states that inside the kitchen or out, “it’s a matter of luck and the belief in others.

“Cooking has changed, but the core values remain the same. It’s about expressing a journey and culture. What better way than through food,” he says. And, besides, as Samuelsson playfully shared with his San Francisco audience on that summer night six years ago, “My fried chicken is better than yours!”

Yes, Chef. Connecting with food and having a conversation about it with Marcus Samuelsson

Marcus Samuelsson / An incomparable story.

It began with a simple ritual:  Every Saturday afternoon, a boy who loved to cook walked to his grandmother's house and helped her prepare a roast chicken for dinner. The grandmother was Swedish, a retired domestic. The boy was Ethiopian and adopted. He would grow up to become a world-renowned chef after emigrating to the United States.

Meet Marcus Samuelsson.

Samuelsson's recently-published memoir, Yes, Chef (Illustrated. 319 pp. Random House, $27.) is not only a great culinary story, it's also a love letter to food and family. I have been reading this incomparable story and it's hard to put down.

Born Kassahun Tsegie in a small, poverty-stricken Ethiopian farming village, Samuelsson contracted tuberculosis at age 2, as did his mother and sister. Together, the three found the strength and courage to walk bravely through seventy-five miles of terrible heat ~ fighting through their fatigue and fever all the way ~ to reach a hospital in the Ethiopian capital city of Addis Ababa. Through a miracle, Kassahun and his sister, Fantaye, got out alive. Their mother died. They never knew their father.

Yes, Chef.

As Samuelsson shared his fascinating life's story with great honestly during a conversation and book signing at Book Passage's intimate San Francisco's Ferry Building store last week, he said: "Sometimes, the worst situation can become the best situation."

Recovered but now orphaned, Marcus and his sister were welcomed into a loving, middle-class white family in Göteborg, Sweden. They had been adopted. Samuelsson hiked, skied and fished, all the trappings of a happy childhood. Best of all, it was there in Göteborg that Marcus's new grandmother, Helga, nurtured in him a lifelong passion for food and cooking with her pan-fried herring, her freshly baked bread, and her signature dish of roast chicken.

In a chapter of Yes, Chef devoted to Helga, Samuelsson writes: "Mormor (the Swedish word for mother's mother) treated her house like it was her own little food factory. She made everything herself: jams, pickles, and breads. She bought large cuts of meat or whole chickens and game animals from the butcher and then broke them down into chops and roasts at home. It's so funny to me how, today, we celebrate braising as some refined, elegant approach, when it's the same slow cooking method Mormor used. Her menus followed a simple logic:

"You have bread today because it's fresh. You have toast tomorrow because the bread has gone stale. You make croutons the next day, and whatever bread is left after that gets ground into crumbs that you'll use to batter fish.

"I don't think I saw a rib-eye steak until my late teens when I started working in restaurants. At home, we ate mostly ground meat that was rolled into balls and stretched even further by ample additions of breadcrumbs. We ate our own Swedish version of a hamburger: pan beef, a patty topped with caramelized onions. Sometimes we ate beef Lindstrom: a hamburger patty mixed with onions, capers, and pickled beets before being seared in butter. That's comfort food where I come from, and it's damn good."

A multi-cultural life.

Indeed, there was little question that Samuelsson was destined for a life and career that involved his passion of food. He studied cooking at a vocational high school in Sweden.

Then, he endured working his way up the culinary ladder, cooking on cruise ships and in the demanding culture of good restaurants in Switzerland and France. All the while, Samuelsson's goal was coming to the United States with the great determination of finding his place in the world.

"I am an immigrant, not a refugee. There is a big difference," explained Samuelsson. "I am as patriotic as any American. I am determined and grateful."

In 1991, at age twenty-one, Samuelsson arrived in New York City and took a low-level job at Aquavit, a restaurant known for its celebrated Scandinavian cuisine. "You have to completely give yourself up," says Samuelsson of being a low-ranking member of a good kitchen. "It's a daily dose of humility."

Soon, his "outsized talent and ambition" as a chef finally came together at Aquavit and he earned a coveted New York Times three-star rating at the age of twenty-four.

As Samuelsson told his San Francisco audience, sometimes, it's a matter of "luck and the belief in others."

Throughout his memoir, Samuelsson describes the brutal and selfless work ~ "chasing flavors" as he describes it ~ that he endured in order to achieve his culinary aspirations, which have including cooking for President Obama's first White House state dinner in 2009, reality show triumphs (Top Chef Masters), and appearances on Today, Charlie Rose, Iron Chef and Chopped, where he is a frequent judge. He's also experienced ambitious failures ~ career crises ~ which have included opening a much-heralded branch of Aquavit in Minneapolis only to see it shuttered four and one-half years after it opened due to an evaporating convention and business audience brought on in a post-September 11 world.

In a New York Times review of Yes, Chef, Dwight Garner wrote: "There's a strong undercurrent of loneliness. ... In part this is because, he says, blacks are 'shamefully underrepresented at the high end of the business.' When bad things happen, like the time the voluble and unhinged British chef Gordon Ramsay used a racial insult to describe him, he felt he had few people to turn to for support. That loneliness is a part of Mr. Samuelsson's reserve."

With modesty but tact, Samuelsson, who won the 2003 James Beard Award for best chef in New York City, pointedly notes: "A hundred years ago, black men and women had to fight to get out of the kitchen. These days, we have to fight to get in." He further explained during his conversation in San Francisco: "I knew in Europe, I could not be accepted as a black chef. I was determined to make it in New York City." 

Always with a smile.

Fast forward to the opening of his beloved Red Rooster in the heart of New York City's lively Harlem (310 Lenox Avenue, between 125th and 126th streets). Samuelsson's newest restaurant celebrates the roots of American comfort food ~ think fried chicken, what the restaurant calls its "fried yard bird" ~ and, it represents a fulfillment of a 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." In Red Rooster, Samuelsson has found a place where he can feel at home, filled with "diversity from all different backgrounds" and in a neighborhood he now calls home, where he lives with his wife.

At times, it's been a struggle for Samuelsson to find his place, both in the kitchen and in the world. At least for now, he has the appearance of a man who's found peace in all the right places ~ and, he's always with a smile on his face.

"Cooking has changed, but the core values remain the same. It's about expressing a journey and culture. What better way than through food," says Samuelsson. And, besides, as he playfully shared with his San Francisco audience on this summer night: "My fried chicken is better than yours!"

Photographs by Michael Dickens, copyright 2012. All rights reserved.