"Notes from a Young Black Chef: A Memoir," by Kwame Onwuachi

I seem to be in another memoir-reading phase, as I have been more and more often in the past few years. Today’s post -- on Kwame Onwuachi’s “Notes from a Young Black Chef: A Memoir” (Knopf, 2019) -- is the third post in a row about memoirs. Interestingly, two of these three – Laymon’s and Onwuachi’s – are about the lives of African-American men who write of the difficulties and discrimination they have experienced, but also of their ambitions and successes; one becomes a professor and writer, the other a chef and restaurateur. Their successes, of course, do not cancel out the discrimination and pain each endured and still endures. In another overlap, two of the three memoirs – Reichl’s and Onwuachi’s – are about lives in the world of restaurants and food. These of course are only broad connections among the memoirs, and each of the three stories is completely individual and quite different from the others. Turning to Onwuachi’s memoir (which is co-written with Joshua David Stein) specifically: I was drawn to it on both the counts listed above, and was pulled into it because of its compelling story. This young chef has gone through so much, and accomplished so much, and was still only 29 at the time of writing. He grew up in New York, Nigeria, and Louisiana. He got off track for a while, including selling drugs, but gradually his love for food and cooking, and his incredible entrepreneurial spirit and confidence, led him to start a catering company, work as a chef on a oil-cleanup ship, study at the Culinary Institute of America, go on the television show “Top Chef,” work in top restaurants such as Per Se and Eleven Madison Park in New York, and then start up not one but several of his own restaurants. Although some restaurants failed, he learned from each experience. He has always believed in the power of food to evoke family, bring people together, and reflect history and cultures.