Red Rooster’s Marcus Samuelsson

NPR interviews Harlem’s Ethiopian-born, Top Chef: Masters winner and James Beard Award-winning celebrity chef Marcus Samuelsson, author of a new memoir Yes, Chef.

Yes, Chef chronicles Marcus Samuelsson’s remarkable journey from Helga’s humble kitchen to some of the most demanding and cutthroat restaurants in Switzerland and France, from his grueling stints on cruise ships to his arrival in New York City, where his outsize talent and ambition finally come together at Aquavit, earning him a coveted New York Times three-star rating at the age of twenty-four. But Samuelsson’s career of  “chasing flavors,” as he calls it, had only just begun—in the intervening years, there have been White House state dinners, career crises, reality show triumphs and, most important, the opening of the beloved Red Rooster in Harlem. At Red Rooster, Samuelsson has fufilled his 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. It is a place where an orphan from Ethiopia, raised in Sweden, living in America, can feel at home.

Samuelsson and his sister Linda grew up in Sweden, adopted as orphans after their mother died of tuberculosis in Ethiopia. All three family members were infected as they walked from their village — Marcus as a three-year-old — to the capital of Addis Ababa at night, unable to take the heat of day.

“And [my mother] knew if she could just get us to the city, she could also then have somebody that could take us to a hospital,” he says. “And we got to the Black Lion Hospital, but she sadly passed away, and me and my sister, Linda, survived.”

Food and Politics

In March 2011, President Obama raised $1.5 million for the Democratic National Committee at Red Rooster. And Bill and Hillary Clinton dined there with friends in February. The former president was at Red Rooster Harlem in May 2011, according to Samuelsson’s website.

In the photo above introducing the article, Mrs. Obama invited Marcus Samuelsson into the Kids’ Kitchen at the 2012 White House Easter Egg Roll, where she joined him in cooking a quick and easy shrimp and vegetable tacos. NBC Today show’s Al Roker joins the festivities, recorded on Obama Foodorama.

Coming to Harlem, Samuelsson says he knew his fried chicken had to be better than everybody else’s.