How the chef at Tatiana brought Afro-Caribbean cooking—and his life story—to the center of New York City’s fine-dining scene.
on a Tuesday in July, but the staff at Tatiana, the restaurant in Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall, seemed exhausted. “Kerry Washington was in last night,” a publicist told me. Someone else mentioned that there had been a private event on Sunday—the one day of the week when the restaurant is usually closed. The last guests had trickled out at 4on Monday, and the managers hadn’t left until six. The party was for Beyoncé, who had just played a sold-out show at MetLife Stadium, and Jay-Z.
At Tatiana, he fills dumplings with crab and egusi, a traditional Nigerian soup made with pungent ground melon seeds. He deep-fries pods of okra until their ridges blister and split—slightly puffed, crisp, and salted, they’re finished with honey and mustard powder, and served with a Trinidadian-style pepper sauce.
Onwuachi had learned to temper his expectations when it came to establishment recognition. He’d attended the prestigious Culinary Institute of America, in Hyde Park, New York, and worked as a kitchen stage, or intern, at Per Se. His first job out of school was at Eleven Madison Park. But he became disillusioned by the racism he experienced in fine-dining kitchens.
Onwuachi was born on Long Island and raised in the Bronx. His parents, Jewel Robinson and Patrick Onwuachi, split up when he was three years old. Robinson, the daughter of a chef, was an avid home cook, and, after losing her job as an accountant, she opened a catering business, serving the Creole staples of her childhood. Five-year-old Kwame and ten-year-old Tatiana were often enlisted to help in the kitchen.
Onwuachi’s formal training inspired him to exalt Afro-Caribbean ingredients and techniques, rather than to simply plug Afro-Caribbean flavors into European formulas. The building blocks of his cooking, as laid out in his cookbook “My America,” include browning—a caramel made with canola oil and sugar, used in the Caribbean as a coloring agent and a sweetener—and Southern-style “house spice,” a customizable mixture that goes in everything from eggs to the flour for fried chicken.
In late August, Onwuachi flew to D.C., and then drove to a small town called Middleburg, at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia’s hunt country, an area that has long drawn élite weekenders from Washington. He was there for the third annual Family Reunion, a food festival that he started with Sheila Johnson, a co-founder of Black Entertainment Television and the first Black American woman to become a billionaire. In the late nineties, Johnson bought a horse farm in Middleburg.
Much of the time, he was trailed by a documentary film crew from Bronxville, a production company that he co-founded with the filmmaker Randy McKinnon, who adapted “Notes from a Young Black Chef” into a screenplay. Hovering close behind, carrying a tote bag full of bottled water, was a strikingly tall young man with his hair in twists, whose name was Destined One Leverette.
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