Yes, Chef: Discovering Marcus Samuelsson, and other Musings

As so often happens when I walk through a real bricks-and-mortar bookstore, a book cover jumped off the shelf and into my hands. The cover of "Yes, Chef" by Marcus Samuelsson was unique to see in the cooking section...usually cookbooks have lovely pictures of food and lots of greenery or other images that evoke fresh food. This book has a dark, firey cover with a mysterious ochre-orange-terracotta powder spread across a black background. It cried out to be picked up off of the shelf.

This is a memoir of Marcus Samuelsson, who was born and orphaned in Ethiopia in the early 1970's, adopted by a family in Sweden and had his first introduction to cooking at the elbow of his Swedish grandmother. His culinary education and evolution reads like a career in the United Nations and present day finds him living and working in NYC's Harlem, running a number of restaurants, TV shows, books, and other culinary pursuits. It is an interesting and inspiring read.

I had never heard of him, but I did eat at Aquavit during his tenure there, during my NYC consulting days pre-September 11.

So my musings this morning are thus:

Bruce and I often comment on sub-cultures...the convergence of like-minded people who gather themselves around common interests...who are completely invisible to the larger community until one day, without preamble, a book jumps into our hands. Or we wander into a store we've never seen, as happened when we stepped into the Dragon's Den in Poughkeepsie - a store entirely dedicated to the Dungeons and Dragons gaming community. Or the Song of the Sea in Bar Harbor which launched our return to the world of music.

This blog is about all things culinary, but it is also about exploration. In the past two weeks, I've been introduced to Yotum Ottolenghi, Nigel Slater, and now Marcus Samuelsson...each with a story to tell through food. What a big, wonderful world we live in.