( intro music )
( applause )
- Pam: Welcome. - Marcus: Thank you.
Do you mind if we talk a little bit about your
early years, your early biography of...
You were adopted when you were three years old
you and your sister.
After your mother had fallen ill.
In fact, many, many people in Ethiopia
had fallen ill, tuberculosis?
Yeah.
Both my mom, my sister, myself we had it, and,
you know, we lived out in the countryside
and it was really my mom and my sister
that walked into a big hospital.
Marcus:
my sister and I, we survived.
So, talking about Sweden and talking about your,
your adopted parents.
Ann-Marie is your mother's name, and...
she wasn't much of a cook, was she?
My mom was a horrible cook. Nice woman.
- ( audience laughter ) - Marcus:
Her mother was a fantastic cook.
So, what about your grandmother's roast chicken?
- Can we talk about that? - Yeah!
I mean, Helga... You know, the funny thing with...
The cooks that I know, the cooks that I sort of admire
they all came out of poverty.
When I think about, but you know, they lived a rich life.
When I think about the cooks that mattered
the most in my life,
I think about a lady like Leah Chase, down in New Orleans
that sort of had the first integrated restaurant
in this country.
Owned her own business since the 40s in America.
And, my grandmother, you know, they were born into poverty
but they knew how to cook.
And...
So they ate well but maybe, you know,
didn't have, what we think, as a lot of money.
And, my grandmother's cooking, although when she passed away
she was a middle class Swedish woman that did,
you know, that did very well.
But her cooking came out of poverty.
That never changed.
Her DNA on roasting chicken
putting the vegetable underneath
letting the chicken fat drip in.
The next day have a chicken soup
and maybe the third day having chicken dumpling.
- You know, so, the way she-- - She really stretched that bird.
Yeah, stretched that bird
and always had the broth on in the back.
You know, she was smart, smart lady.
You know, she had also child labor.
- She had us three... - ( audience laughter )
...running up and down, taking care of the pantry
and making like, there was always--
When you entered her house, you had to work.
There was always something going on.
Now, thinking about that chicken, too
what I thought was really interesting was that
your grandmother instinctively knew something
about the temperature that that chicken needed to be
in the same way that chefs who are cooking
a 27 dollar chicken today, do the same thing
but they do it in a different way.
Can you talk about that a little bit?
You know, that cooking is...
It's like anything you do a lot
it's just instinct, right?
It's almost like Jazz musicians, you know it.
Some people come from it from a school,
some people were just born with it.
But when you have that concert or when you're cooking
it doesn't really matter, we're here now.
And either you
learn those muscles or you don't.
My mom had this fancy electric oven,
my grandmother never trusted that oven, so...
My grandmother, she had
an oven that we'd have to feed with wood all the time.
So, just understanding
how an oven worked, things like that
a cooking school's not going to teach you that.
- Pam: Yeah. - Cooking school is also not
going to teach how you taste something and, you know.
She used to taste the sauce
by pouring it straight into her hand
and tasting it like this.
- Right. - You know.
There was, you know... So stuff like that,
you know, you have to be a real craftsmen to understand.
So,
at Aquavit, how excited were you when they said,
"Yeah, come and... come and work here."
No, it's very exciting.
Aquavit has always been, sort of the,
the only Scandinavian restaurant outside Scandinavia.
Marcus:
he came back after a couple of months,
"I'm looking for a chef."
And he said, "I know who is going to be the new chef."
I'm like, "Who is it?"
"You're going to be the new chef."
And I was like, "Well, let me think about this."
Because it made me nervous. I didn't wanna be...
Aquavit is a very famous restaurant in Scandinavia.
I didn't wanna be the guy to close it.
( audience laughter )
I'm like... Isn't that because I was just being paranoid
I'm like, "No, I don't want all that."
But I also knew that
timing of stuff doesn't always work.
You know, I wrote to
get to three-star Michelin restaurants 30 times
before I got in.
That didn't fit with my timing.
- ( audience laughter ) - So, you know,
there were 30, there was 29 no's, you know what I mean?
- Yeah. - So, I also knew the opposite
of that timing is just not going to be presented to you
and I think it even helped me being black, in that case.
Because I knew how rare we get the shots.
So, you better take it.
Right, you better do the most out of it.
Well, and you definitely made that opportunity work for you
because I think by the time you were
literally, just less than a year later when you were 24,
a little food writer named
Ruth Reichl in the
reviewed your meal.
- Yeah. - And something happened.
We got three stars from
You're the youngest... He is the youngest chef
to ever receive a three-star review from the
I mean, come on!
( applause )
But, what I like about that more than anything is
that we really had no clue that she was in the building.
Any of those times.
And when I say like, "We had no clue, we had no clue."
Did she wear a disguise or something?
It wouldn't matter to us, because we didn't know.
We were so disorganized.
- ( audience laughter ) - We were just working.
It could have said "
we wouldn't have known.
So, what happened after Aquavit?
What was your next big adventure?
You know, I remember the weekend before 9/11,
I did, I was cooking at The Towers.
I was cooking there, down there, and the following weekend
the weekend of 9/11, I was in Australia.
And I just remember, a guy waking me up, like,
knocked on my door, "You gotta put on the TV".
And I saw this stuff that happened
and I knew a lot of those cooks, I knew a lot of those servers,
I knew a lot of... I knew chefs.
At The Tower? The restaurant at the top. Right.
And it was one of those times when you start thinking about,
"Okay. What am I doing?"
Like, whether, is this going to be...
Is this going to be my life
to cook for the richest people in the world
for the rest, fill at least 80 seats every night?
And I started to think about,
you know, what can a chef do, what is my other purposes.
And, my call was that experience,
right, the post-that.
Yeah.
And, I decided to, "You know what,
let me, let me move to Harlem.
Let me move somewhere else."
So, I'm like, "What if...
You know, what if I can open a small restaurant here that
puts the community...
Becomes a waterhole for the community.
That is of and similar to Sylvia's
in the place of creating jobs.
But just done a little bit different."
And that was really when
the whole idea of Red Rooster, for me,
started to become real.
Marcus:
And, how is it doing these days?
We have been very fortunate, you know.
( knocks on wood )
- Very fortunate. - Yeah.
Marcus:
and we're really blessed by...
But, you know, it's not about--
I never measured a restaurant,
and it's easy to say when you're busy all the time,
but I don't measure it by
how busy it is.
I measure it by the goals and
the reason why I put it in there.
What is-- What was the purpose?
What is the core purpose?
The purpose was to
really create something to inspire and aspire, right?
The purpose was to create jobs of the trade
that I've been lucky enough to be a part of.
The purpose was to also create
another, so young,
particularly, people of color can say
"Hey, I can own a business. Hey, I can become a chef.
Hey, I can become a bartender." Whatever your goal is.
But it's a field here and here is an--
It represents an opportunity.
This trade that lot of people of color really started in
and served in, but the minute it became a profession
didn't fit into anymore,
can really take back its authorship.
That's the intent. And that takes time.
And, thank you so much for coming and being with us.
- Marcus, thank you. - Well done. You did a great job.
- You did. - ( applause )