46 pages • 1 hour read
Kwame OnwuachiNotes from a Young Black Chef
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Key Figures
Kwame Onwuachi
Content Warning: This section references emotional and physical child abuse and drug use.
Kwame Onwuachi is a restaurateur and a James Beard Award–winning chef. Onwuachi was raised in the Bronx by his mother, a caterer who taught Onwuachi to fall in love with cooking from an early age. As a boy, Onwuachi struggled with his father’s abuse and his family’s financial stress. He was sent to his grandfather in Nigeria for two years to learn to be more respectful. When he returned to the United States, he tested into a gifted charter school. However, his behavior continued to create problems, and Onwuachi was expelled from several schools. After graduation, he attended the University of Bridgeport before expulsion for dealing drugs on campus. Onwuachi descended into a life of drugs and partying before waking up one day and deciding to cook a meal; this small act changed his trajectory forever.
In 2010, Onwuachi moved to Baton Rouge and worked as a cook on a ship for workers cleaning up a major oil spill. His time on the ship awakened his love of cooking; he was amazed at how the food he cooked helped the ship workers feel connected to home. He moved to New York City and started a catering business called Coterie Catering. To help subsidize the business, he found work as a server at Craft, the award-winning restaurant of Top Chef judge Tom Collichio. In 2012, he was accepted into the Culinary Institute of America. Onwuachi continued to cater and work other jobs to afford tuition. He completed his externship at Per Se, the three-Michelin–starred restaurant of American chef Thomas Keller. Onwuachi graduated from the Culinary Institute of America in 2013 and began working at Eleven Madison Park.
In 2015, as Onwuachi began preparing for his own restaurant opening, he secured a spot on Bravo TV’s reality cooking show Top Chef, where he came in sixth place. He opened Shaw Bijou in Washington, DC, in 2016, but the restaurant received mixed reviews, suffered management problems, and closed a few months later. In 2017, Onwuachi was hired to open a restaurant in DC that centered on Afro-Caribbean cuisine. Kith/Kin received positive reviews. Onwuachi resigned in 2020 to open his own restaurant. His dream was realized in 2022. Tatiana—named after his sister—focuses on telling Onwuachi’s unique story and has received many accolades.
Onwuachi was named Esquire’s 2019 Chef of the Year and was one of Food & Wine’s Best New Chefs. Also in 2019, he was named “Best New Chef of the Year” by the James Beard Foundation. Onwuachi later served as a guest judge on Top Chef, where he assisted the chef contestants in visiting restaurants featuring menus from the West African diaspora, encouraging them to tell their stories through the cuisine. In 2021, Onwuachi was appointed Food & Wine Magazine’s executive producer. He published a second book with Joshua David Stein, titled My America: Recipes from a Young Black Chef (2022); it was named Best Book of the Year by Bon Appetit. The San Francisco Chronicle called Onwuachi “the most important chef in America” (Phillips, Justin. “Why Kwame Onwuachi Is the Most Important Chef in America.” San Francisco Chronicle, 18 May 2019).
Joshua David Stein
Joshua David Stein is an author, editor, and journalist who has written, edited, and co-authored many books, including Food & Beer, Where Chefs Eat, The Nom Wah Cookbook, Can I Eat That?, What’s Cooking?, The Ball Book, and many others. Stein worked for The Village Voice and the New York Observer as a food critic. Stein hosts The Fatherly Podcast and served as editor-in-chief for the online magazine Fatherly. In 2020, Stein wrote To Me, He Was Just Dad: Stories of Growing Up with Famous Fathers, a compilation of first-person accounts of living with famous paternal figures.
Jewel Robinson
Jewel Robinson is the mother of Kwame Onwuachi. Robinson’s father was Creole and had a small bar in Beaumont, Texas, where Black Texans could meet and eat together in safety. Jewel was named after her grandmother, who owned two bars with Jewel’s grandfather, Floyd. In Notes From a Young Black Chef, Onwuachi explains that Jewel filled his childhood home with delicious food and laughter. She started a successful catering company marketed toward Black elites and anyone seeking high quality Southern cuisine. Onwuachi describes his mother as charming and lively.
Onwuachi’s memoir reveals Jewel to have been instrumental in helping her son develop his catering business and in motivating him to pursue his dreams. She taught him to work hard and fight for what he wanted. Onwuachi credits her with instilling in him a love of food and tenacity of spirit.
Patrick Onwuachi
Patrick Onwuachi is Kwame Onwuachi’s father and a complicated figure in the chef’s life. Patrick’s father was an academic who brought his son to Nigeria in 1973 when Patrick was 12 years old. An exacting architect, Patrick instilled in his own son an obsession for excellence and precision. Patrick also brought the flavors of West Africa into Kwame’s childhood home. The chef recalls his father’s love for the Nigerian egusi stew and fufu. However, Patrick also physically and verbally abused his son and held him to impossible standards. He installed a chart in his home where he would mark Kwame’s infractions with an “X.” Kwame received an “X” for mistakes such as writing a “K” improperly or not lining his equal signs up properly on a math paper. After a certain number of infractions, Patrick beat Kwame with a leather whip purchased in Africa. Although Onwuachi credits his father with indirectly introducing him to much of the cuisine he loves, Patrick largely serves as a negative example of Anger and Power in the memoir—one against which Onwuachi cultivates his own style of leadership.
Granddad
In Notes From a Young Black Chef, Kwame Onwuachi refers to his paternal grandfather as Granddad. His grandfather’s name is the same as his father’s—Patrick Onwuachi. Kwame’s choice to refer to his grandfather as merely “Granddad” may help readers avoid confusion, but it also signals the very different roles the two men played in Onwuachi’s life. The senior Patrick Onwuachi was an academic who moved from Africa to the United States at age 25. From the 1950s through the 1970s, Onwuachi was an important figure in the civil rights and Pan-African movements and taught at Howard and Fisk Universities. Onwuachi returned to Africa later and lived as an elder in a community in Nigeria. From ages 10 to 12, Kwame lived in Africa with his grandfather and learned about his heritage and culture. Incorporating these traditions into his cooking would become a defining feature of Onwuachi’s career.
