JAMES BEARD AWARD NOMINEE • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST
BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY VOGUE • NEW YORK
TIMES BESTSELLER
"One of the great culinary stories of our time."-Dwight
Garner, The New York Times
It begins with a simple ritual: Every Saturday afternoon, a boy who
loves to cook walks to his grandmother's house and helps her
prepare a roast chicken for dinner. The grandmother is Swedish, a
retired domestic. The boy is Ethiopian and adopted, and he will
grow up to become the world-renowned chef Marcus Samuelsson. This
book is his love letter to food and family in all its
manifestations.
Marcus Samuelsson was only three years old when he, his mother,
and his sister-all battling tuberculosis-walked seventy-five miles
to a hospital in the Ethiopian capital city of Addis Adaba.
Tragically, his mother succumbed to the disease shortly after she
arrived, but Marcus and his sister recovered, and one year later
they were welcomed into a loving middle-class white family in
Göteborg, Sweden. It was there that Marcus's new grandmother,
Helga, sparked in him a lifelong passion for food and cooking with
her pan-fried herring, her freshly baked bread, and her signature
roast chicken. From a very early age, there was little question
what Marcus was going to be when he grew up.
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.
With disarming honesty and intimacy, Samuelsson also opens up
about his failures-the price of ambition, in human terms-and
recounts his emotional journey, as a grown man, to meet the father
he never knew. Yes, Chef is a tale of personal discovery,
unshakable determination, and the passionate, playful pursuit of
flavors-one man's struggle to find a place for himself in the
kitchen, and in the world.
Praise for Yes, Chef
"Such an interesting life, told with touching modesty and
remarkable candor."-Ruth Reichl
"Marcus Samuelsson has an incomparable story, a quiet bravery, and
a lyrical and discreetly glittering style-in the kitchen and on the
page. I liked this book so very, very much."-Gabrielle
Hamilton
"Plenty of celebrity chefs have a compelling story to tell, but
none of them can top [this] one."-The Wall Street
Journal
"Red Rooster's arrival in Harlem brought with it a chef who has
reinvigorated and reimagined what it means to be American. In his
famed dishes, and now in this memoir, Marcus Samuelsson tells a
story that reaches past racial and national divides to the
foundations of family, hope, and downright good food."-President
Bill Clinton
