8/12/2023 0 Comments Shaw bijou chef![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Sometimes that idea doesn’t become clear until later on. Sometimes that idea is waiting at the threshold of the project, ready to welcome you in and show you around. In either case, one must find the idea that animates the entire project. The processes of writing a memoir and a cookbook aren’t that different. Recipes being the thing as which Kwame excels, we were both excited to take advantage of this new form. But in a cookbook, recipes are the central mode of communication. Prose being my wheelhouse, my hand was felt in wrangling Kwame’s stories for the page. Though Notes had some recipes, it was overwhelmingly a prose-based text. And yet we were both very excited to work together again, especially on a cookbook. Our lives had taken somewhat divergent paths. I was generally and still very much hustling. In the intervening years, I had written a slew of cookbooks ( The Nom Wah Cookbook, with Wilson Tang Il Buco: Stories & Recipes, with Donna Lennard Vino: An Essential Guide to Real Italian Wine, with Joe Campanale Cooking for Your Kids) and a few children’s books ( The Invisible Alphabet and Solitary Animals). I, however, was still in my apartment in Brooklyn, hustling. He was living in Los Angeles-Hollywood, I think-and was no longer tied to a restaurant. (Who plays me? I wonder!) Kwame was fielding many offers for many projects. The book had gotten picked up to be made into a movie, starring Lakeith Stanfield as Kwame. Notes had been a success and had helped situate Kwame in a broader cultural context. Notes couldn’t help but be more interesting, more human, more relatable, after it grew to include this setback.īy the time we started the cookbook, My America: Recipes from a Young Black Chef, Kwame’s life had grown more complicated and expansive. But as his co-author, I was in some ways relieved. Kwame’s story is Kwame’s unique story but it also resonates in a universal way. One reason that book resonated with so many readers is that it didn’t shy away from portraying the self-doubt, the challenges, the insecurities all of us face in one form or another without appending an artificially rosy conclusion to it. Notes couldn’t help but be more interesting, more human, more relatable, after it grew to include this setback. Shaw Bijou closed shortly after it opened under a hail of criticism. I knew immediately one of my challenges would be to help Kwame see-and to admit to and to explore the idea-that a) that smooth line was probably not an accurate representation of his life’s path and b) a compelling memoir a smooth line does not make.Īs it turns out, we didn’t have to work too hard to manufacture a more nuanced arc after all. (The original title was Chasing Happiness.) Naturally, as a writer, I worried about this. The general trajectory of the narrative was a steady triumphal slope upwards. When we began work on it, Kwame was in the midst of opening Shaw Bijou, his first fine-dining restaurant in Washington D.C. Notes started as one thing and became another. This, the actual seeing of another person, is perhaps the most necessary thing as a collaborator and one reason, I think, why Kwame and I have worked so well with each other for so long. One reason, I think, is because since I’d been around and writing about chefs for so long, I didn’t relate to him as a Bright Up-and-Coming Chef, which he was, but as a human being, as I came to find, a wonderful human and wonderfully complicated human being. Despite the inherent weirdness of the meeting-it’s like a first date but observed, high stakes and professional-we hit it off. The editors at Knopf and Kwame were looking for a co-author and called me so I met him on a hot Friday afternoon at the PRH tower in Midtown. ![]() I first met Kwame Onwuachi in August 2016, after he had sold what would ultimately become Notes from a Young Black Chef to Knopf but before the book had taken shape. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |