The future of cooking, Marcus Samuelsson will tell you, is personal. Soon, we will stop boxing great chefs into narrow ghettos of national or ethnic cuisine. What will emerge is an era of “personal cuisine,” he says, in which cooking will be defined by all of a chef’s influences.
At 29, Samuelsson has established himself as one of the most innovative chefs in the world. The dishes that emerge from his kitchen at Aquavit may be Scandinavian by design, but the food is strikingly original. Herring sushi—a pickled fish, boiled potato, and black mustard combination—is an unmistakable nod to classic Swedish cooking. Foie gras ganache, Samuelsson’s most famous creation, combines his love of new textures with the classical French training he received at Georges Blanc, the Michelin three-star restaurant in Vonnas. And even though Samuelsson first encountered lotus root years ago while cooking on a cruise ship, he takes this Asian ingredient to a whole new level with his lotus root–crusted char with white balsamic sauce.
The most telling—perhaps the most personal—element in this bounty of influences and inspirations is the small, unassuming fold of spongy, sour, crêpe-like bread that lies on a plate next to hot-smoked salmon and goat cheese parfait. This is injera, the indispensable accompaniment to many Ethiopian dishes. Samuelsson, though raised in Sweden by adoptive Swedish parents, was born in that East African nation and lived there until he was 3. The complexity is not lost on Samuelsson. “I’m really three personalities,” he says. “If I don’t open my mouth, I’m 100 percent Ethiopian. As soon as I open my mouth, I’m Swedish. And I live in America.”
It is late December 1999, a month before Timkat—the Epiphany festival of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and a traditional time for Ethiopian-Americans to return home. As people finish their Christmas shopping or prepare for the dawning of the new millennium, Samuelsson plans a trip to Ethiopia, a place that he loves but does not know.
Everybody on the Ethiopian Airlines flight to Addis Ababa seems to know one another from their days in Ethiopia or from their membership in the tightly knit Ethiopian-American communities in Washington, New York, and Los Angeles. Seats are soon abandoned and people are up visiting, hanging out at 35,000 feet, alternating between Amharic and English. “This is totally different from flying to Sweden,” Samuelsson observes.
The chef talks about Ethiopia with the can’t-wait-to-get-there anticipation typical of tourists. But for him the trip raises the perilous question of how much he really wants to know about his early life. Ethiopia was in upheaval when he left in 1974. The Communists had overthrown the monarchy, and in rural areas, people were dying of disease and malnutrition. Samuelsson pulls out his adoption papers, which state baldly that his mother died of tuberculosis. On the subject of his father’s fate, they are silent.
“When I went to the Ethiopian consulate, the woman said to me, ‘Your uncle gave you up for adoption.’ I said, ‘What are you talking about? I don’t have an uncle.’ I don’t know if that’s true or not.”
Although Samuelsson has a personal agenda, this is a working trip for him as well. He feels that it’s time to learn more about Ethiopian food. One of his traveling companions is Yeworkwoha “Workye” Ephrem, owner of Ghenet Restaurant in New York and his adviser on Ethiopian cuisine. Ephrem is taking him to meet a higher authority: her 81-year-old mother, Muluwork Asfaw.
Samuelsson also has an invitation to cook a meal at the Sheraton in Addis Ababa. It is one of the few luxury hotels in Africa, and a star turn by this particular guest chef has consequently attracted quite a bit of local media attention. The proposed menu for the evening is a work in progress. Even though he has come to this country to learn, Samuelsson is not interested in strict interpretations of Ethiopian classics. He plans to use Ethiopian ingredients and flavors much as he uses Swedish ingredients and flavors at Aquavit. He is looking for building blocks for his own very expressive cuisine.
Samuelsson has brought along his best friend, Mesfin Asefa, for moral support. “Mesfin was raised in Sweden, but he’s totally Ethiopian. He lived in an area where the Swedes were a minority,” Samuelsson says. “I lived in Göteborg, where my sister and I were the only black kids.” They met in New York—another unlikely twist to this improbable tale.
Asefa’s uncle meets us at the airport. And it is in Asefa’s family’s home—a white stucco middle-class house with a gate and a guard—that Samuelsson has his first meal in Ethiopia: yebeg wat (spicy lamb stew), lentils, and kale. This he eats in the traditional way, with his right hand, first tearing off a piece of injera, wrapping it around some stew and perhaps some lentils, then placing the package in his mouth. Like prodigal sons, Asefa and Samuelsson eat under the watchful glare of Asefa’s aunt. “That’s my Swedish grandmother in a nutshell,” Samuelsson laughs. “If you came to her house, she had to go in the kitchen and make you something to eat. She simply had to.”
Samuelsson rarely ate Ethiopian food until he moved to New York. Now hardly a week goes by when he doesn’t go to Ghenet or Meskerem, another favorite restaurant. Though his Swedish parents were not versed in East African culture, “they knew they couldn’t just give my elder sister and me black dolls to play with,” says Samuelsson. “They gave us black culture as they knew it, and that was through music. The first concert I ever saw: Stevie Wonder. First album I ever bought: Bob Marley.”
Samuelsson gets his first tour of Addis Ababa in a Lada taxi, the primary mode of transportation in the city. The blue-bodied, white-topped Russian-made car looks like a Fiat and is held together by spit and glue, wire and prayers. Hit a bump, and the door may fly open. Hit two bumps, and the car may stop entirely. “How old is this car?” he asks. “Older than you,” comes the reply.
Through the window Samuelsson glimpses the city’s many churches and the white-cotton–clad worshipers who flock to them during the days before Orthodox Christmas, January 7. We pass the palace of the late emperor, Haile Selassie, and the many alfresco coffee shops (the popular beverage is native to the highlands of this country). And we pass the Black Lion Hospital. “I should go there,” he says. “It served as the adoption agency that connected me with my Swedish parents.”
The national dish of Ethiopia is doro wat, chicken stew. It will be the centerpiece of the curriculum when Samuelsson takes his master class from Workye Ephrem’s mother. The chef knows, without asking, that she will be insulted if he arrives with bags of groceries. On the counsel of Mesfin Asefa’s uncle, though, he decides to go to the market and buy a sheep, a gift that is both time-honored and practical.
The huge open-air market called Merkato is the soul of the city. Its geography is mapped out in minute detail in the minds of the market mavens. Ask them where to find buckets or onions, cotton dresses or cinnamon sticks, and they can tell you exactly. Like the city in which it’s located, Merkato is a study in contrasts. Samuelsson is immediately drawn to neatly constructed cones of spices and dry ingredients—red lentils, yellow split peas, ground ginger, crystallized ginger—that gracefully ascend a foot or more above the sacks that contain them. The geometry and colors, he explains, parallel much of what he tries to create on his plates at Aquavit.
It is not long after daybreak, and Merkato is moving. Young men rush along dirt paths and around muddy puddles, huge baskets of beets or peppers on their heads. They don’t slow down for feranj, or foreigners.
“This is just the wildest food market. It’s mind-blowing,” says Samuelsson. “I can’t say it’s the best produce I’ve ever seen, because it’s not, but the market itself makes what we have in New York look like a little suburb.”
Sitting on the ground are scores of women, each with a selection of red onions, cardamom pods, or heads of garlic. Their faces are wizened with age, their feet bare, and their manner unhurried. “Look at that face,” Samuelsson says. In this country famed for its beautiful women, these market vendors exude an unpretentious grace and untutored beauty that is striking. They don’t squander smiles. But for them, something about the behavior of this Ethiopian man—who doesn’t speak Amharic and who seems so fascinated by even the most ordinary of their wares—elicits smiles, maybe even a rolling laugh or two, especially when he loses his normal poise during attempts to subdue his prize purchase, a woolly brown ram. Eventually, the animal is lashed to the luggage rack and we drive off in triumph.
In the old days, no Ethiopian girl could hope to find a husband if she didn’t know how to cut up a chicken into the 12 pieces appropriate for doro wat. Legs, thighs, and neck are separated in typical fashion. But the back is cut into two pieces, and the breast is cut into three pieces, two of which are attached to the first joint of the wing. The remaining wing pieces round off the dozen.
You can tell from the sharpness of her eyes and the authority of her gray hair that no daughter could ever emerge from Muluwork Asfaw’s house without knowing the proper way to cut up a chicken. But Asfaw also beams warm approval when something is done right. She sits at the kitchen table, an apron over her black dress, supervising her daughter’s cooking. Ephrem may be an accomplished chef, but this day, at every stage of the cooking process, she brings the food to her mother for advice and approval. Samuelsson is impressed with Asfaw’s presence in the kitchen. “She is like an executive chef,” he says, “who must dictate how food is to be cooked.” Asfaw “cooks with all her senses,” he says. “She tastes, looks, and smells.” And as she inspects and samples each pot, Samuelsson follows suit.
Samuelsson has seen Ethiopian food prepared before. He is not surprised by the massive amount of chopped onion added to the stew, or the huge dollop of spiced butter added to a pot of lamb and kale. “Most Ethiopian dishes are cooked long and slow to maximize the blending of flavors,” he points out, “like poor people’s food all over the world.”
As the cooking progresses, various bottles appear on the table. Like many Ethiopians, Asfaw makes her own spirits. In a recycled Scotch bottle there is the gold liquid called tej, or honey wine. In another bottle there is talla, the traditional home-brewed beer, which looks and tastes much like Guinness stout. And there are bottles of arake and liqueurs made from oranges, coffee, milk, and honey. After a few sips, Samuelsson’s mind is working. The menu for the upcoming dinner at the Sheraton is coming into focus.
“I look at cooking as a reflection of who I am, an Ethiopian guy with a love for the spices and the country, but not much knowledge of the cuisine. I can take the spices and essences and work with them in a Western way.”
The Sheraton Addis may be in Africa, but its style and its management are decidedly European. You feel the weight of this as soon as Samuelsson walks into the kitchen. He looks not like the head chefs, imported from Europe or Southeast Asia, but like the line cooks and pot washers. They smile with pride when they see him.
Samuelsson makes his wishes known with firm and formal insistence. “Anything you don’t know, just ask me. Let me know before, not after, a mistake is made,” he says. There is much on his still-evolving menu that the line cooks have never heard of. Cucumber juice? White coffee? He rushes from station to station as a chef in an American kitchen would, but that pace is unknown here. “He moves so fast,” one cook says. When he steps away for a moment, several of the cooks taste the white bunna, toasted green coffee beans simmered in coconut milk (a staple in much of Africa), heavy cream, cinnamon, brown sugar, and, from a bottle plucked off Asfaw’s kitchen table, coffee liqueur. Soon, with the aid of a charged siphon, this “white coffee” will add a foamy contrast to velvety chocolate ganache cakes.
“What amazes me is that he is really using Ethiopian tastes,” says Alemayehu Tefera, one of the line cooks. “There are people who make traditional food, but not in this way.”
The evening’s honored guests include doctors, ambassadors, and tourism officials. Samuelsson takes the usual Continental apéritif—a glass of Champagne—a step further, pouring it over Champagne granita and serving it with an amusebouche of smoked trout.
His first course consists of salmon cured in the mixture of chile peppers, ginger, onion, cloves, cinnamon, basil, rue seed, and bishop’s weed that Ethiopians call berbere (pronounced “ber-ber-AY”), then wrapped in injera and served with a cold yogurt soup. “Pairing salmon with a sourdough bread is classic,” Samuelsson notes. “Think of Russian blini.”
And indeed that is the key to Samuelsson’s personal cuisine: his ability to take classic flavors and add to them an extravagant taste of the unexpected. In his next course, he pairs his foie gras ganache with tea-cured duck. He didn’t invent the idea of adding cardamom to the tea—that’s common throughout this part of the world—but the spice adds a smoky richness. It’s served with a honey wine reduction and an onion “jam” in the same seasonings that give a wat its distinctive taste.
For the third course, instead of deconstructing a Western dish and then reassembling it with Ethiopian ingredients, Samuelsson takes spicy Ethiopian grilled lamb and presents it, not as the usual boneless morsels, but as rack of lamb, crusted with berbere. Ethiopians are meat eaters, and this course strikes an audible chord as the first bites are taken.
The meal closes with the chocolate ganache cakes and that ethereal white-coffee foam garnished with crisp, translucent beet chips.
“I’ve always loved the pairing of beets with dessert,” says Samuelsson. “Their natural sweetness compliments the chocolate. And because Ethiopia is where coffee comes from, I thought it would be fun to include some.”
“It’s more than I expected, really,” says Yusuf Abdulahi Suker, the commissioner of tourism. “It was something original, something new. I was completely overwhelmed.”
Samuelsson is glowing the next morning. Encouraged by the conversations he’s had with Suker and Jean-Pierre Manigoff, the general manager of the hotel, he is alive with the thought of establishing a cooking school in Addis Ababa or of creating an internship for Ethiopian chefs in New York. But it has become obvious that he will not pursue questions of his birth and adoption on this trip. Perhaps his schedule is too busy, perhaps his desire to know more about his Ethiopian family is outweighed by ambivalence about what he might discover.
What he talks of in the end is food and the ways in which his personal cuisine has been altered by what he has learned here. “I may not go back tomorrow and cook differently, but I know that every major trip in my life has made me a better chef. And this is the best trip I’ve ever done, spiritually, in every way.
“I would like to inspire not just cooks but everyone,” he continues. “If people are willing to open their minds to the cuisine of Ethiopia, then someday they will be willing to do the same with Ethiopian culture. The best of Ethiopia has global appeal.” Just like Samuelsson’s personal cuisine.