Traveling Man

Five years later, when Puck decided to open a Spago in Chicago, he immediately turned to Kwaku-Dongo. Once again, it was time to move on.

The country's third-largest metropolitan area, dubbed "city of the big shoulders" by poet Carl Sandburg, has a diverse population of 8 million, united in its love of big portions. Puck and Kwaku-Dongo took this-and the fact that most of the city's inhabitants have roots in Germany, eastern Europe, Italy, or the African-American South-into consideration when planning their new venture. The Asian-influenced, vegetable-and-fish-driven cuisine that is a natural fit on the West Coast, they knew, wouldn't cut it in the Windy City.

Puck's first step was to send his chef to France for yet another crash course. And as Kwaku-Dongo worked his way through the kitchens of L'Oustau de Baumanière (where Puck had trained); La Maison Troisgros, in Roanne; and Burgundy's L'Esperance, he added yet another layer of refinement to his craft.

The result was a menu featuring some of the old California crowd-pleasers alongside a selection of meatier, heavier entrées with Asian and Mediterranean accents. It was an instant hit. A few months after it opened, Chicago Tribune critic Phil Vettel raved about the restaurant. "Superior cooking," he wrote, "lurks in every corner of the menu."

These days, the Wolfgang Puck imprint is certainly present, but so are traces of the disparate experiences that have shaped François Kwaku-Dongo. Veal tortellini with sautéed mushrooms and sage harks back to the Alo Alo days. Japan is there, in a beet salad that arrives looking like a delicate architectural display constructed from herbed goat cheese and red and yellow slices of the vegetable that have been boiled in rice wine and orange juice. French expertise merges with a Midwest sensibility in a pork chop that gets wood-grilled, coated with a balsamic sauce studded with apple and yellow raisins, and served with a potato gratin featuring Wisconsin blue cheese. It seems only fitting that this chef can be heard giving instruction to his crew in five different languages: Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, and English.

And what of Africa? References to home pepper Kwaku-Dongo's conversation. Hailing a taxi as it's beginning to pour one day, he remarks, "This is when Chicago most reminds me of Africa, when the rain falls and the good rich smells rise up from the earth." And in a conversation about a visit to Washington, D.C., and a tour of the Library of Congress, he talks of his hopes of establishing a library in Botro, amassing "the tribal lore of West Africa and saving all the knowledge that's being lost."

But in the Ivory Coast, as in other African countries, cooking duties have always been relegated to the women, so the young François never spent any time in the kitchen. When he was asked to prepare a "safari meal" for a benefit in Hawaii, Kwaku-Dongo was reduced to making desperate phone calls to his mom in Abidjan so she could walk him through the recipes step by step. (The one thing he does credit to his African past is an affinity for salt-curing. "Where I come from," he explains, "there is no refrigeration.")

In the past few months, however, the chef has begun to incorporate his heritage into his work. Last October, in conjunction with the opening of an exhibit on postcolonial Africa at the Museum of Contemporary Art, he added a pair of African dishes to the menu at the museum café, which is part of Puck's midwestern empire. Diners not tempted by schnitzel sandwiches and Cobb salads can now opt for fried plantains with a bowl of spicy red dip-a re-creation of aloko, the Ivory Coast's favorite snack. And they can order a deliriously fiery mesquite-smoked turkey stew enhanced by tiny eggplants and miniature dried shrimp and served with a mash of white yams-a take on the foo-foo François used to eat in Botro.

These are truly West African dishes, but they are a small part of his repertoire. Which leads you to wonder whether it might not be time for the chef to embark on yet another crash course. The next time Kwaku-Dongo and his American wife, Ruth Letson, take their two children back to the Ivory Coast for a visit, he might want to think about sticking around. Not forever, of course. Just for a little while. Just long enough to learn about the cooking of the one place he's always called his home.