Yes, Chef by Marcus Samuelsson

Marcus Samuelsson is  a star chef.  He is the youngest chef to ever have his restaurant awarded a three-star review in the New York Times (at Aquavit), and his current restaurant is the re-opened Red Rooster in Harlem.

So here's the short version of his life.  He was born in Ethiopia--at age 2 his mother took he and his older sister over land on foot many miles to a hospital because they were very sick with TB.  His mother dies and after many months in the hospital, he and his sister are adopted by a middle class family in Sweden, who already have a mixed race adopted child.  They adore him, and his grandmother moves closer to his parents in order to be more a part of their lives--it is a full on happy racially mixed family.  Which is not to say that there wasn't quite a lot of racism in his life, because there was.  Probably more than he discloses--he played soccer avidly as a child, but he is a small man, and in the end, he just wasn't big enough.  That is the great failure of his life--but it drove him to chose vocational school and he threw himself into cooking.  His grandmother was an excellent cook, and throughout his childhood he spent times cooking locally acquired traditional Swedish food.

He soon realizes that he will need to leave Sweden to become the chef that he wants to become.  He cooks in several European restaurants, and travels extensively, trying to absorb the flavors of different cultures. He cooks on a cruise ship for a while, and he does what I think would be so much fun to do--eat street food around the world.  He ends up in New York City at a fancy upscale Nordic cuisine restaurant, where he becomes the head chef through lots of hard work and a little bit of luck.

The story is remarkable in and of itself.  The part that he talks very little about is the role that being black played in his life, other than to say it was very hard to get people to take him seriously as an up and coming chef because they didn't see someone who looked like him cooking in their restaurant.  Well, I suspect it was harder than that, and maybe it is too personal or too indecipherable to share publicly.  He does end up leaving the restaurant that made him famous, having to 'buy' back his name in the process, in order to open his own restaurant in Harlem.  He marries an Ethiopian woman and immerses himself in black culture in an iconic neighborhood in New York.   He names the restaurant after a famous Harlem speakeasy, from back in Harlem's glory days, and serves food that is a mixture of Swedish and Southern, and all of it comfort food.  There is gravlax and there is fried chicken with greens.  He wants the neighborhood to taste his food and he wants people to travel to Harlem to eat.
Interesting read by a complicated guy.