Notes From A Young Black Chef by Kwame Onwuachi

This is a good read and a sobering story, which is told more as a series of short stories than a continuous narrative. The title riffs on a memoir of another chef, Daniel Boulud , who went from French farm boy turned Michelin chef, and who doles out advice to those with the nerve, masochism and heart to carve out a career in a professional kitchen. Boulud is white and Onwuachi is black, and while Boulud grew up in a culture where the importance of food is literally everywhere, Onwuachi grew up in the Bronx, the most urban of urban environments, where not only is food not the center of life, it can be hard to come by at all. Not to mention the racism, both covert and overt. Onwuachi, 29, is the only son of a marriage that ended soon after it started and was never going to work. His mother, Jewel Robinson, became a chef and caterer after she lost her job as an accountant. His father, Patrick Onwuachi, is an architect whose own father was a respected professor at Howard University, prominent in the Pan-Africanism movement. After they split, his mother had to work several jobs to make ends meet and his father was so verbally and physically abusive it is hard to hear about, and certainly going between those two worlds was like a rock and a hard place, each with their challenges. He learned to cook the food of the Caribbean from his mother, the food of Nigeria in his grandfather's house, and he honed his professional chef skills at the Culinary Institute. These stories are filled with triumphs and failures, dreams and disasters, and the art of making your own luck rather than waiting for it. Well worth reading.