“I look at it as a crash course in how to open a restaurant. “I don’t look at it as a failure per se,” Onwuachi says. He opened a groundbreaking fine-dining spot called the Shaw Bijou-and suffered through its wince-inducing closure after about three months and a volley of curiously early negative reviews.
#SPEEDINESS PROFESSIONAL#
He’s 33 now, but in his late 20s, after appearing as a contestant on Top Chef and working in the Michelin-starred kitchens of Per Se and Eleven Madison Park, he compressed the entire arc of a professional cooking career into a burst of years in Washington, D. C. (And just this week, Pete Wells of The New York Times named Tatiana the best restaurant in the entire city.) He has already penned an acclaimed memoir, Notes from a Young Black Chef, which came out in 2019, the same year we here at Esquire named Onwuachi Chef of the Year. It has taken forever to get here, though some people in the food world like to suggest (perhaps with envy) that Kwame Onwuachi is moving a bit too fast. Even when I was pitching this to Lincoln Center, I said I wanted to tell the story of New York but give a voice to the inaudible-to the people who built New York.” “It’s about the people of New York who make New York what it is, honestly. So it all kind of tied it together.” The restaurant (which is named after his sister) evokes the food he grew up eating in the neighborhoods of the city where, in his early 20s, he would sell candy on the subway. “Everything that I do is always deeply rooted in story and soul, and I saw that this was San Juan Hill, which was an Afro-Caribbean neighborhood. “I wanted to tell the story of what was here before Lincoln Center,” Onwuachi says. Tatiana’s braised oxtails take four days to prepare.
#SPEEDINESS PATCH#
It’s also that his culture happened to be present on this patch of Manhattan before the opera and the ballet came along to displace it. “We take our time with food.” Factor in the decades it has taken for a restaurant like Tatiana to appear at a place like Lincoln Center and, well, as Sam Cooke once put it, “It’s been a long, a long time coming.” It’s not just that Onwuachi is bringing his culture-the culture of the Bronx, New Orleans, Nigeria, and the Caribbean-to a venue that’s associated with the Eurocentric stylings of Mozart and Puccini. “It goes back to my culture,” Onwuachi says. Patience pulses through each recipe, from the curried and buttery patties (stuffed with slow-cooked goat shoulder) to the chopped cheese (a riff on a late-night bodega staple found throughout Harlem and the Bronx) made with aged ribeye. Most of the dishes on the menu at Tatiana take days to prepare.
It makes sense that the flavor goes on and on. The sauce is so sticky that it clings to your fingernails all the way to the next morning, and you can’t imagine being mad about that, because it’s one of the most delicious things you will ever taste.
Eventually they’re served in a pond of funky, fatty, gleaming sauce that is the result of these flavors combining, converging, cooking down. The oxtails soak in the marinade for 24 hours. Over there, Onwuachi dips a spoon into a cauldron in which vegetables and roasted chickens and hundreds of chicken feet boil and bob for hours as they’re rendered into gelatinous, deeply flavored stock. Over here, cook Jamal Lewis mixes up a Caribbean-inflected marinade-fresh bay leaves and cinnamon and allspice and a ginger-garlic paste and some of Onwuachi’s grandfather’s hot sauce. Better to go down into the basement kitchen beneath Tatiana, Onwuachi’s new Afro-Caribbean restaurant in New York City’s beloved hub of the performing arts, Lincoln Center, and see for yourself. Four days, really, but the process of preparing and cooking them has so many steps that you lose track when chef Kwame Onwuachi tries to explain it.
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