Onwuachi, Kwame

Impact on the world

Opened five restaurants before turning thirty, including 2016's short-lived but widely discussed Shaw Bijou and 2017's Kith and Kin, an Afro-Caribbean restaurant in Washington, D.C. drawing on his own family ties to Louisiana, Jamaica, Trinidad, and Nigeria, before opening Tatiana at New York's Lincoln Center in 2022, which the New York Times named the city's number one restaurant the following year; he won the James Beard Foundation's Rising Star Chef of the Year award and was named Esquire's Chef of the Year in 2019, the same year he published his memoir 'Notes from a Young Black Chef,' co-written with Joshua David Stein, an account of his path from teenage drug dealing to fine dining that Time magazine called essential reading and that is currently being adapted into a feature film starring LaKeith Stanfield; fellow chef Carla Hall, already profiled in this collection, provided a cover endorsement for the book describing his journey toward fine dining as genuinely captivating.

Life & background

Born on Long Island in 1989 and raised primarily in the Bronx, Onwuachi experienced a childhood marked by financial precarity and violence; at age ten his mother sent him to live with his grandfather in rural Nigeria for two years specifically so he could, in the family's words, learn respect, an experience he later said gave him knowledge that ultimately proved no match for the temptation of fast, easy money once he returned home as a teenager. He was expelled from multiple schools for behavioral issues, sold drugs in New York as a teenager, and was later expelled from the University of Bridgeport for dealing on campus, relocating in 2010 to live with his mother in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where he found work cooking aboard a ship serving crews involved in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill cleanup; that experience, paired with memories of cooking in his mother's modest Bronx apartment kitchen as a child, redirected him decisively toward a culinary career. He financed his first catering business with twenty thousand dollars earned selling candy on New York City subway trains, trained at the Culinary Institute of America, and worked in several of Manhattan's most demanding professional kitchens, where he has said he first confronted directly how unwelcoming fine dining's upper tiers could be toward people of color; he placed sixth on Bravo's 'Top Chef: California' in 2015 before opening his first restaurant the following year. After Shaw Bijou drew mixed reviews and closed within months under investor pressure, he rebuilt with Kith and Kin, which the Washington Post and Michelin Guide both reviewed favorably, before resigning that position in 2020 to pursue independent ownership; he has continued expanding his restaurant group across New York, Washington, Miami, and Las Vegas, published a 2022 cookbook titled 'My America: Recipes from a Young Black Chef,' twice hosted the James Beard Awards ceremony, and was named to Time's list of the 100 most influential people in 2025, continuing to describe his core professional ambition as making the specific fine-dining dishes he wants to make in an industry some investors have suggested isn't yet ready to see a Black chef succeed beyond elevated versions of traditionally assumed Black American food.

Sources

1. Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau; Bookshop.org (Notes from a Young Black Chef); PenguinRandomHouse.com