Samuelsson, Marcus (Kassahun Tsegie)

Impact on the world

Became the youngest chef ever to receive a three-star review from The New York Times in 1995, at age 24, while serving as executive chef of the Scandinavian restaurant Aquavit, going on to win eight James Beard Foundation Awards across his career and to personally cook the first state dinner of the Obama administration in 2009; in December 2010 he opened Red Rooster in Harlem, a restaurant built around Southern soul food and Black American culinary traditions that received broadly positive reviews and helped anchor a broader revival of Harlem's dining scene, even as some critics, including chef Eddie Huang, publicly accused Samuelsson of approaching Black American cuisine from an outsider's perspective shaped by his European training and questioned whether his Ethiopian birth and Swedish upbringing gave him standing to represent Harlem's specific culinary heritage, criticism Samuelsson has continued to engage with publicly without fully conceding.

Life & background

Born Kassahun Tsegie in Ethiopia in 1971 to an Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church priest father and a mother who died of tuberculosis when he was roughly two or three years old, after the two of them and his older sister walked more than 75 miles to a hospital in Addis Ababa during a regional tuberculosis epidemic, Samuelsson and his sister were separated from their father amid the chaos of the Ethiopian Civil War and adopted in 1973 or 1974 by Lennart and Ann Marie Samuelsson, a geologist and homemaker from Gothenburg, Sweden, who renamed the children Marcus and Linda. Raised in a stable, middle-class Swedish household where his adoptive grandmother Helga first taught him to cook, he enrolled at Gothenburg's Culinary Institute at 16, apprenticed in Switzerland and Austria, and moved to the United States in 1994 for a position at the New York restaurant Aquavit, rising rapidly to executive chef and earning his historic three-star Times review the following year; he became a U.S. citizen in 2000 and was named the James Beard Foundation's Rising Star Chef in 1999 and Best Chef in New York City in 2003. Drawing on his complicated, multi-continental heritage, he authored 'The Soul of a New Cuisine,' exploring African food traditions, and a string of other cookbooks, while his 2012 memoir 'Yes, Chef,' co-written with Veronica Chambers, won a James Beard award for writing and detailed his unusual path from an Ethiopian hut he described as roughly the size of two restaurant tables to some of the world's most acclaimed professional kitchens. After opening Red Rooster in Harlem, the neighborhood he came to call home, he expanded into a restaurant group spanning more than 30 locations across multiple countries, founded the annual Harlem EatUp! food festival in 2015, launched the Rise Residency fellowship program supporting mid-career Black culinary professionals with funded research time and mentorship, and continued extensive television work, including hosting the PBS series 'No Passport Required' and serving as a longtime judge on Food Network's 'Chopped'; he met and married Ethiopian-born model Maya Haile in a wedding held in Addis Ababa, and the couple has children together.

Sources

1. Encyclopædia Britannica; BlackPast.org; Vilcek Foundation; The HistoryMakers; StarChefs