Culinary Memoir: Yes, Chef

MARCUS SAMUELSSON, THE JAMES BEARD AWARD NOMINEE, HAS BEEN NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY VOGUE AND IS A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. "One of the great culinary stories of our time," Dwight Garner of The New York Times describes it.

The story begins with a simple ritual: every Saturday afternoon, a young boy who loves to cook walks to his grandmother's house and helps her prepare a roast chicken for dinner. The grandmother is Swedish, a retired domestic, while the boy is Ethiopian and adopted. This boy will grow up to become the world-renowned chef Marcus Samuelsson.

Yes, Chef is Samuelsson's love letter to food and family in all its manifestations. Samuelsson was only three years old when he, his mother, and his sister, all battling tuberculosis, walked seventy-five miles to a hospital in the Ethiopian capital city of Addis Ababa. Tragically, his mother succumbed to the disease shortly after they arrived, but Marcus and his sister recovered, and one year later they were welcomed into a loving middle-class white family in Göteborg, Sweden.

It was there that Marcus's new grandmother, Helga, sparked in him a lifelong passion for food and cooking with her pan-fried herring, her freshly baked bread, and her signature roast chicken. From a very early age, there was little question what Marcus was going to be when he grew up.

Yes, Chef chronicles Marcus Samuelsson's remarkable journey from Helga's humble kitchen to some of the most demanding and cutthroat restaurants in Switzerland and France, from his grueling stints on cruise ships to his arrival in New York City, where his outsize talent and ambition finally come together at Aquavit, earning him a coveted New York Times three-star rating at the age of twenty-four.

But Samuelsson's career of "chasing flavors," as he calls it, had only just begun. In the intervening years, there have been White House state dinners, career crises, reality show triumphs and, most importantly, the opening of the beloved Red Rooster in Harlem. At Red Rooster, Samuelsson has fulfilled his dream of creating a truly diverse, multiracial dining room—a place where presidents and prime ministers rub elbows with jazz musicians, aspiring artists, bus drivers, and nurses. It is a place where an orphan from Ethiopia, raised in Sweden, living in America, can feel at home.

With disarming honesty and intimacy, Samuelsson also opens up about his failures—the price of ambition, in human terms—and recounts his emotional journey, as a grown man, to meet the father he never knew. Yes, Chef is a tale of personal discovery, unshakable determination, and the passionate, playful pursuit of flavors—one man's struggle to find a place for himself in the kitchen, and in the world.

Praise for Yes, Chef has been widespread, with Ruth Reichl describing it as "such an interesting life, told with touching modesty and remarkable candor," and Gabrielle Hamilton stating, "Marcus Samuelsson has an incomparable story, a quiet bravery, and a lyrical and discreetly glittering style—in the kitchen and on the page. I liked this book so very, very much." The Wall Street Journal noted that "Plenty of celebrity chefs have a compelling story to tell, but none of them can top [this] one," while President Bill Clinton praised the book, saying, "Red Rooster's arrival in Harlem brought with it a chef who has reinvigorated and reimagined what it means to be American. In his famed dishes, and now in this memoir, Marcus Samuelsson tells a story that reaches past racial and national divides to the foundations of family, hope, and downright good food."

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