Kwame Onwuachi’s Cuisine of the Self

It was only 10:30 A.M. on a Tuesday in July, but the staff at Tatiana, the restaurant in Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall, seemed exhausted. “Kerry Washington was in last night,” a publicist told me. Someone else mentioned that there had been a private event on Sunday—the one day of the week when the restaurant is usually closed. The last guests had trickled out at 4 A.M. on Monday, and the managers hadn’t left until six. The party was for Beyoncé, who had just played a sold-out show at MetLife Stadium, and Jay-Z. (“I buried the lede,” the publicist said.)

Kwame Onwuachi, Tatiana’s chef and proprietor, wouldn’t normally be at the restaurant so early, but he was there to record a television segment for WNBC—his second of the day, after the “Today” show, at half past eight. “You’ve had a busy morning!” the camera operator said. “It’s not really morning if you don’t sleep,” Onwuachi replied.

For the segment, Onwuachi and a reporter named Lauren Scala were going to sample dishes that he’d be cooking for an event at the U.S. Open: pepper steak, hamachi escovitch, black-bean hummus topped with berbere lamb. A bottle of spring water was produced. Someone asked if there shouldn’t be wine, too. “Are you gonna turn this water into wine?” Scala quipped. Onwuachi laughed and said, “It is my Jesus year, though! Thirty-three.”

“Do I remember when I was thirty-three?” Scala wondered aloud.

“It must have been a good year if you don’t remember it,” Onwuachi said.

For Onwuachi, it’s been a very good year indeed. Last November, he opened Tatiana, his first restaurant in New York City, his home town. Tatiana is named for Onwuachi’s older sister, who helped raise him (an enormous portrait of her with her two daughters hangs in the private dining room), and its menu is inspired by his personal history. He grew up steeped in the cuisines of his elders—his roots are in Creole Louisiana, Nigeria, and the Caribbean—as well as in food from the city’s corner stores, street carts, and Chinese restaurants.

At Tatiana, he fills dumplings with crab and egusi, a traditional Nigerian soup made with pungent ground melon seeds. He deep-fries pods of okra until their ridges blister and split—slightly puffed, crisp, and salted, they’re finished with honey and mustard powder, and served with a Trinidadian-style pepper sauce. For a dessert called Bodega Special, he makes a “cosmic brownie” (an homage to a Little Debbie product), which is dotted with rainbow-hued chocolate chips and paired with ice cream both flavored and shaped to look like a powdered doughnut.

The first time I ate at the restaurant, shortly after it opened, Onwuachi made the rounds, checking in with every table. One of my dinner companions told him that her name was Tatiana, and he insisted that she stand up for a long embrace. He was dressed in street clothes, including a do-rag. If this made it seem as if he wasn’t actually working in the kitchen, the truth is that he doesn’t usually wear chef’s whites. Onwuachi, who is small and a bit boyish (“Booyakasha!,” he hollered, as he bounded down the steps to the basement prep kitchen), favors baseball caps and vividly patterned button-downs. He wears thick-framed glasses, which give him a slightly nerdy, erudite air, and he’s heavily tattooed. For a while, he had the word “patience” inked on his right forearm, but he had it removed and replaced with an elaborate depiction of the ingredients for gumbo. A jumble of text on his left arm includes the words “New York City Kid,” in script; a large “X,” as in Malcolm; and the name of his ten-year-old niece, Madisyn, in her own handwriting.

His look is fitting for a restaurant that feels more like a night club than like a stuffy house of fine dining. The space has floor-to-ceiling windows that are hung with curtains of slinky gold chains. Music—hip-hop and R. & B., much of it from the late nineties and early two-thousands—is played at a volume that can make conversation challenging, or at least athletic. In the first few weeks after Tatiana opened, when the staff was still getting its footing and tables weren’t turning over fast enough to keep up with reservations, Onwuachi poured free tequila shots for waiting guests.

“You’ll see some people walk in, and you see the surprise on their face,” Mouhamadou Diop, one of the restaurant’s managers, said. He recounted an evening when an older white woman had wandered in after a Mostly Mozart concert. She asked what music was playing—it was Cardi B. “She said, ‘I like this song,’ ” Diop told me. “And I said, ‘Let’s dance, then.’ ”

Last March, Pete Wells, the Times restaurant critic, awarded Tatiana three stars, extraordinary for a rookie restaurant. Then came an even bigger shock: in April, when Wells published a list of the hundred best restaurants in New York, Tatiana held the No. 1 spot, ahead of Atomix, Le Bernardin, Via Carota, and other redoubtables. “We needed Tatiana. We needed a kitchen that puts Caribbean and African and Black American cooking, too often kept in the city’s margins, right at center stage,” he wrote. “And after quarantines and masks and distancing and sundry social traumas, we needed a party.”

When I asked Onwuachi if he was surprised to have topped the list, he smirked. He knew the restaurant was a hit; it had been packed since pretty much the week it opened. But, he said, when a friend had sent him the link to the list on the day it was published, with a text that said, “Boom,” he’d instinctively started scrolling to the bottom: “When I got to one hundred, I thought, Oh, I must have skipped it. And then I got back up to ten, and I was, like, ‘No fucking way. No fucking way. No fucking way!’ ”

Onwuachi had learned to temper his expectations when it came to establishment recognition. He’d attended the prestigious Culinary Institute of America, in Hyde Park, New York, and worked as a kitchen stage, or intern, at Per Se. His first job out of school was at Eleven Madison Park. But he became disillusioned by the racism he experienced in fine-dining kitchens. At Eleven Madison Park, he and the few other Black cooks on staff were overlooked and even stymied by their white supervisor, he wrote in his 2019 memoir, “Notes from a Young Black Chef,” which he co-authored with the food writer Joshua David Stein. One day, Onwuachi raised concerns about alienating Black patrons. His boss laughed and said, “No Black people eat here anyway.” Onwuachi left the job not long afterward.

From there, his career proceeded in fits and starts. In 2015, when he was twenty-five, he competed on “Top Chef,” placing sixth. (His downfall was serving store-bought frozen waffles with his fried chicken.) The following year, he opened his first restaurant, the Shaw Bijou, in Washington, D.C. In some ways, it was a prototype for Tatiana, with an autobiographical tasting menu and an opulent dining room. It closed after just two and a half months, thwarted by flighty investors and harsh judgment from the press. The food critic for the Washington Post, Tom Sietsema, wrote that he had left feeling unimpressed and underfed. His review ended, “Pizza, anyone?”