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When Marcus Samuelsson Moved to New York
Photo: Courtesy Marcus Samuelsson Group
It’s a beautiful Tuesday morning in Central Park, and Marcus Samuelsson is ready to Rollerblade. I meet him at 10 a.m. at a spot he suggested — the Duke Ellington Statue on 110th Street at Fifth Avenue, across from the Africa Center — and right on time, the chef comes flying down the pavement in purple track pants, a checked Dapper Dan Gap sweater and a red and white Kangol hat.
We’re making our way — I’m on a Citi Bike, following behind — to Skate Circle near the Rumsey Playfield, where ’80s-house DJs and skaters get together. Samuelsson says he spent countless weekends here when he moved to the city 30 years ago from Sweden to work at the previous midtown location of Aquavit, a Scandinavian stalwart even then. “I didn’t have a lot of money and living in the city was expensive, so I’d Rollerblade everywhere,” he says. He remembers having to abandon a date after blowing his entire $40 weekend budget on lunch and a movie, and making trips for Ukrainian dumplings on the Lower East Side.
Rollerblading was also a form of professional transportation as he moved around the city to source ingredients while listening to Nas or Mobb Deep. “I had recently spent time in Singapore and Japan, and I wanted to find some salty Asian ingredients,” Samuelsson says. “One day, after three weeks of Rollerblading around, I made my way down to Chinatown, where I found this store that sold galangal, lemongrass, and curry leaves.” He couldn’t get deliveries to the restaurant, so he would skate down by himself, buy what he needed, and carry it back to Aquavit on West 54th Street. “I’m thinking no one else uptown knows about this spot and then Jean-Georges’s sous-chef walks in and I’m like, Fuck — my secret’s out.”
The stakes at the time were unusually high. Less than two months after Samuelsson started at Aquavit, the restaurant’s sous-chef died of heart failure, the result of an accidental overdose. Shortly after, Aquavit’s owner, Håkan Swahn, tapped Samuelsson to become executive chef; he was 24 years old and had been told on multiple occasions that, as a Black man and an immigrant, he would never own a New York City restaurant. “I didn’t want to be the one to close the kitchen, and I didn’t go to France and come to New York City just to snort coke in a bathroom,” he says.
What he wanted to do was turn a conservative Swedish restaurant into a destination for Michelin-caliber cooking by applying new ideas to Nordic techniques. “No one really knew what Swedish food was at that time, but I did,” he says. “Rather than trying to make the food at Aquavit more Swedish, I tried to make it more worldly.” In the fall of 1995, the then–food critic of the New York Times, Ruth Reichl, took notice of Samuelsson’s “delicate and beautiful food, walking a tightrope between Swedish tradition and modern taste.” Reichl gave Aquavit three stars, a rave. Samuelsson still remembers how she tried to tease out the ingredients he used to give his recipes depth, such as curry leaves in a chilled tomato soup with shrimp, or lobster salad “piqued by the sweetness of melon, tamed by the blandness of fromage blanc and sharpened with mint” that was, Reichl wrote, “maddeningly delicious.”
The review changed the trajectory of Samuelsson’s career. Today, he is such a fixture of food TV and publishing that his story is well known to anyone who follows food. He is friends with the Obamas. Doechii, Ayo Edebiri, and Law Roach all attended the Met Gala pre-party he hosted this spring. But in 1995, it was hardly a given that a chef born in Ethiopia and raised in Sweden would break through. (“I was doing all these events for the restaurant, and people would flat out ask me “Where’s the chef?’” he remembers, “and I would say, ‘It’s me.’”) Yet what he eventually found in Manhattan was acceptance, a home with enough diversity to complement every part of his background. “I was on my midtown shit while I was at Aquavit,” he tells me, “but I was also going to Harlem.”
Uptown he saw the next part of his New York life start to unfold. “I used to live in Hell’s Kitchen right across the street from Alberta Wright’s restaurant, Jezebel,” Samuelsson says. “The restaurant was an extension of Black Broadway at that time. I’d sit there with my one beer for two or three hours because that’s all I could afford, but Alberta was kind enough to let me sit there all night.” He found that same sense of belonging after moving. “Once I moved to Harlem, I got to experience so many official institutions here, but there are people like Lana Turner, who are institutions in their own right.” He says her guidance was instrumental in helping him eventually open Red Rooster in 2010: “Years ago, she told me, ‘I know you’re looking to open a restaurant here. You need information and help.’ She invited me into her house and showed me what Black excellence looked like from her lens.” (After Red Rooster opened, Samuelsson put Turner’s hats on display in the restaurant.)
As our morning in Central Park comes to a close, he walks me toward Lincoln Center, where we park my bike. We hug and I tell him I’ll see him uptown, where we live about ten blocks from each other. Then, on his way to meet a potential investor, Samuelsson takes off again, blades pounding the sidewalk as he glides down the avenue.
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