46 pages • 1 hour read
Kwame OnwuachiNotes from a Young Black Chef
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 6-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary: “Gulf State”
Onwuachi’s grandmother had left her home in Louisiana to move to Chicago to escape the weight of Jim Crow, but Onwuachi made a reverse journey, joining his mother in Baton Rouge where she worked as an executive chef. Like his grandmother, Onwuachi was looking for a new start. Onwuachi had never had difficulty moving between social classes and diverse groups of people, but the South offered unique challenges. Everywhere he went, he saw Black individuals being treated as if they were invisible.
After arriving in Louisiana, Onwuachi spent weeks on the couch, and Jewel pressured her son to find a job. Onwuachi moved in and out of menial jobs. He found work as a server at a restaurant called TJ’s Ribs. He soon discovered that the restaurant practiced an unspoken form of segregation; Onwuachi served the Black customers in one corner of the restaurant. All the other servers were white, and all the cooks were Black. The managers yelled and demeaned the cooks, and Onwuachi felt a line separating him from the men in the kitchen. Working at TJ’s Ribs separated Onwuachi from his love of cooking. Relief came when Jewel found a job in New Orleans. Onwuachi quit his job as a server to join his mother. Soon he heard about a job making $1900 a week, cooking food on a ship for workers cleaning up the Deepwater Horizon spill.
The job was grueling. Onwuachi was disappointed in the head chef, who treated him poorly and put little effort into the food they prepared. Most of what they served came from frozen packages. Onwuachi was struck by the poor white workers on the ship. He feared them, pitied them, and felt sad that the meals the ship offered provided no comfort. One day, Onwuachi asked if he could do the ordering; he prepared étouffée for the crew. The workers were delighted, and soon Onwuachi took over meals and replaced the head chef. He began to discover the restorative power of good food.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Finding My Craft”
Onwuachi spent the summer working on the ship. On his weeks off, he flew to New York to buy expensive clothes and visit restaurants. He was amazed at the dishes and unique ingredients New York’s restaurant scene offered. When his contract ended, he was certain he wanted to pursue cooking as a serious career. To start his own catering company, he knew he would need capital. After watching a boy sell candy bars on the subway, he decided to buy candy wholesale and sell it on subways. He made up to $400 a day, but when two boys selling candy questioned Onwuachi one day, he learned that the candy-selling market was controlled by an important figure in the Webster housing project. He did not want to cross him, so his candy-selling days were over. However, he had made enough money to buy a few things for his business and to secure a job catering a party for a new fashion boutique.
In search of revenue, Onwuachi looked for a restaurant that would hire him. Noticing an upscale restaurant with a menu that appealed to him, he asked for an application. The manager at Craft, a restaurant managed by chef and restauranteur Tom Collichio, hired Onwuachi as a server on the spot. Craft opened a new world for the young chef. For the first time, he worked at a restaurant where the front of the house and back of the house worked closely together. Onwuachi arrived early, stayed late, and took advantage of the learning opportunities the restaurant offered.
Meanwhile, Onwuachi continued to try to grow his catering business. When a woman overheard him speaking about his business, she asked him to put together a tasting for an upcoming conference. Jewel helped Onwuachi find a venue for the tasting, and he secured the job. He would be preparing 1,600 meals for a four-day conference. His mother and some of her catering friends flew to New York to help him make the job a success. For the first time in his life, Onwuachi was in charge.
Chapters 6-7 Analysis
In this section, Onwuachi grapples further with The Discovery of Identity. While raising money for a catering company, Onwuachi realized that he had encroached on an underground citywide candy operation that tied back to his old B.A.B.Y. gang. His ability to connect with all types of people enabled him to escape the subway without being hurt.
Onwuachi continues his soul-searching when he describes moving to Baton Rouge, where he experienced overt segregation and racism for the first time. A restaurant called TJ’s Ribs hired him to work as a waiter; it did not take long for Onwuachi to realize that he was the only Black server who had been hired and that his job was to serve Black customers in a separate section of the restaurant. The kitchen was filled with Black line cooks who would not meet his eye. Onwuachi watched as the general manager screamed at the cooks, calling them “scum” and “your kind.” Standing on the other side of the counter, he felt disconnected from the cooks. He understood what it meant to be Black in many other parts of the world, but being Black in the South was something completely different. While working in the restaurant, Onwuachi confronted his own place within this system of oppression. When the manager yelled at the line cooks in front of Onwuachi, he knew that it was partially for his benefit. It was to keep him in his place by making a spectacle of his fellow Black co-workers.
Once, after receiving abuse from the manager, one of the line cooks yelled at Onwuachi, turning the humiliation he experienced onto Kwame. This example of Power and Anger reveals the cyclical nature of abuse. Reminiscent of the way a younger Kwame absorbed his father’s abuse and in turn became aggressive toward classmates in elementary school, the line cook received abuse and passed it to someone else. For Onwuachi, the experience reaffirmed how hierarchical power could contribute to a pattern of aggression and dominance. This experience would play out again later in fine-dining restaurants. The head chefs ruled their kitchens, leaving the other cooks trembling with fear over the tiniest mistakes. They failed to see how their reign of terror elicited more mistakes than precision or how it became a burden that was to be carried by everyone in the kitchen, often unloaded onto friends, co-workers, and family members. Such episodes sharply contrast with Onwuachi’s experiences of Food as Connection and Story, revealing how power imbalances can twist what Onwuachi depicts as life’s fundamental pleasures and comforts.
While TJ’s Ribs did not inspire Onwuachi’s culinary trajectory, it provided him with a foundation to apply for a job cooking on a ship. Working on the ship gave Onwuachi the opportunity to cook whatever he wanted to and to witness how food could uplift and motivate others. He interviewed workers to find out their favorite dishes and attempted to recreate them in the ship’s kitchen. As the smell of his food filled the galleys, workers popped their heads in with excitement to see what was cooking. Onwuachi learned that food could function as connection and story and that he could be the one to tell that story through his cooking. Working at Craft gave him the framework for what his storytelling might look like one day. He wanted to share his experiences on the plate in a fine-dining setting, something few Black chefs had accomplished within a system that advanced white-owned restaurants.
