A Kitchen of His Own: Claiming Black Culinary Identity in Kwame Onwuachi’s Memoir Notes of a Young Black Chef

Abstract

This article examines Kwame Onwuachi’s memoir Notes of a Black Young Chef (2019). In this memoir, Onwuachi narrates his coming-of-age story with a focus on his culinary journey starting in the Bronx and moving to the world of fine-dining. The chef manages to express himself through cooking and gains social visibility although he has been challenged by racial stereotyping and social hierarchies around him since his childhood. Onwuachi’s life narrative has references to the black bildungsroman, and he constructs his culinary style accordingly. Onwuachi treats food as a self narrative. He rejects the notion of a classical restaurant and transforms the kitchen into a culinary stage where he would display his life as well as the diversity of black identities together with food culture. The chef dislocates the assigned gendered and interpellated racial identity and claims his own space through his self-narrative and culinary performance. Therefore, this article examines the intersections of food, performance, and performativity. Onwuachi, as a black chef, recasts culinary performance and the traditional celebrity chef image to promote social transformation and racial equality for the black community