Notes from a Young Black Chef: Adapted for Young Adults by Kwame Onwuachi (review)

As memoir openings go, this one ranks high on the tension scale: a rising-star chef, on the cusp of opening his first kitchen, caters a high-stakes international dinner with members of his newly hired staff. As many readers drawn to Onwuachi’s YA title will already know, Shaw Bijou, the upscale D.C. restaurant on which Onwuachi is pinning his hopes, is doomed, and this memoir (an adaptation of his adult work) is both an entrepreneur’s personal story and a post-mortem on a very public crash-and-burn. There’s plenty of self-justification in Onwuachi’s tale of his rocky family and school life (rebellious enough that his mother packed him off to relatives in Nigeria for a spell), cockiness in his full-throated self-assurance, and impassioned finger-pointing in his analysis of Shaw Bijou’s closure. The often rancorous candor adds heat to the tale, though, and Chef also generously credits friends and family who supported his most audacious efforts and pauses to consider how his own decisions might have influenced outcomes. Although Onwuachi’s Top Chef followers and fans will know that he’s already moved along with other ventures since Bijou’s 2017 demise, they’ll enjoy this frenetic account of a young Black man’s determination to create “a fine-dining, modern American, globally influenced restaurant that tells my life story through food.”