Few food personalities enjoy as high a profile as Joseph Johnson. “Chef JJ”, as the New York chef is known to his fans, has a colossal social media following, a long-running cooking show and a name that’s a staple of the who’s who lists that appear in major food publications.
Trained at the Culinary Institute of America, Johnson took a break from the US restaurant scene early in his career to spend time in kitchens in west Africa. The experience, he says, forever changed how he looked at the food of his ancestors, which was largely absent from the types of restaurants with crisp white tablecloths and punctilious waitstaff. Johnson decided he would devote himself to addressing that imbalance.
As he thinks about how his fast-casual Harlem restaurant FieldTrip expanded to the food mall beneath Manhattan’s Rockefeller Center, and his plans to keep growing the franchise (a third Manhattan location is in the works), Johnson says he can’t help but feel the pressure. It’s not just a matter of scaling up and staying profitable. Johnson is describing a particular burden shared by a small group of high-profile restaurateurs of color.
“For me, Black people [in the restaurant world], we all feel like we represent the whole [Black] culture,” says Johnson, who was born on Long Island and raised in the Pocono mountains, and whose parents are of Caribbean and African American descent. “If I fuck up today … if I fuck up at Rockefeller Center, they are not going to let another Black chef in here. That’s how I think.”
Johnson has joined the ranks of other acclaimed Black chefs, including the Ethiopian-born Swedish superstar chef Marcus Samuelsson, who recently opened a new restaurant in Chelsea, and Kwame Onwuachi, whose African-Caribbean restaurant Tatiana at the recently renovated Lincoln Center received a rousing three-star review in the New York Times. FieldTrip’s arrival at Rockefeller Center is considered a watershed moment for an institution that was built on longtime inhabitants being forced out in the name of urban renewal.
Scattered across the US are other chefs, including Nina Compton in New Orleans and Mashama Bailey in Savannah, Georgia, who have been devoted to integrating the food of their heritage into the American food landscape. Showcasing the complexity of Black food traditions is no easy task. Securing funding and gaining the media attention necessary to stay afloat is a whole other challenge.
“I think in the everyday market space, when you look at hotel developers, landlords, investors, there’s only a handful of them that are writing checks or giving you the deal,” Johnson says. “A lot of people don’t realize that white folks are on the 80-yard line and Black people on the 20-yard line with resources.”
Onwuachi sees his restaurant as far more than a critical darling. Tatiana is a finely tuned proof of concept. “It can be a beacon for other Black chefs,” he says. “Investors can say, ‘OK, this thing works, you need to invest in Black chefs and their creativity and not be afraid that people are not going to take well to this.’” The culinary landscape needs more than just chefs challenging notions. Onwuachi cites the importance of bolstering the ranks of mainstream food critics and editors in chief of color. “I just think it’s going to take a long time for us to get there.”
A sudden spotlight
The reckoning that followed the police killing of George Floyd in Minnesota brought renewed attention to inequities in many corners of society. Johnson and Onwuachi were among the chefs publishing personal essays about the food world that vibrated with outrage but also hope. Black food made by Black chefs, which was gaining in fashion in the years leading up to the pandemic, was suddenly in the spotlight.
The past three years have seen a more nuanced conversation around the definition of “Black food”, along with a hard look at structural barriers facing Black chefs. In addition to trouble with securing investment in restaurants, there are issues of who gets the big culinary awards, and the evolving discussion about the language used to define cuisine.
“The indirect and passive way that we write about communities of color is still challenging,” says Jamila Robinson, veteran food writer and food editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer since 2019. Robinson sits on committees at the James Beard Foundation and the World’s 50 Best Restaurants, two pre-eminent organizations that honor chefs and restaurants. “It can be exhausting, trying to turn that lens back and ask people how they would receive that information if they were of that community.”
Rewriting the rules
Changing the discussion around Black food involves more than instituting a quota for recipes like jollof rice or gumbo. Robinson says it’s time to rethink the common culinary lexicon, and reconsider “doing things like italicizing non-English words”, and the use of phrases such as “old world” and “new world”. She asks: “Old world to whom? What do you mean by ‘old world’ … and ‘new world’ is what?”
Biases are hard to break down. Robinson, who also contributes to a number of publications, cited a recent story that she wrote in which she mentioned the artist Rashid Johnson, who is Black, alongside Norman Rockwell. Her editor asked her to add additional context about Johnson, but did not do the same for Rockwell. “Cultural competency is a challenge for people of all backgrounds,” she says. “I think it’s still a learning process to write about people of color without a white gaze.”
“It’s one thing to say that we did our three Black stories this year or whatever,” says Toni Tipton-Martin, legendary food writer and editor in chief of Cook’s Country magazine. “But we really want those to be treated with seriousness, and the same intelligence and fun that we apply to other communities. It’s not hard to do, but it requires reminding people every day what our mission and vision are.”
Tipton-Martin was the first Black editor to lead a food section at a major American newspaper, when she was hired in 1991 at the Cleveland Plain Dealer. She says that what she encounters at Cook’s Country is similar to what she experienced at the Southern Foodways Alliance, an influential organization based at the University of Mississippi that focuses on southern culture, where she served as president.
During her time there, Tipton-Martin says her role included being what she calls an “inside voice”, helping to make sure all communities that make up the diverse food culture of the south were invited – from Vietnamese contributions to the food of Louisiana to Haitian immigrants.
“Sometimes when you try to translate that outside of yourself, it can sound like tokenism,” Tipton-Martin says. “As somebody said to me one time: ‘I didn’t know you had an ethnic agenda.’ It was really coarse. I don’t have an ethnic agenda, I have an equity agenda.”
Auditing the awards
The James Beard Foundation, whose annual awards are considered the Oscars of the restaurant and food journalism world, undertook an audit in 2021 after canceling its awards that year because of the pandemic and scrutiny over the transparency of its process.
“Over the last few years the organization has been trying to move things in the direction of showing more diversity in terms of the kinds of people who are celebrated,” says Dawn Padmore, the foundation’s vice-president of awards. The audit’s findings led to shortening committee members’ term limits from three to two years, and a pledge to diversify the committee, with a goal of 45% of members and judges being Black, Indigenous or other people of color. Padmore says they achieved the goal in 2022, and this year they’re shooting for an even 50%. At last year’s James Beard ceremony, Bailey took home honors for outstanding chef in the country. Owamni by the Sioux Chef, a Native American restaurant, was named best new restaurant.
The World’s 50 Best Restaurants, a London-based organization, which for 20 years has created the coveted honor of the 50 best restaurants across the globe, canceled the release of its rankings in 2020. This change allowed the organization to pause and reconsider its values and biases. “We reflected on what we were doing more than at any other time, and what was our purpose,” says William Drew, the organization’s director of content. The organization increased the number of voters in Africa and added a regional list of the 50 best Middle East and north African restaurants.
One of the hurdles that the World’s 50 Best Restaurants and others need to help overcome, Drew says, is the “history and assumption” that the best restaurants are rooted in Eurocentric traditions. “People have grown up with the idea of what a posh restaurant looks like, the type of service and a wine list that’s like a book. None of that is true, of course.”
The boost of buzz
For more than 20 years, Lee Schrager has been operating as the food world’s rock star promoter, putting chefs on the map with his buzzy food festivals such as the Food Network South Beach Food Wine & Food Festival and the New York City Wine & Food Festival. Schrager admits that he and his team has largely failed in the past to uplift Black chefs.
“I have Black friends who said, ‘Listen, the festival doesn’t look like us.’ And I said it should look like you. It should look like all of us,” Schrager says. “I’m like, ‘Wow, you’re right.’ We’re not doing a good enough job.”
His team has been doubling down on identifying chefs that aren’t already big names, many of whom are of color. The organization has hired a diversity counselor who Schrager says also introduced “us to a whole world of media that is appealing to a different demographic than we’re used to”. Of the approximately 390 chefs who participated in the South Beach festival last month, about 70 were Black, he said, adding that that’s a nearly twofold increase from 2022.
A handful of Black chefs at the most recent festival handpicked the other chefs who cooked at their event. Johnson invited a few Miami chefs to work by his side. “I get tired of people saying in communities around America, ‘There’s no Black chefs, there’s no Black restaurants,’” he says. It’s not just a matter of helping put new names on the map. He has a message he wants his fellow chefs of color to hear: “I am supporting you.”
This article was amended on 21 March 2023 to correct the spelling of Kwame Onwuachi’s name.
