Race/Related: Kwame Onwuachi is a whole new kind of celebrity chef

Fame and clout that stretch far beyond the kitchen.

View in browser|nytimes.com November 15, 2024 At 34, Kwame Onwuachi has achieved a prominence that eludes peers who have been cooking far longer. Scott Suchman for The New York Times A Duo of Skill and Charisma By Pete Wells For a chef who had opened a new restaurant an hour ago, Kwame Onwuachi looked very calm. The place is called Sirius, and it is a four-seat tasting counter inside another restaurant, Dogon. Mr. Onwuachi opened Dogon itself a month earlier, on Sept. 9, inside the Salamander Washington DC hotel. So really, he was overseeing two infant restaurants. He also had lines to remember. One of the four customers that night at Sirius was going to propose right after the Wagyu oxtails, and had asked Mr. Onwuachi to present the ring under a cloche with a little speech saying that the course represented "love and a lifetime of commitment and trust." If any of this was weighing on Mr. Onwuachi, there was no sign of it in his confident smile as he walked through Dogon's packed dining room, stopping to greet a friend here, pose for a photo there. And all of it, including the proposal, went off without a hitch, as seems to be the case lately with most things Mr. Onwuachi touches. At 34, he has achieved a prominence that eludes peers who have been cooking for longer and control more restaurants. The past decade has given us car-seat food critics and TikTok bakers, but hardly any new stars whose fame came primarily from working in a restaurant. Mr. Onwuachi is the exception. His talent in the kitchen and his charisma outside it conspire with a rare ability, seen more often in pop stars than in chefs, to read the currents of the moment and align his own energies with them so that he seems to be traveling in unison with the rest of the culture. Anna Wintour recently put him in charge of the food at the Met Gala next year, announcing his role at a news conference inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art that was like "being in a Batman movie," he said. "I felt like green gas was going to come up and the Joker was going to bust in." He played in the N.B.A. All-Star Celebrity Game in February, taking the court with the singer Jennifer Hudson and Micah Parsons of the Dallas Cowboys. In September, he cooked for the Black Excellence Brunch on the South Lawn of the White House. This month, he will be the focus of an episode of the Netflix series "Chef's Table." He has endorsed or partnered with Lexus, American Express, Warby Parker, Macy's and other companies that have approached Jordan Solomon, one of his representatives at Creative Artists Agency. In his posts on Instagram, he is as likely to be showing off his Microsoft Surface Pro tablet as sharing the latest accolade for his New York restaurant, Tatiana, where tables are still maddeningly, tantalizingly hard to get, nearly two years into its run. "Kwame is a completely different celebrity chef from the Bobby Flays and Mario Batalis," said the chef Alexander Smalls, a friend and mentor. While earlier cooking stars were defined by their profession, Mr. Onwuachi has already transcended his. One indication that Mr. Onwuachi has more room to roam than the typical celebrity chef: Tom Colicchio was skewered as a "total sellout" for his Diet Coke commercial and Rick Bayless was called "a pimp for the Evil Empire" when he promoted a Burger King chicken sandwich, but Mr. Onwuachi took almost no flak for filming a Coca-Cola ad or taking part in a McDonald's marketing event. "He is extraordinarily extroverted in his activities, and they cross the gamut, from golf to basketball, to Hollywood and movies, and doing pop-ups and appearances and media," Mr. Smalls said. "That's new to the chef community. We don't usually have that reach." In many ways, Mr. Onwuachi might have been custom-made for the moment. Just when food writers and editors became motivated to make amends for a long history of leaving Black chefs out of the story, along came Mr. Onwuachi, a Black chef whose work is explicitly about Blackness. Dogon is a little larger, quieter and calmer than Tatiana, as befits a hotel dining room. Its menu has shout-outs to Washington institutions like Ben's Chili Bowl rather than Tatiana's bodega allusions. But both of his restaurants trace the global paths of the African diaspora from Nigerian egusi and Malian ground-nut stew to Jamaican oxtails and Creole shrimp, retaining the force and complexity of the original spices. In Mr. Onwuachi's places, Black cooks and servers are more prominent, and the diners more racially diverse, than in many fine-dining restaurants. "It's the greatest part about looking around the dining room in both restaurants," he said. "At Tatiana, you can have somebody in a durag and somebody in a tuxedo going into the opera. I want more of that." Jamila Robinson, the editor in chief of Bon Appétit and Epicurious, remembered eating in Tatiana one night when Snoop Dogg's "Beautiful" started to play and the whole room joined in on the opening "Oh, oh, oh, oh." "They eat together, they sing together, they get up and dance, they give you a hug," she said. "For me, that is a Black experience." That anyone looking for a Black experience might find it in a restaurant at Lincoln Center has to be considered one of the modern-day miracles of New York. 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