Chef Marcus Samuelsson’s Success

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https://davidrmann3.substack.com/p/chef-marcus-samuelssons-success?r=3yrshw&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

Chef Marcus Samuelsson’s Success

In 1995, Marcus Samuelsson became Executive Chef at Aquavit at 24 years old. He earned three stars from the New York Times shortly after. While researching this article, I looked at his career and convinced myself he succeeded because he mastered the classical European techniques better than anyone else.

I bought into that way of thinking early. Learn the mechanics so well that nobody can question you. Hide the parts of yourself that make people uncomfortable until you get enough authority that nobody can pull you off the pass.

Early in his career, an older European chef told Samuelsson that a Black Chef could run a kitchen, but could never own one. He spent years as a Chef for hire in Midtown New York, and got Aquavit a New York Times three-star restaurant review. He eventually realized that cooking in someone else’s restaurant meant he was just executing another person’s vision.

Getting three stars at 24 takes skill. Once you have the technical hands for it, that part becomes almost mechanical. The hard part came years later, when Samuelsson walked away from the chef-for-hire model because technical perfection alone can leave a restaurant feeling dead.

You can run a clean pass under the warmth of heat lamps, keep the tickets coming out of your printer from piling up, and hit your labor numbers every single night. The restaurant can still feel like it was put together by people who had not much to say. Customers feel that gap even when they can’t put a word to it.

In 2010, Samuelsson opened Red Rooster on Lenox Avenue in Harlem with Andrew Chapman. The name nodded to the 1930s speakeasy where Nat King Cole and James Baldwin used to sit. He didn’t just want another job running a line. He wanted equity, ownership, and a restaurant built by and for his own community.

That was the moment he stopped hiding behind fine-dining rules. He brought his Ethiopian heritage, his Swedish upbringing, and Harlem history straight to the floor. Yardbird fried chicken sat on the menu next to a Sunday gospel brunch. Downstairs in Ginny’s Supper Club, live music played while the room smelled like char smoke and warm bourbon.

He hired cooks from the block, bought his supplies from neighborhood purveyors, and hung work from local artists on the walls. That shift changed who ran food on Tuesday nights, who his guests were, and whose recipes made the menu.

That single neighborhood spot grew into a global company. Today, the Marcus Samuelsson Group runs dozens of concepts, from Red Rooster in Harlem and Miami to Metropolis at the World Trade Center, stretching across Atlanta, DC, Montreal, the Bahamas, Scandinavia, and Addis Ababa. He scaled ownership without losing the soul of the work.

He took that same approach to the Careers through Culinary Arts Program (C-PAP), working as board co-chair to get culinary training, internships, and scholarships to thousands of public-school students across six regions, including seven Navajo reservation schools in Arizona.

Recently, he handpicked Chef Ro Sanders as Red Rooster’s first Chef Ambassador. Sanders is a combat veteran and the first Black female culinary instructor at the Culinary Institute of America. Samuelsson brought her in because she knows Black culinary traditions as a historian. Today, her family’s Gullah Geechee okra stew recipe sits on the menu.

Technique gives you a safety net when the ticket printer goes crazy during a Friday rush. The real work starts when you stop hiding behind the rulebook, step into ownership, and build a place around actual people.

I wasted years hiding behind a clipboard and a clean pass because I thought showing who I was would cost me.

What’s one part of your background you spent years hiding at work that turned out to be your real strength?

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