Nigerian American chef Kwame Onwuachi is a James Beard Award winner (Rising Star Chef of the Year, 2019), a Top Chef finalist, a best-selling author, one of Food & Wine’s Best New Chefs, and a 30 Under 30 honoree by both Zagat and Forbes.
Before the age of 25, he had lived in both Nigeria and the Bronx, joined a gang, sold drugs, sold candy on the subway, graduated from the Culinary Institute of America, worked on oil cleanup ships after the Deepwater Horizon spill, and opened an ambitious tasting-menu restaurant only to see it flop dramatically in less than three months. (He even found time at some point to debut a kitchen-proof nail polish collection and we have to admit, he has astoundingly beautiful hands for a professional chef.)
All of which is to say, he had ample material for his memoir, Notes From a Young Black Chef, despite having published it at age 29. Now he’s back with a cookbook, My America: Recipes From a Young Black Chef, which he’ll discuss at the Orlando Public Library (downtown).
2 p.m., Sunday, Feb. 19, Orlando Public Library, 101 E. Central Blvd., 407-835-7323, attend.ocls.info, free but registration required.
This article appears in Feb 15-21, 2023.
