Tag Archives: memoir

Eats, Food

Samuelsson’s Yes, Chef Makes Memoir a Must-Read

Marcus Samuelsson (Photo: Kwaku Alston)

In late June, chef Marcus Samuelsson was in Seattle for a special event at Tom Douglas’s Palace Kitchen downtown. For $90, you got dinner à la Samuelsson and a copy of his memoir, Yes, Chef. Typically, we at The SunBreak would offer a book review prior to this kind of event, so there’d be at least a slight tie-in to our Seattle coverage. But you get the review anyway, because this book is that good.

According to Amazon, 17 other people have said something like this after reading it: “If you had told me before I read this that I would read a chef memoir, and then later think it was one of the best books I had ever read, I would have laughed at you.”

When I got Yes, Chef, I had no idea who Marcus Samuelsson was, and I picked it up expecting to skim pass recipes and parboiled prose. But thanks in part to Veronica Chambers, the author of Mama’s Girl and Samuelsson’s collaborator on his memoir, this is an superbly-written work telling a story of Dickensian drama–the New York Times invents a category for it, calling Yes, Chef “one of the great culinary stories of our time.”

New York discovered who Samuelsson was in 1995, when he became the youngest chef to get three stars from the Times, for his work at Aquavit. Ruth Reichl said then: “Mr. Samuelsson is cooking delicate and beautiful food, walking a tightrope between Swedish tradition and modern taste. Swedish food often balances salty with sweet–think of herring–but Mr. Samuelsson has appropriated the idea and made it his own.”

It is perhaps jarring then to discover, on page one, that Samuelsson’s story begins in Ethiopia, and to learn later that his first name was originally Kassahun. “I was two when a tuberculosis epidemic hit Ethiopia,” explains Samuelsson, narrating how his childhood was nearly over before it had begun, and how, after the death of his mother, he was adopted by his Swedish parents.

Part of the pleasure of the book is the way unexpected events unfold, so I’ll avoid a synopsis. It’s worth noting that Samuelsson is as good as any travel writer on life in ’70s Sweden, working in a Swiss resort hotel, and showing up wide-eyed in New York in ’94– though a bit more food-centric than many. As he grows into adulthood, and seizes upon cooking as his passion, he demonstrates a dogged single-mindedness that both elevates him professionally and distances him from almost all other relationships–except with his chef mentors.

Though there’s some race-fueled bullying in his schooldays, Samuelsson professes not to have “racial wounds,” even though he begins to take note of the way he has to out-perform to move ahead in the kitchen. And Gordon Ramsey appears to have ensconced himself on Samuelsson’s shitlist permanently, after calling Samuelsson in one of his trademark rages and accusing him of snubbing him on his visit to London.

“To be honest, though, only one phrase in his juvenile tirade unsettled me: when he called me a black bastard,” says Samuelsson. Having sacrificed so much to overcome a ubiquitous, grudging reluctance to hire black management, once he’s made it, Samuelsson isn’t about to say “Yes, chef,” to Ramsey’s matey racism.

Samuelsson makes it clear that, on his own, he’d have left some of the less-flattering memories out, which is something else we owe Chambers. Samuelsson’s rise in higher and higher-pressure kitchens has a counter-narrative in the colleagues who didn’t rise with him, the daughter he didn’t raise, the family funerals he missed, the pull he thought he had with Bobby Flay. Some of this is balanced by Samuelsson’s unforced humility–he’s always ready to name-check his inspirations and influences–but other times he himself comes up empty in trying to describe the thoughtlessness of ambition.

In a way, you get the sense, Samuelsson is a puzzle to himself (the dislocation of his Ethiopian homecoming, the gap between a familiarity he can feel preconsciously but not know, between his success and an African standard of living is powerfully rendered), and his cooking is a kind of balm–it can’t erase differences, it doesn’t try to. It unites them, contrasts them, pulls diners into Samuelsson’s world of associations, while letting the problematic Samuelsson recede.

Arts & Entertainment, Literature

Family Ties in Both a Marine’s Memoir & Comedy-of-Art-Manners Novel

The mailbag has been kind to The SunBreak recently, bringing Benjamin Busch’s memoir Dust to Dust and Kevin Wilson’s first novel The Family Fang. (Busch reads in Seattle tonight at Lake Forest Park’s Third Place Books, 7 p.m.)

Dust to Dust is startlingly good.

Though it’s bound up in Busch’s experiences in wartime Iraq, as an officer in the Marines, it’s the opposite of what you might expect. Let’s begin with the chapter titles: “Arms, Water, Metal, Soil, Bone Wood, Stone, Blood, Ash.” That’s not rhetorical stylishness; Busch has a grim fascination for what he perceives as elemental that might remind you of the poet Ted Hughes. Or, in another context, you might think of Matt Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft: another book by an essentially solitary man who finds himself in praxis.

Where Jonathan Shay finds in Homer the deracinated veteran, victim of PTSD, struggling to find his way home, Busch excavates his childhood to demonstrate that he knows who he is, that who he is led him to war, to service of his country. The memoir begins with Busch describing how, as a boy, his parents forbade him guns, yet: “I spent much of my childhood constructing forts in our backyard and gathering local boys for epic battles.”

Busch is not an easy man to get your arms around, figuratively. Marine officer, yes, but also student of studio art at Vassar. Guest commentator on All Things Considered, and also Officer Anthony Colicchio, coiner of “Hamsterdam,” on The Wire. As an actor in Generation Kill, he got to reenact invading Iraq. As a stylist, he can write an austere action-poetry:

“We almost got a wooden cross out of that shit,” said one pilot.

Their faces were shiny with sweat. I nodded to the crew chief and ran out the lowered gate in back with my pack. They lifted again, blowing sand, dust, and sharp segments of dry grass in a cloud over us, turned, and fell back down the valley, the pilots driving their empty metal shell through the invisible wind.

He’s observant, noticing things that matter, that take you there. “Staring up a trees in a forest is like staring into a hole. All of the lines decrease toward a center that does not exist. It is an anomaly in the rules of perspective,” he writes. “But seen looking up, they formed a cone, and I felt like falling, detached from the ground.”

The artistic project is a response, of course. Plenty of boys and girls play at fighting who never go off to discover what an IED can do. You can feel Busch using the waters, trees, and sediments of his pre-war youth as a poultice on wounds from the desert. But the heart of darkness arrives after that. Busch is contemplating his own decrepitude (war is tough on joints), when his parents’ health intrudes.

He quotes Paradise Lost: “In either hand the hast’ning Angel caught / Our lingering parents….” Parents are the original ground from which we spring, and Busch begins to grasp his novelist father’s preoccupation: “He created families that were under assault and then defended them with language.” There is no defense for mortality, of course. Reading Dust to Dust is a bit like the Buddhist instruction to meditate on a skull until it no longer frightens you.

If there’s an instructive skull in The Family Fang, the first novel from Kevin Wilson, it’s grinning. Now in paperback, the “best book of the year” is available for all those who–like me–missed it the hardback time around. Pick it up before Wilson arrives for his reading at the University Bookstore on May 18 (7 p.m.).

“Mr. and Mrs. Fang called it art. Their children called it mischief,” is how the book opens, a little Lemony-Snickety. The children are Annie and Buster, Child A and Child B in their performance-artist parents’ gallery descriptions. We meet Annie and Buster in early adulthood, when they are coming to realize just what their childhood has done to them.

They’re aspirational wrecks, no question. Annie is a movie star with a volatile on- and off-set social life, possibly reminding you of Angelina Jolie. Buster is a writer, penniless, yes, but still on assignment for Potent (which might sound like Maxim) to profile a group of unemployed young vets who have created a new line of potato-launching artillery. He is not a natural:

“So,” Buster began, unsure of the correct way to phrase his question, “does all of this, shooting off potato guns, ever remind you of your time over in Iraq?” As soon as he finished his question, everyone around him seemed, momentarily, incredibly sober. “Are you asking if we have flashbacks or something?” asked David.

The first act plays out for some time, in lots of (in fact) flashbacks and cutaways, as Wilson introduces both the contemporary Annie and Buster, and their childhood selves, Svengali’d into ridiculously set-up art happenings from Caleb and Camille Fang, often taking place in a mall and dependent upon disturbing a bovine complacency. If it seems that Caleb and Camille’s art is a little one-note in its public humiliations, it’s because Wilson wants to employ this as an allegory for childhood, specifically those lived out in the public shadow of attention-seeking parents.

But finally, Buster and Annie return home, and the novel’s second act–growing up–can begin:

For Annie it was more shocking to see her parents for the first time in years than it had been to see Buster’s swollen face. Her parents seemed like miniature, crooked versions of themselves. Their hair had gone completely gray.

It’s all agreeable enough, if not entirely surprising, or as amusing as you might expect a “best book of the year” to be. That’s not Wilson’s fault. It might have benefited from some tightening up, so that his satiric impulse would be more evident. As the lives of everyone are more and more lived on Facebook and YouTube, with their attendant humiliations, you can almost dispense with the question of whether art is worth children, or children, art. The kind of scrutiny that Annie and Buster wilted under is all around, and in reach of regular people, too.