Page 38 - Sharp Winter 2023

F O O D
ko means to go, and fa means to seek and look for. So, it’s not too taboo to fetch something at the risk of being left behind. I really love that mes- sage. It’s an Adinkra symbol, and Adinkra symbols come from the Ashanti Region in Ghana where my family is from.
What ingredients or flavours would you sug- gest home cooks experiment with to activate aspects of the palate intuitive to West African diasporic cuisine?
I love that: “aspects of the palate.” I’m going to steal that.
You can have it.
When I think of West African diasporic flavours, the Caribbean islands, West Indies, even South America and the American South, I think of warm spices. Cinnamon, clove, allspice, nutmeg. I think of aromatics: ginger, garlic, and then maybe a little bit of heat from habanero. They grow almost invasively so we use them to our advantage. I also think of preservation, salting and pickling, and the umami — almost like the funky fish sauce vibe as well.
Rewatching your seasons on Top Chef, think- ing about you introducing diners or judges to unfamiliar flavour profiles or textures, I kept
thinking about this quote by the Senegalese writer/filmmaker, Ousmane Sembène. He had incredible success internationally, but he’s of- ten cited as saying (I’m paraphrasing), “Africa is my audience, the West and the rest are my markets.” How do you balance a sense of au- thenticity — as contested and personal and subjective as that is — with wider accessibility? Who is your audience?
Kind of how you notice your speech may change depending on what group of people you might be around, a different community, right? You’re not going to talk the same to your students that you would to your best friend, or your mom. So the food that I cook — I approach it in the same way. Perfect example: eating any sort of steak rare or mid-rare might be super crazy in West Africa, right? Everybody eats their steak well-done. Versus in the States, medium rare. If I serve a sauce on a well-done steak, it needs to be a looser sauce, if I’m serving that same sauce on a rare steak, I may have to thicken it up. I’m serving an audience that’s used to the food, I can go in with a little bit more unabashedness.
A dish that signifies novelty or discovery for one diner may be more about recognition or resonance for another.
Especially in a competition. When I first got in and got the word and knew I was going to be on, I’d worked in Peruvian, modern American, French, was classically trained at Johnson and Wales, but I knew if I had the opportunity to make West African food, well — the continent being the second biggest continent in the entire world and the food being so unknown didn’t make sense to me.
The fact that this show is so prestigious, 16 years in, and I haven’t seen a chef cook anything from the continent — I was like, why not me? Let’s just do it. It was a huge risk because I could’ve been eliminated the second day. But Padma [Lakshmi] mentioned this as well: I was not only cooking, but teaching throughout the season.
At the end of the day, the food needed to taste good. I won a dish with fufu, a very traditional, extremely West African meal that’s never been changed since the day it’s been invented. And I served it to a bunch of people who’ve never had the dish before, and I won that challenge. So it proved that it could happen, and people are open and willing to eat. I know there was a big push for people to bring new voices and new judges to the panel after that as well, and I thought that was awe- some. I really agreed.
In so many ways, even though the title’s not mine, I definitely feel like I won.
38 GUIDE • WINTER 2023
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