Marcus Samuelsson Says French Cuisine Isn't The Gold Standard (Reheat)

Hey everyone, Dan here with the Reheat for you featuring the one and only chef Marcus Samuelson. He has become a TV star and an internationally recognized chef. You may know him from his flagship restaurant, Red Rooster Harlem, which combines Swedish and Ethiopian food, and a lot more, into dishes like cornbread with lingonberry butter and a take on fried chicken called hot honey yard bird. Marcus and I talk about how his grandmother Helga informed his relationship with food and his approach to getting to know Harlem. You really get a sense of how Marcus' life has shaped his approach to food. Now remember there's an episode of the Sporkful you want us to reheat, drop me a lines and mean email or voice memo to [email protected], tell me your first name, location, what episode you want to hear, and why. Thanks so much and enjoy. This episode contains explicit language. So we're going to get things kicked off right now, your phones are off, and I'm going to say this is the Sporkful, it's not for foodies, it's blah blah blah, you know how it goes, and then I'll say we're coming to you from the Museum of the City of New York. In New York? Is that redundant? That feels. I'm just going to say we're coming to you live from the Museum of the City of New York. I think it's obvious to work. That's in New York. Done you think? Okay, we're producing this as we go, all right. This is the Sporkful, it's not for foodies, it's for eaters, I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show we obsess about food to learn more about people and we are coming to you live from the Museum of the City of New York. Thank you all so much for being here, it's great, yeah, thank you all, anyway. I'm feeling punchy tonight. Back in 1995, when Marcus Samuelson was at a Swedish restaurant in New York called Aquavit, he became the youngest chef ever to get a three star review from the New York Times. He was 23 years old. Today, his flagship restaurant, Red Rooster Harlem, combines Swedish and Ethiopian cuisine, soul food, and more, in two dishes that have helped launch an empire. The menu includes cornbread with lingonberry butter, a salad with berberave in a gret, and his own take on fried chicken, a hot honey yard bird. Red Rooster Harlem is a restaurant that seeks to break a lot of the old culinary rules about what and who belongs in which restaurant. Today Marcus has restaurants all over the world, including a new one at the Four Seasons in Montreal. He's the author of multiple best-selling books and the host of the PBS TV show No Passport required. His new audio cookbook, "Our Harlem" is unaudible now, please welcome Marcus Samuelson. Thank you for having me. How are you? So Marcus, welcome. Thank you. Great to have you. I want to start right off. I just want to get right into the hard-hitting questions. Get into it. You write in your memoir, "Herring is the classic Swedish fish." "Isn't Swedish fish the classic Swedish fish?" [laughter] That's brilliant, that's brilliant. You know, I think that at this point, the Swedish fish is the Swedish, is the classic Swedish fish. So with the Swedish fish that's evolved, we started as a herring country and we became a gummy fish. Right. Yeah. Well, I don't know if you can help me unlock a mystery. I actually have a box of Swedish fish here on stage. And I don't know if you know about this, Marcus, but there's a big mystery around the red, which is the original color, Swedish fish. No one knows what the flavor is. I didn't even know these things had flavor, because it's just color. We're about to find out. All right. Here's the package that'll sound effects. Is he opening it up for you? Is it too late to, is it too early or too late to walk off to stage? [laughter] I don't know which one it is. What do you think? Mm-hmm. You're smelling that sear of Pro. Are you tearing it up? You're much more professional than I am. No, no, no. But, you know, it has that very bubblegummy, sort of, nose. And so I would say, it is like a, I think it hints towards raspberries and strawberries, but that artificial version. Some people have suggested that it is lingonberry flavor. No. [laughter] No. lingonberry is very tart. It's more cranberry, et cetera, but I would say it smells artificial summer. Like if somebody's in a factor and says, this is what summer smells like. Sweetie summer, like, you know, midsummer, that, it has that flavor. Okay. You know? So it is sweetish. Ish. [laughter] Sweetish. Yes. Yeah. Growing up in Sweden, I know you write in your memoir about cooking with your grandmother Helga. Tell me what she was like in the kitchen. Well, I share a lot with my grandmother Helga because we truly, truly, comfortable in the kitchen. So our lingo always became food. And the other thing that I really learned from my grandmother was, you know, it's hard to think about Sweden as a really poor country, but she grew up in a, you know, very poor times. And what was fascinating as a kid was, we ate amazingly, yet all these food came out of poverty. She made potato dumpling from scratch and she made bread from scratch and it was all leftovers, right? She bought me when it wasn't good, so you had to cure it, you know. So bucket, water, threw in a ton of salt and then she threw in an egg, you know, didn't crack it, and the egg had to come up to, you had to be the size of a Swedish crew now. That's when you know you have the right amount of salt. And when the egg is floating, it's floating out, stuff like that, right? She taught me before that, how do you kill us chicken? Old school, like you have to suck the net and blow the, separate the skin. This is like old school cooking, right? And my mom's like, my kids will never need to know that. But when I worked in a three-star Michelin restaurant in Lyon, I had to pluck duck and I knew exactly how to pluck them. I started with putting the duck in the refrigerator and I just traced back to how my grandmother taught me this stuff, right? These are just like rituals of cooking and the rituals of cooking are deeper than cookbooks. So Grandma Helga clearly a very important person in your life. Another very important sort of factor from your childhood that I want to touch on briefly is soccer. I'd like to ask you to read a bit from your memoir. Wow. Yeah. I've been adopted from Ethiopia as a toddler, culturally and linguistically, I was Swedish. But as I got older, I could feel people respond to me more as a young black man instead of a cute little black kid. That subtle shift in the bottle language of strangers was something that I never discussed with my parents, but it was lucky for me that this deepening racial awareness happened at the same time as I joined the soccer team. All of a sudden, at friends with darker skins, darker hair, while I was beginning to sense the ways that I didn't fully belong to Swedish society, I'd found a place and a group of people with whom I felt very much at home. That moment that you first sensed that you didn't belong in Swedish society? How did that feel? The type of shit that we were exposed to was like, when I remember when I started school, for example, the teacher was like, "Oh, she just stared at me, "Oh, what do we do now?" I'm like, "What do you want to talk about?" "I'm seven. What the fuck are you doing now? I don't know. I'm seven." And then we're like, "Nine." I'm like, "Well, Mark is, and I said next to my best friend, and I'm like, "No, you're going to sit up front." And that walk of shame, those like, whatever, 30 feet it is, and you take your book, so he was like that. He wasn't a shouting racist him, asking, standing on top of the mountain. It was a very, sort of, Swedish-passive, aggressive, elegant Bergman-esque racism. That, right? That you realize it's an adult, like, fuck, that happened, that really happened. You were, there was a pair where you thought you were going to be a professional soccer player. That was going to be your career. Yeah. I've only really had one time in my life when I doubted myself. That was the day when I got caught from my soccer team. And it was the only time I could say it was really confusing for me. So I think cooking also saved me in many ways, because I took that energy, that work ethic, and moved it into cooking. And I still feel like I've never looked back from that. - What drew you to cooking specifically? What made you want to get into that? - Well, I knew how to pickle and preserve and cure, and I knew how to cook from my grandmother stuff. Like, well, this is something I should be doing. And I like the energy of that rush. - Well, that yeah, I gather that once you started getting into professional kitchens, you were drawn by the organized chaos of it. - Yeah, and it was also a world that was very much driven by immigrants. And I just liked that environment, and that chaotic environment is something that you either run away from or run towards. Being in a kitchen, it's like being in a punk band or being in a soccer pitch, where you do this to get us against them, whatever them are, right? And then when you finish, it's like, wow, we did that. And that I loved that word. And age raised, none of that stuff mattered. It was just like you just did it. But I mean, it's also like, I mean, restaurant kitchens are, especially at higher end restaurants, and especially 20 to 30 years ago, can be incredibly intense places. I mean, you talk about like, you often would throw up before a shift, because it was so intense. - I went to Switzerland. I got a scholarship to go to Switzerland. And we started with, I was a commie, which is the lowest, and there's 60 commie in the beginning of the summer. And the great choice of the chef is to narrow it down to 20 by the end of the summer. So it's a very high chance to get fired. You can get fired for anything. You can get fired because your jacket is wrinkled. You can get fired because, you know, your knives are not polished, whatever. It could be anything. It was lined up every day. You constantly nervous. And for me, it's like I had going to the throwing up, changing my apron, running back to the kitchen, I had that down to like seven minutes. If I did it in seven minutes, no one would notice. Only, you know, the other commie would notice, when we covered for each other. But the day I got caught was, they changed the system and went from opening the door to the bathroom to a swipe card, modern times, right? That damn swipe card didn't work in the beginning. So I ended up throwing up on the door. And my chef of all people, the big boss, walks in. And it's like throw up on the floor and the handle and it's me and it's not, it's a nasty scene. And all he does this, like this, he walks over me. And he says, "Gothanabe and Mr. Samelson." And that's all he says, "Good evening, Mr. Samelson." So you're lying on the floor covered in your own puke and he just like steps over you and he's like, "Hey, Gothanabe, chef." OK, I was like, you know, it was just bad, right? Sounds like, OK, I'm going to get fired, I'm going to get fired. Like he never mentioned the incident. I worked there for three years, two and a half years. We talked on my last day, we had a real conversation, right? And it happened because it was a tragedy, there was a death that happened. And he felt really bad. And he agreed that it's better that I would leave, right? Like you should, you're done, you're done everything, you should go home. And he promoted me every six months. But we didn't really talk. It was just like, he screamed like, "Mr. Samelson!" I'm like, fuck, what's going to happen? It's like, you should work in this station now, OK, that's it. You talked about a death in the family. I know that in 1993, your grandmother, Helga passed away. And I know you missed the funeral, as I understand it. And then I want to ask you to read another excerpt from your book. On August 11, 1998, my father, Leonard Samelson, passed away. In her home in Gothenburg, I was at work in New York. He's been struggling with the aftermath of a stroke. But then he took a sudden turn and was gone. I couldn't leave the state to go to his funeral, without jeopardizing my immigration status. My mother said she understood. My sisters both said they understood. But honestly, it would take me years to say that I understood the choices that I made. All I know is that I did what, by now, came natural. I crammed my grief and fear into a little box and closed it up until I was ready to deal. There was no time, I told myself, to make a meal out of this mystery. Nothing could get in the way I'm my cooking. What are you thinking about now reading that passage? Well, I think that we'll get lost in this conversation, in this moment, is that we don't humanize people. And being an immigrant, coming to a place is a human experience. It's years of aspiration, of trials and errors. But there's human decisions that affect families. It has massive impact on families. And also when you come as an immigrant, in my case, you're alone. And it's very personal. It's very, very personal that I know that-- if you ask me 10 times, maybe six times, I think I did the right decision. And four times, I did the wrong decision, you know? [MUSIC PLAYING] Coming up, Marcus tells us about a new dish he's working on that I think gives a rare window into the mind of a chef. Plus, he responds to criticism of his flagship Harlem restaurant. Stick around. [MUSIC PLAYING] [PHONE RINGING] It's time to open up a can of advertisements. [MUSIC PLAYING] Welcome back to The Sporkful. I'm Dan Pashman. And we have live shows on Little Island in Manhattan coming up. This show is going to be entitled The Great Yogurt Feud. We're going to dig into Bulgarian yogurt exploring the surprising story of how a yogurt-obsessed nation lost out to its Greek neighbors and their ubiquitous style. The show will include interviews, free samples, a Bulgarian women's choir, and fro you over sale from our friends at Culture. These are free shows. No tickets required. Comes sit on the grass with a view of the water and enjoy. August 28th through 30th, as a Friday through Sunday, 5 p.m. shows, same show every evening. So come on down to Little Island. [email protected]/live. Thanks. Now let's get back to my conversation with Chef Marcus Samuelson taped live on stage at the Museum of the City of New York. Earlier, we heard Marcus talk about feeling like he wasn't fully accepted as Swedish because he's black. And we heard him talk about the lonely, deeply personal experience of coming to America as an immigrant. These ideas were still on my mind as we continued talking. [APPLAUSE] So many times in your life, you felt like you didn't quite belong. How do you think that this feeling has influenced your cooking? Well, I can tell you that I've been an immigrant six times, so I'm comfortable of not being comfortable, right? And so the place I go to when I have that emotion is through food. I look at the fact that I've traveled and experienced and seen rituals and tasted food from all over the world. I bring that in. From last night, I've been thinking about this roasted carrot dish that I want to smoke the carrots and rub them in, fermented butter with berber and roast them, and then shave them, and then maybe put some cucumber right next to it, and serve it with this cured hamachi or really nice fatty jettoro or todo. And then I know how to build this roasted vinegarette that I want to build. Through you simmer the mustard seeds, then you add in pickle lemons and olive oil, and a little bit of soy. And then you just do your chicharrons through fried chicken skin and you crumble that on top. And then you do fresh-- you just have really nice, beautiful fresh herbs on top of that, right? That's that's so good. Yeah, where and when is this happening? So since last night, I've been thinking about do I salt the cucumber? Do I cut them in the stripe this way? So that doesn't have a race. That doesn't have a nationality. That has excellence and deliciousness. So everything else is noise to me. And I know, and I'm going to tell you this has been very honest. My son's birthday is coming up on Friday. And I'm there, right? I'm there. We're getting ready for it. But I'm really there. I'm really here with-- In your head. Like cucumbers should have been salted. What's all should it be? And my wife is like, did you get the tables? Did the cake done? And I'm super grateful for her doing that. And you're like cucumbers, cucumbers. How to cut the cucumbers? So it's all-- the one thing would be in the chef. For me at least is that I'm always missing my head. And I'm never alone, I'm extremely busy. So I want to bring it back to tracing your culinary career. You worked at a French restaurant in Switzerland. We talked a bit about this. One of the things that you write in your book is the better I got at my job, the less I liked it. You said, I longed to work in a kitchen where the chef's passions ruled. This restaurant held to the highest standards in the industry, but they worked from a playbook set in stone. French stone. Why was it so important to you to follow your own culinary path? Well, I think at that point, I figured out that somebody lied, right? What do you mean? Well, we were only measured by French food. The only food that was considered anything good was French. But it didn't make sense to me. At that point, I've been to Japan already. And although I couldn't find any Japanese cookbooks, but I really liked that food. And my roommates-- and we lived in a basically like a dorm-- and when we had a chance, we cooked for each other. And they were from all over the world. Singapore, Argentina, and when we cooked up our very simple dishes, I liked to sing a pouring dish. And then I went back and cooked French food. I was like, that's better. And she did it out of the dorm. But by that, you mean the thing your roommate was cooking? Yeah. And I'm just saying, oh, they're really lying. And that really start from the authorship of black excellence has always ripped out. You see the stolen or completely ripped out, right? And when you think about food, there's no difference, right? You know, like Fouagra was invented in Egypt. Most people don't know that. Really good coffee, French roast coffee, really good chocolate, Belgian chocolate. Where the hell in Brussels is the coca-bee? I'm looking. So the authorship of brilliance is constantly ripped, right? That's massive. Because that means that people don't aspire to go into that field. And also, because we were always the serving tribe, there's a stigma I'm coming out of domestic, right? That is pretty incredible fuel. So you arrive in New York, and you eventually get a job cooking at Aquavit, which is a Swedish restaurant. After a long and successful run at Aquavit, you decide you're ready to open your own restaurant, your first restaurant, and you decide to plant your flag on 125th Street. Why Harlem? You know, post 9/11 when they really shook all of us, right, in different ways. You can't be selfish to think about fine dining on all of those things, but yet that was my craft. What's going to happen? And I had the luxury of being an immigrant, but not being a refugee. So I had a choice. I could go back to Sweden, very cushy. I could go back to Europe. So we started to ask myself these questions. You're in New York. Why are you here? Do you want to stay? And I realized I'm home. And this was my calling to dig deeper. So I moved to Harlem. But and constantly when I moved up there, people said to me, you're going to open a restaurant. And I knew I wanted to open a restaurant, but I felt embarrassed that I didn't know enough. And-- Didn't know enough about Harlem? Didn't know enough about Harlem to be able to-- it's early as I became an ambassador for Sweden. I said, young chef. If I want to do it again, I knew that I have to speak from a large microphone. And between 2003 and 2010, I was really a student of Harlem. If you do it by meeting your neighbors and engaging and being curious, coming up Marcus explains how he developed his beloved fried chicken recipe. That's after the break, stick around. Hope you're hungry, because it's time for some ads. Welcome back. Let's return out of my conversation with chef Marcus Sam Wilson. I want to make this drum beat about a fried chicken. But guess what, I didn't go up with fried chicken. So I have no reference point to this dish. So how does it go about crafting? Because you say in our Harlem, in Harlem restaurants, I mean, that's the dish that a restaurant's going to be judged by. And so if I'm opening in Harlem, I got to have it. But you weren't going to go the traditional route. Well, I knew that I had to have the dish and I better do it well. But I also knew if I get judged by that, we're going to sneak in all these other food that shows that black taste is not monolithic. I would never think a Polish person and a Portuguese person have the same food culture. They're both from Europe, and the country's both starts with P. That does not mean. But in black cultures, like, oh, you're from Ghana. And you're Jamaican and you're black via Brazil. Well, you should all like fried chicken, like what kind of-- and maybe we do, maybe we share some of that, maybe, maybe not. But I knew I wanted to have it and understand it. And eating at people's homes, eating at restaurants, eating at encounters, eating at MGs, just eating a lot of fried chicken. For folks who haven't had it, give me the quick rundown of the recipe that you settled on after months of research. We started with the fundamentals of that. We make a mix between buttermilk and coconut milk, and where we have, mm-hmm, spice. And then we add that in. And then we heat up the oil. And we put rosemary and garlic in there. Then we lift that out. And that's a key step. And then you take dark meat, bone in, skin on. You dip it in a flour mix. And then you fry it on low heat, lift it out. Let it rest, increase the heat, fry it again. So it gets crispy, take it out. Then you toss it with hot honey and a little more, mm-hmm, spice. [LAUGHTER] And for me, it's rhythmic. You know, in Spanish there's a world called Motuna, which means African rhythm. And for me, it's very rhythmic. All the food at Rooster is of African culture, but it's for us. You talked about needing an education to become an ambassador of Harlem in the same-- Well, I'm not a ambassador. There's real ambassadors. Like, I-- So let me ask you, no, no, no, no. I can now never say that I'm a ambassador. I take the privilege of being part, being accepted in the community. I don't take that lightly. And I know at Red Rooster, there's a lot of sort of Harlem iconography and references to the history of the neighborhood. And you've also opened Red Rooster Shortditch in London. Shortditch is a neighborhood in London that has been the site of a lot of gentrification. In fact, in London, they've nicknamed it Shortditch ification. That's the sort of shorthand for gentrification. And I want to get your take. The New York Times did a piece on it and said, since adopting Harlem as his home and choosing it to hone his skills as a showman restaurateur, Mr. Sam Wilson has masterfully straddled a fine line between gentrification, appropriation, and appropriation, which means approval. I had to look it up. And the phrase that this writer used was that they felt the representation of Harlem. There was Harlem light. I'm curious to get your take on that. London has always been a city grown up in Sweden that you aspire to. And as much as the African-American tribe did in America, the African and the Caribbean Blacks in London did enormous amount for Black diaspora in Europe, from music, from style. That was the place where you could find other. So I always will do more at Rooster, but it will always be committed into communities or Black culture has always had a natural say. And shortage was also where the drum and bass culture was in London, and where DJs and music and storytellers and graffiti was the home for graffiti in London. I know the choices we did, and I know why. People have never seen this, right? Bring in Harlem in terms of food out there to the world. You know what happens? Black excellence is told in a most delicious way. And you have to do it with a lot of humility, a lot of hard work, I think, and a lot of arrogance. [LAUGHTER] He has restaurants all over the world, including a new one at the Four Seasons Montreal. And of course, just down the block in Harlem, Red Rooster, you can find all the restaurants at MarcusSamuelson.com. This new audio cookbook on Audible is called Our Harlem. Check it out. Big hand. and please for Marcus Samuelson. (audience applauding) Thank you very much. And a big hand for all of you. Thank you so much for coming. Thank you very much for coming. Good night. Thank you. Special thanks to the Museum of the City of New York. If you live in the area or if you're just coming to town, it is definitely worth a visit. They have incredible exhibits about the history and culture of New York. So much going on there, check it out. This show is produced by me, along with Senior Producer and Sandy. And Associate Producer. Our engineer is Jared O'Connell. Music help from Black Label Music. Our editor is Peter Clowny. The sportful as a production of Stitcher, our executive producers are Daisy Rosario and Chris Bannon. Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman. And I'm Noanie from New York City, reminding you to eat more, eat better, and eat more better. (upbeat music) Huh? This reheat was produced by Gianna Palmer. The team that produces the sportful today includes me, along with Managing Producer Emma Morgan Stern and Senior Producer Andreas O'Hara. Our engineer is Jared O'Connell. The sportful as a production of Sirius XM podcasts are executive producers Camille Stanley. And hey, did you know you can listen to the sportful and the Sirius XM app? Yes, the Sirius XM app it has all your favorite podcasts plus over 200 ad free music channels curated by genre and era. Plus live sports covers. Your podcasting app have that. And there's interviews with A-list stars and so much more. It's everything you want in a podcast app and music app all rolled into one. And right now, Sportful listeners can get three months free of the Sirius XM app by going to SiriusXM.com/Sportful. (upbeat music)