Chefs

Tribune Asks, Where Are the Black Chefs?

The most prominent black chef in Chicago is Swedish: Marcus Samuelsson.
The most prominent black chef in Chicago is Swedish: Marcus Samuelsson.

Christopher Borrelli and Phil Vettel have a couple of pieces at the Tribune today that are worth some thought. The question is, where are the black chefs? It’s not that there aren’t plenty of black-owned food businesses in town, but they’re cafes and soul food restaurants and, most recently, turkey-based healthier fast food chains, not Michelin star joints. And it’s not that there aren’t plenty of black graduates of the culinary schools— Washburne’s student body is primarily black, Kendall is about 20% black. So where are the head chefs? (We’ve asked ourselves the same question while producing the Key Ingredient chef challenge series for the Reader; early on, we got a lot of comments asking where the women chefs were, and we ultimately have had a decent number of them, but our next African-American chef will be our first.) Borrelli finds no particular reason to see outright racism, but it’s clear that whatever the customary social path is to top restaurants, blacks aren’t on it— one clue is a throwaway mention that Washburne doesn’t even have a placement office.

One place we have tended to observe African-Americans working in kitchens is in the hotel side of the business. We suspect that there is a general push in the African-American community from parents and relatives to encourage the kid who makes it through a professional training program to take the most secure job offered; hotel restaurants in general offer more job security and benefits than the peripatetic world of restaurants. (We observed something similar in advertising, where big clients wanted to see blacks on their account, but they barely existed; only middle class white kids with lots of family resources tended to go into a profession known for constant layoffs and job hopping.) And to judge by the statistics, blacks don’t do that badly as heads of food businesses, but we suspect the bald number (about 9%, versus about 13% of US population) hides the fact that they’re concentrated at the lower end. But we’re curious to hear others’ similarly anecdotal explanations; why do you think top-level black chefs are so rare?

Where are the black chefs? [Tribune]

What chefs around the nation say [Tribune]

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Tribune Asks, Where Are the Black Chefs?