For hundreds of years there have been black cooks in America. Now there also are black chefs.
In the last few years more blacks have achieved prominence and recognition as professionals in fine restaurants, diversifying a field that was almost exclusively white, male and, in the most prestigious restaurants, European.
Few blacks sought admission to the top cooking schools, which funnel graduates into the best restaurants.
“There was a tendency to look down on being in the kitchen because that’s where we were relegated for so many years,” said Doreen Thompson, a food-loving lawyer in Washington, D.C., who founded the African-American Chefs and Cookbook Authors Association last year. “Now it’s being seen as an economically viable profession, and it’s percolating up.”
Historically, young blacks have not been able to look around and see many inspiring role models. That is changing, too, as blacks, like members of other minority groups and women, gradually move into jobs that are more visible and more powerful.
Thompson’s group is one of several new non-profit organizations that support blacks in the food field through education, financial aid and publicity, and not just during February, Black History Month.
Significantly, black head chefs in fine restaurants, such as Steve Simmons of One Market, in San Francisco; Patrick Clark of the Hay-Adams Hotel, in Washington; Walter Hinds of Lolabelle, in Manhattan, and Jacqueline Cholmondeley of Livanos, in White Plains, N.Y., generally have found restaurant kitchens to be colorblind.
“When you’re in the kitchen trying to turn out the food, there is no time for attitudes,” said Simmons, the chef at One Market, a new restaurant. “In this kitchen we’re chefs and cooks first.”
A graduate of Bates College who has been in the food business for 12 years, Simmons started as a busboy in San Francisco, eventually attending the restaurant program at City College there.
This generation of chefs also is turning out food that tends to be colorblind. Prominent black chefs are cooking the way their white counterparts are cooking: contemporary American, with French, Italian, Asian and Caribbean influences.
While a great number of black cooks still prepare soul food and barbecue, maintaining a culinary tradition for which blacks long have been celebrated, that kind of food does not lead to executive chef positions in top hotels and restaurants. Nor does it lead to the kind of acclaim that is showered on chefs such as Clark, the executive chef at the Hay-Adams, who regularly is invited to cook alongside Wolfgang Puck and Larry Forgione at benefit dinners.
As soon as he finds the necessary financial backing, Hinds, the executive chef at Lolabelle, plans to open his own restaurant, preferably in Manhattan. Hinds was born in Panama, where his father was a chef, grew up in Port Jefferson, N.Y., and attended Peter Kump’s New York Cooking School. His first job was in the kitchen of Safari Grill, a now-defunct Manhattan restaurant.
“There were many ethnic groups in that kitchen, so from the beginning, I haven’t had any problem with discrimination,” he said.
He calls his food, which features dishes such as pepper-seared tuna with stir-fried Asian greens, crisp rice noodles and a soy-tomato vinaigrette, contemporary American. Some of his food also reflects his heritage. He often serves a side dish of mashed plantain and puts dandelion greens in his roast garlic risotto.
“But I’ve gone way beyond any stereotype,” he said.
Lola Bell, who owns the restaurant in which he works, studied at the French Culinary Institute to avoid being stereotyped.
“Just because you’re black doesn’t mean you have to serve curried goat or black-eyed peas and smothered pork chops,” she said.
At One Market, Simmons’ specialties include a fried-onion salad with smoked salmon and chervil creme fraiche and a beef tenderloin with a red-wine reduction and bone-marrow sauce.
This new group of young black chefs is proving, often to skeptical parents and high school students alike, that becoming a chef or embarking on a career in the food service industry can lead to success and financial independence, not a return to the servitude of generations past.
Statistics compiled by the National Restaurant Association, a trade group in Washington, show that blacks, who represented 10 percent of the total work force in 1992, held a higher than average proportion of jobs in food preparation and service, 13 percent.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that in 1992, blacks held about 44,000, or 13 percent, of the 338,000 supervisory positions in food service and preparation. In 1983 they held about 25,000, or 10.5 percent, of 239,000 supervisory positions.
“Maybe we’ll start to bring a sense of the prestige you can have in this field,” said Simmons, who was among a group of black chefs honored in August at a benefit dinner held by the Sonoma County, Calif., chapter of 100 Black Men. This group, a national organization, is dedicated to promoting positive role models and raising money for scholarships.
“The jobs are not just in the kitchen,” Simmons said. “There are also careers in the front of the house, in management, but kids don’t know what the opportunities are.”
Cholmondeley, the executive chef at Livanos, a seafood restaurant, said: “We have to convince people that this is a creditable profession. They think of McDonald’s, and they’re not aware of the possibilities.”
A native of Guyana, Cholmondeley originally wanted to be a textile designer but became interested in food and decided to attend the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y. She helped organize a chapter of black alumni of the school, often considered the Harvard of professional cooking schools. The group hopes, among other things, to establish three full-tuition scholarships.
Jane Wallace, a director of the school who heads the enrollment committee, said blacks make up 4 percent of the student body. Over all, the minority enrollment, including Hispanics, Asians and American Indians, is 12 percent.
Industry observers also point out that high school guidance counselors need more information about opportunities in the food-service field.
“Many of them do not understand that home economics can lead to management positions,” said Michael Hurst, a restaurateur in Ft. Lauderdale and former president of the National Restaurant Association, who is advising guidance counselors in Florida.
Herman Cain, the first black president of the restaurant association, will take office next year. He also is the chief executive of the Godfather’s Pizza chain.
Bell, the owner of Lolabelle, who started working in restaurants to supplement her income as an actress, regularly talks with high school students.
“The restaurant business is wonderful because you can be a success without a college degree,” she said. “Where else can you start with nothing and wind up owning a business?”
Bell also has started an apprenticeship program in her kitchen, a step not without its disheartening aspects. One apprentice, she said, wound up selling drugs in the kitchen.
“That was the downside,” she said. “But then when I saw the progress made by one young man who could not look you in the eye at first, I knew it’s worthwhile.”
Many successful black chefs come from close-knit families. Where the family structure is fragile or nonexistent, mentors become even more essential.
Susy Davidson, the executive director of the new International Association of Women Chefs and Restaurateurs, said, “You have to have role models and actively network so you can help each other.”
Her group also plans to reach out to minority men because they face problems similar to those confronting women.
Black women long have been professional cooks, a vocational track that evolved from the days when they were domestic employees. Several have become successful, such as Sylvia Woods, the owner of Sylvia’s, a soul-food restaurant in Harlem, and Leah Chase, whose mother opened Dooky Chase, a Creole restaurant in New Orleans, in 1941.
If today’s chefs have broadened their culinary horizons, they have not abandoned tradition. Edna Lewis, for many years the chef at Cafe Nicholson, a restaurant serving Continental food in Manhattan, now is the executive chef at Gage & Tollner in Brooklyn and is serving some Southern specialties.
Joe C. Randall, who was an instructor at California State Polytechnic Institute and now is promoting black chefs through a cable television series called “Cookin’ With Soul,” also started a group called A Taste of Heritage Foundation to highlight black contributions to the American table and to raise money for scholarships.
Thompson, the founder of the new African-American chef-and-cookbook-author association, hopes that as blacks become increasingly powerful in the food field, the status of black cooking will rise.
“We need greater recognition of the African-American contribution to the American table,” Thompson said. “There are very few upscale restaurants serving African-American food, and we need to encourage them.”
