Marcus Samuelsson on the London Red Rooster, Obama and Brexit

Barack Obama loves his ribs, now chef Marcus Samuelsson is bringing sauce to London. He talks the politics of food with Samuel Fishwick
Going east: Ethiopian-born, Swedish-raised chef and restaurateur Marcus Samuelsson is opening Red Rooster in Shoreditch
Daniel Hambury

Marcus Samuelsson knows the secret to satisfying a President: short ribs, sweet potatoes, spicy beans and a playlist featuring Run DMC, Sting, Nas and Amy Winehouse. The 46-year-old Swedish-Ethiopian chef has cooked for Barack Obama “many times”, from the President’s first state dinner at the White House in 2009 to when Obama chose Samuelsson’s Harlem restaurant Red Rooster as the venue for a fundraiser in 2011.

“The thing to remember is he had a normal life until he was 42, and has fully realised both that this is a big moment for you and what that’s like,” says Samuelsson, who last week opened a second Red Rooster at The Curtain Hotel in Shoreditch (Obama couldn’t make the opening but De La Soul played).

“So he just clicks and starts talking about basketball or whatever, like he’s a regular guy. I wasn’t prepared for that the first time I met him.”

Samuelsson and Obama have more in common than most chef-US President combinations can boast: like Obama, Samuelsson was raised in a mixed-race family, having lived in Ethiopia until he was two. “My father was a poor farmer. My mum, my sister and I had tuberculosis — Mum didn’t survive but we did. A Swedish couple adopted me and my sister.”

‘Obama just talks about basketball like a regular guy. I wasn’t prepared for that the first time I met him’

It’s been a peripatetic journey. Samuelsson and his sister Linda were brought up in Gothenburg alongside their adoptive sister Ann, by “loving, stable” parents Ann Marie and Lennart Samuelsson, who were white but “gave us an idea of identity of black culture through music. My father always played Fela Kuti and gave me James Baldwin books to read while my mum played Bob Marley. I learned English through listening to Stevie Wonder LPs at school.”

French and Swedish influences dominated his early cooking: having moved to New York, he became the youngest chef to receive a three-star rating from The New York Times while he was cooking for the Scandinavian restaurant Aquavit in Manhattan in 1995. “I didn’t fully realise my African side until I was 25. That’s when I moved to Harlem and started to eat African-American food on a weekly basis: the sweet potatoes, the rice, the okra,” he says.

Obama, he says, is someone he can relate to. “The priority for him is safety. As a black male I know what that means. Race is this thing that defines many situations — we all think, especially when we’ve lived in urban cities, that we’ve moved on but it’s defining the US and Europe at this very moment.”

The bird is the word: left, Samuelsson with Michelle Obama at the Easter Egg Roll in 2012
Rex

When Samuelsson first picked London as the site for the second Red Rooster, Brexit wasn’t even on the menu. Now it looms large. “People are being left behind,” he says. “Brexit by itself is very sad because it’s going against voting for young people. It’s very rare to have an election where it’s not for the next generation. The world is not going to get less diverse, it’s going to get more so.”

Still, he’s excited about his new adventure, which he likens to “going to war” (he’s wearing an appropriate uniform of a khaki jacket and trousers, and a Jimi Hendrix T-shirt). He gets “20 requests a year to open a new Red Rooster” — so why Shoreditch? Like Harlem, it’s a community “in transition; in both places there are storytellers and associations with food”.

He remembers coming to London when he was seven or eight, watching Arsenal at Highbury, going to Borough Market and saving up to go to Marco Pierre White’s Mirabelle in a borrowed suit and a borrowed jacket — he made pocket money fishing in Gothenburg and selling his catch to tourists. “As a teenager you’re looking at Marco — he has long hair and smokes, every chef relates to that, right?”

Samuelsson has a 22-year-old daughter, Zoe, from an earlier relationship, and a 10-month-old son, Zion, with his current wife, Maya Haile. “That smile,” he says of his son. “It doesn’t matter how tired you are, he doesn’t give a s***, he’s just like: ‘Pick me up’.” Maya and his sister helped him reconnect with his birth father while he was in his twenties. “One of the most amazing days of my life was when I got married and my birth father and my adoptive mother met for the first time.”

Samuelsson is in London a lot now, staying at the Ace or Hoxton Hotels or his apartment around the corner from Red Rooster. “You want to smell the area, not just see it from the cab on your way in from Heathrow,” he says. He employs 165 people in Harlem and wants to create a similar “cooking community” here.

Good for the soul: chicken and waffles at Red Rooster

He won’t be rolling out the welcome mat for Donald Trump any time soon, though. “He’s not going to come to us, so it’s OK. I don’t even know what he eats.” I’ve heard he’s a two scoops of ice cream and Diet Coke kind of guy. “Good luck with that. How do you cook for that? You don’t. You opt out.”

Samuelsson often thinks about his remarkable turn of fortune, from a small, red-bricked hut in Ethiopia to going to the White House. But luck is only a part of it. “When you’re an immigrant you don’t take anything for granted — you just go f*** it, let’s show our best, and go.”

Fired up, ready to go? That’s the only way to be in the kitchen.

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