Mr. Onwuachi, the first thing that struck me when I entered your restaurant, Tatiana, was the music: hip hop and R&B. It made me feel really relaxed, like I was going to a friend’s house for dinner.
You hit the nail right on the head, that’s exactly how it’s supposed to feel. It's supposed to feel like you're home! For me, music is so important in the experience of dining, because even if the food is good, if the music isn't good and the dining room isn't electric, then that means the meal was just okay. I wanted to pair my cuisine with the music of my cuisine, the music of the black experience. I wanted to tap into my childhood, a little bit of that nineties hip hop and R&B. Hip hop was big for me because I grew up in New York, you know, music was my escape as a child. So I wanted to represent that, and I wanted it to be bumping and vibrant in that dining room.
Tatiana is located in Lincoln Center, nestled between the Metropolitan Opera House, and David H. Koch Theater. Did you ever feel the need to conform to a more classic or traditional fine dining ambiance?
Never. I think that's what makes Tatiana special. It’s authentic. Patrons come in and they hear the music, they see chopped cheese and curried goat patties on the menu, they feel like they’re home. They don’t have to feel the hubris of traditional fine dining, the stuffiness of it. It’s not uncommon to see somebody in a du-rag next to someone in a tuxedo. That’s always resonated with me. And Lincoln Center has always been really supportive of that.
“There’s so many dishes that have remnants of the past in them. And I just think it’s beautiful when you think about food that way.”
Apparently when you first pitched the idea for Tatiana to Lincoln Center, you said you wanted to make a restaurant that represented old New York. And they replied, “Like the Ritz Carlton or The Four Seasons?”
(Laughs) Yeah, my idea of old New York is different. I want to highlight the people that built this city, I wanted to showcase these immigrant stories that are often overlooked. I think in the food community, we know that so well, but it’s less known in a secular area like the Upper West Side. Before Lincoln Center was there, this area was called San Juan Hill, it was a vibrant Afro Caribbean neighborhood, and I felt it was just important to make that statement with the food we serve. It could have been easy to do something that was just Americana, but I wanted to tell the story of a restaurant that would have been here regardless if Lincoln Center was there or not.
Why is it so important for you to tell those stories?
So that those stories don't get lost! I want to keep these stories alive, because I think that's where the true magic happens. There’s a group of people that were displaced from this place, and the ingredients come through that rather than through me. I’m not just coming up with a dish based on my own ego. A lot of food is way more connected than it is separate. American gumbo has its roots in an okra soup from Nigeria and West Africa. Jambalaya is derived from the African jollof rice. At Tatiana, we’ve got a pastrami suya on the menu, which is a nod to the Nigerian beef dish. There's so many dishes that have remnants of the past in them. And I just think it's beautiful when you think about food that way, it’s through these dishes that we see the history of what was happening when that dish was created. It's about continuing to share stories and never letting people forget those cultures.
It’s also a really poignant representation of your own personal history: we see everything from your Nigerian roots to your upbringing in New York shown on a plate.
I go back to my roots because it's such a familiar thing! I think we're more inclined to cook foods that are indicative of our roots, or things that we like grew up eating, and to highlight where we came from. I have a nutcracker cocktail on the menu because I grew up drinking nutcrackers in the Bronx. Growing up we were given a dollar a day as allowance, so you’d have to stretch that for the day! I would go to the bodega and mix and match my deal. On the menu at Tatiana, I’ve got a cosmic brownie just like you’d get at the bodega, but we turned the powdered donuts into ice cream. We have a chopped cheese sandwich, another thing we grew up eating, but it’s made with dry aged beef and taleggio and black truffle. We make our own Kaiser roll. So pulling from those memories, it just helps to tell a story with the food. If a dish tells a story, it has a soul — you're not just cooking for perfect seasoning. That is a prerequisite.
The New Yorker recently called that “cuisine of the self” in an article they wrote about you. Is that authenticity a challenge for you?
I gravitate towards being authentic. It makes me feel more at ease. It’s harder for me to be fake, than it is for me to be authentic. Is it a battle? Yes, but nothing that is great is easy. So it's all part of it! That said, I do also think every chef is making cuisine of the self, whether they want to admit it or not, because it's always their interpretation. Cooking is self-expression, right? Even when I was younger, I think I understood that. As you get comfortable, you start to get a little more authentic, you stop regurgitating things and you take your own risks. I think I started having that self-expression when I started my catering company at 18… I was expressing myself, maybe a little bit more than I should have been in the early stages! (Laughs)
What makes you say that? You think you had too much confidence?
Well, I think I should have still been learning, and then those things would have caught up. I think my confidence met my skill later, probably around 24 or 25.
That’s around the time when you opened your first restaurant, Shaw Bijou, in Washington, right?
Around then, yeah. I just felt like I wanted to do things on my own! That was maybe even to a fault, but I enjoyed learning as I went. I wanted to bring my vision to life, so yeah, I did open my own space called Shaw Bijou. But there was a lot of frustrations involved… There was a lack of transparency from the ownership team and a lack of financial literacy, to be quite frank, in the restaurant industry. But there was also a bit of racist judgment from the chef community, like how dare I, as a young Black chef, open a restaurant at such a young age? People thought I hadn’t paid my dues. But I got this opportunity, so why would I say no? We only have one life to live, and I’m not going to live based on anybody’s rules or let anyone tell me when I’m ready. I put my blood, sweat, and tears into that restaurant, and I felt we deserved to be there just like everyone else.
How do you know that you’re ready when you’ve been part of a system for so long that tells you you’re not ready, that you have to keep paying your dues?
For me, I just take it one day at a time, and if an opportunity is presented to me, and I know it’s for me, I need to make it happen. I prepare as much as possible. I just think when you feel ready, that’s when it’s time and no one can tell you otherwise. Of course, you need to be realistic, but I mean, immigrants come over to this country and open up restaurants all the time without any restaurant experience. They're just cooking food from where they came from, trying to make a buck, and they’re successful. They're not trying to be famous. I think we can all do that. We can all have that same gumption.