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Effortless Luxury: Life Designed Around You: Culture

Marcus Samuelsson Dishes up the World

By Mary Alice Kellogg for Effortless Luxury: Life Designed Around You

In his latest flagship restaurant in New York City, Red Rooster Harlem, Chef Marcus Samuelsson serves up his own definition of soul food. Alongside crab cakes and blackened catfish with black-eyed peas, Swedish-inspired creations like Helga’s Meatballs With Pickled Cucumbers and Lingonberries make an appearance on the menu.

“My job is to globalize my cooking,” said Samuelsson in an interview that appeared on StarChefs.com. “The types of food people know are French, Japanese, Chinese, maybe Indian, and Mexican … People will never ever say, ‘Today I want to eat strictly Swedish.’” With Samuelsson’s cooking on the radar, this perception is changing fast.

Samuelsson’s Global Vision
At Aquavit New York, Samuelsson raised people’s awareness of Scandinavian fare beyond smorgasbord -- and gained an international culinary reputation for it. No matter where Samuelsson goes, Sweden is close to his heart. Born in Ethiopia and orphaned at age 3, Samuelsson was adopted by a Swedish couple and raised in Gothenburg, where -- no surprise for a kid growing up in Sweden’s culinary heart -- he developed an appreciation for the region’s fresh fish, seafood and game.

Those ingredients remain the building blocks of his menus, as do traditional Swedish food prep techniques, such as pickling, curing and smoking. Using these elements of Nordic cuisine, the Swedish-raised chef blends texture, flavor and aesthetic. The result is a unique intersection of culturally disparate inspirations.

To this attest many of his other buzzworthy projects: His James Beard Foundation Award-winning cookbook The Soul of a New Cuisine features a unique exploration of Ethiopian cuisine. The regional comfort food of the U.S. is the subject of his most recent cookbook, New American Table (and the inspiration for the menu at his flagship Red Rooster Harlem restaurant). And since 2009, he has been opening multiethnic Street Food fast-food restaurants in Sweden.

Samuelsson’s Global Giving
Samuelsson’s global aesthetic extends to giving back to others too. On the second season of Bravo TV’s “Top Chef Masters,” he competed and won on behalf of the UNICEF Tap Project, which supplies clean drinking water to communities in developing nations. He participated in the 2011 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and he frequently lends his clout to local and international food and nutrition projects.

Through his new Food Republic website project, he’s campaigning to raise awareness and relief funds for famine-stricken Somalia, Kenya, Djibouti and Ethiopia. This international outreach comes naturally to Samuelsson, whose cuisine is rooted in a multicultural worldview.

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Photo: Getty Images

Mary Alice Kellogg is the managing editor of Effortless Luxury. A winner of the Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Award, she has written and edited for many national magazines and websites, including Town & Country, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Condé Nast Traveler and Travel + Leisure.

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