The character arc of Kwame Onwuachi

Who is Kwame Onwuachi?

The investor shut it in January. He opened four more.

His mother, of Louisiana Creole heritage, is a chef who ran a catering company out of the house. His father is Nigerian and came to the United States in the 1950s. He was born on Long Island and grew up mostly in the Bronx. At ten his mother sent him to live with his grandfather in Nigeria for two years, so he could learn respect. He helped raise livestock and grow vegetables there, and learned to use every ingredient and every part of an animal.

He was expelled from several schools for behaviour and eventually graduated from a public charter high school in the Bronx. He went to the University of Bridgeport and was expelled from there too, for dealing drugs. In 2010 he moved to Baton Rouge to live with his mother, and was hired to cook on a boat serving the crews cleaning up an oil spill in the Gulf. He went back to New York that November, waited tables at a well known restaurant and opened a catering service of his own.

In 2012 he enrolled at the Culinary Institute of America, and worked during culinary school. In 2015 he was a contestant on the thirteenth season of a national cooking competition and placed sixth. The following November he opened Shaw Bijou in a converted townhouse in Washington, one of the most expensive restaurants in the city. The reviews were mixed and critics questioned whether it was worth the price. He scaled back the menu and cut the prices. In January 2017 the primary investor closed it.

In late 2017 he opened Kith and Kin, serving Afro Caribbean food drawn from his family ties to Louisiana, Jamaica, Trinidad and Nigeria. In 2019 a national foundation named him Rising Star Chef of the Year, a magazine named him its chef of the year, and he published a memoir written with a collaborator. In July 2020 he resigned from Kith and Kin to open something of his own.

A cookbook followed in May 2022. In November of that year he opened Tatiana at Lincoln Center in New York, a fusion of Caribbean, African and American Southern flavours. In September 2024 he opened Dogon in Washington, and a newspaper named it one of the fifty best restaurants in the country the following year. In April 2026 he opened Maroon in Las Vegas. He has appeared as a guest judge on the competition he once placed sixth in, and was the subject of an episode of a documentary series about chefs.

The moments

Kwame Onwuachi's timeline.

What he wrote

Books by Kwame Onwuachi

• 2019

  Notes from a Young Black Chef: A Memoir

  Written with Joshua David Stein. The Bronx, Nigeria, the expulsions, the boat and Shaw Bijou, in his own account.

• 2022

  My America: Recipes from a Young Black Chef

  Written with Joshua David Stein. The cookbook that followed the memoir.

Kwame Onwuachi: frequently asked questions

What people ask about his line.

Sources

• Kwame Onwuachi, English Wikipedia biography.
• Notes from a Young Black Chef: A Memoir, by Kwame Onwuachi with Joshua David Stein, Knopf, 2019.
• The Washington Post reporting of 15 January 2017 on the closure of Shaw Bijou.
• James Beard Foundation award record, Rising Star Chef of the Year, 2019.
• No Wikiquote page exists for him, so no quotations are printed here.