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Chef Kwame Onwuachi’s brilliant and telling memoir “Notes from a Young Black Chef” is evidence of his being a storyteller. Beyond the page, the dishes he creates tell you his name and where he came from, about his family and their traditions. His food bridges diaspora by bringing together ingredients and dishes from his respective cultures and histories. 

I’m just telling you my story, really. [I’m telling you] my family’s history from West Africa, the Caribbean, the American South that really tells the story of how we were spread across the world. And I think it's important to tell that story … that’s why I opened Kith/Kin, to tell the story of my ancestors in a way that hasn’t been done before.

Kith/Kin, the Afro-Caribbean restaurant he opened in D.C.’s InterContinental Hotel in 2017, serving Afro-Caribbean cuisine, is the story of his familial roots in Louisiana, Jamaica, Trinidad, and Nigeria. Onwuachi left Kith/Kin in 2020, however, in pursuit of creating a restaurant he himself owns. “Something that profits off of Black and brown dollars,” he says, “should be Black-owned.” 

Onwuachi is devoted to both the art of preparing a dish and the practice of investing time and resources in his community, working to mentor young chefs, support mentorship programs and institutions, and to ensure “kids don’t go hungry.” In all that he does, he is always intent to pay homage to those who came before him. “I borrow from [family] all the time, so I want to make sure that I’m honoring them and making sure that they also are enjoying the fruits of my labor, because without them, I wouldn’t be here.”

Onwuachi’s roots go deep. Before there was Kith/Kin, there was Shaw Bijou, which served a 13-course tasting menu. Before there was Shaw Bijou, there was season 13 of Top Chef, on which he was a contestant. Before any of these accomplishments, before fame and before he was a chef at all, Onwuachi was a child in his mother’s kitchen in the Bronx, NY, watching her create dishes for her catering company and tasting the food of her culture–food he would one day recreate himself. “I didn't know what the trinity was—the onion, celery, and pepper that form the base of so much Creole food—but I could taste the trinity in it,” Onwuachi shares in his article “In Her Footsteps: Louisiana and Texas,” a part of his three-part video series, Tasting Home. “Today, they still mean one thing to me: home.”