View From Your Table
3 Responses to View From Your Table
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M_Young says:
So I visit the Red Rooster site and once again race rears it’s head. The place is an homage to black cuisine created by Marcus Samuelson. Now, Marcus Samuelson (who seems to be a really good guy) was an East African orphan, raised in Sweden by white parents and who learned to cook (initially from his Swedish grandmother. Yet on coming to the us and being highly successful, chooses to live around other black people in Haarlem, and in this case sort of appropriate American blacks foodways. In other words, race is clearly a real thing to him, even though culturally he really has no connection with blacks, and certainly not Afro-Americans.
The website is funny too — the ‘wide angle’ shot of the place shows a nearly SWPL crowd, with a few Asians and blacks dining (the staff and cooks seem all black). Granted there is a much larger sprinkling of blacks at the place, but nothing close to the neighborhood’s demographic, and maybe not even the 1/8 of the proportion of the US in general. The ‘tight shots’ do feature (almost exclusively) black costumers, including what appears to be three senior ‘church ladies’.
I’m not taking anything away from Samuelson — he’s creating jobs and hopefully training some local young folks in the ways of restauranteur-ing. But I do think it’s another exampl –particularly featuring black diners when it looks like most of the customers are non-black — of how the approved attitudes about race in the US don’t exactly match reality.
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Floridan says:
I’m a little late getting to this, but M_Young, you need to read Samuelsson’s autobiography, Yes Chef, to understand how he sees the connection to black America. You say “race is clearly a real thing to him” but in large part it is something that, throughout his life, was forced on him. Again, read the book.
I’ve been to Red Rooster and the dish shown is its take on bisquits and gravy. When we were there the people in the dining room were pretty much evenly divided between blacks and whites. Keep in mind, however, that Red Rooster is not a diner or fast food joint — most people, black, white or otherwise, probably won’t go based on price alone.
So that looks good, but what is it? If I had to guess I would say mofongo.