Marcus Samuelsson has had a hell of a life. Born in Ethiopia, he was adopted at the age of three and moved to Sweden, before travelling the world as a chef working in high-end restaurants and falling in love with the kitchens of France. He then headed up the kitchen when he was just twenty-four at Aquavit in New York during the 1990s, receiving rave reviews and becoming a nationally renowned cook. TV shows and books soon followed, and he was invited to cook the first state dinner for Barack Obama at The White House in 2009. That’s already more than most chefs can even hope to achieve in their lifetimes.
However, it was Marcus’ own restaurant Red Rooster, which opened in Harlem in 2010, that cemented his status as one of the world’s great culinary minds. At first it sounds like a bit of an odd mix – American soul food with a few Ethiopian and Swedish twists thrown in, plus plenty of nods to the cuisine of the local area – but the rave reviews proved it was a winning formula. Buoyed by its success, Marcus decided to open a second Red Rooster in 2016; not in another part of the US, but in Shoreditch, east London. So why did he decide to venture into the UK restaurant scene rather than expand the Red Rooster name in its native home?
‘Growing up in Sweden meant I always saw London as a really inspirational city,’ he tells me as we sit down in the dining room of Red Rooster Shoreditch. ‘I’d go to west London with my parents as a kid, but when I started visiting east London I completely fell in love with it. As someone who loves music and graffiti and street food culture, it really appealed to me. Shoreditch reminds me of Brooklyn and Harlem a lot, but it has its own identity too, thanks to factors like the Jewish and Bangladeshi communities. It’s multicultural in a way only a big city can be – and I love it.’