How Kwame Onwuachi Proved to Himself That He Is Enough

Kwame Onwuachi isn’t comfortable being still. Even during the COVID-19 pandemic, he refused to take a break.

“I remember talking to a friend, and I was like, ‘The earth is really still right now, so if you don’t continue working, when it does continue rotating, metaphorically, you’re going to just be doing the same thing you were doing [when it was still],’” says Onwuachi. “‘But if you’re actively working on something, when the world is back on its axis spinning, you’re ready to go. You have projects lined up.’ So that’s what I did.”

When the pandemic forced him to shutter Kith/Kin (the Afro Caribbean restaurant in Washington, D.C., that catapulted him into success), Onwuachi stayed in motion. He moved to Los Angeles and cultivated his other passions. He was a regular judge on Top Chef season 18; wrote his second book, My America; and joined Food & Wine as an executive producer, collaborating on events like the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen and producing a column and video series called Tasting Home.

So when the world started spinning again, Onwuachi was ready and more confident than ever. “I had proven to myself that I was enough,” he says. “I was very adamant about my wants, needs, and desires.” In 2022, he opened Tatiana by Kwame Onwuachi in New York City’s Lincoln Center, which rocketed to the top of The New York Times’ 100 Best Restaurants list almost overnight.

Onwuachi was already an excellent storyteller, as proved by his personal menu at Kith/Kin and his groundbreaking memoir, Notes from a Young Black Chef, but that period of cultivating creativity taught him how to be more succinct at Tatiana. On the surface, the restaurant concept seems fairly straightforward — it’s named after his sister and inspired by the food he grew up eating in the South Bronx. But the menu also contains references to San Juan Hill, a large Afro Caribbean community in the Upper West Side that was pushed out during the construction of Lincoln Center, through dishes like hamachi escovitch crudo and curried goat patties. “But we’re not telling people that when we hand out the menu,” says Onwuachi. “They get to know that over time, after we gain their trust … At the end of the day, people just want to eat. After you win people over with good food, they’ll sit and listen to your story, instead of the other way around.”

That same nuanced style of storytelling is in play at Onwuachi’s newest restaurant, Dōgon, which is projected to open in late summer at the Salamander hotel in Washington, D.C. “[At Dōgon] I want to dive into the history of how D.C. came to be,” Onwuachi says.

That history starts with the name of the restaurant. “Pierre Charles L’Enfant was commissioned by George Washington to create the city of D.C., and he wanted it to be modeled after famous European cities. And when they needed somebody to draw the borders, they hired Benjamin Banneker, who was a son of a freed man,” Onwuachi explains. “You can only imagine, if they hired a Black man back then, he must have been really good at his job! So how the hell did this guy know how to draw the borders? He did it from reading the stars. I found out he was a descendant of the Dogon tribe, a Malian tribe of astronomers and scientists who used the stars to map and predict things. So D.C. wouldn’t have its borders without West Africa.”

It’s a complex and important story, and one that takes shape through the food. The dishes at Dōgon give context to its backstory while also incorporating themes that have followed Onwuachi through his career. Take the crab in shito chile crunch with plantain cakes and aji verde sauce: “That dish alone has influences from El Salvador and Peru,” Onwuachi says. “They have a huge influence in D.C., as well as Ghana, with the shito chile crunch. So you’ll see a lot of different things meeting on a plate, but if you peel back the layers, the origin is Africa.”

Just because Onwuachi is back in the restaurant industry doesn’t mean he has cut off his other creative outlets. In fact, he has more going on than ever: He’s working on a new line of flavored sparkling water called Miri and his second cookbook, and, for the fourth year, he is producing The Family Reunion food festival in collaboration with Sheila Johnson, the cofounder of BET and CEO of Salamander Hotels and Resorts. No matter what project he’s working on, you can trust that Onwuachi will approach it with intentionality, a message, and a purpose — just like all great storytellers do.