Changing the culinary landscape - career opportunities for African American gourmet chefs

American Visions, April-May, 1994 by Milford Prewitt

People have earned their freedom in many ways through the centuries, but few have relied on their cooking skills as a strategy to escape from bondage. Nevertheless, cooking was the route a slave named James Hemings took to win his liberty. Hemings might be an obscure personage in black history, but the trail he blazed two centuries ago has become a burgeoning career path for African-American gourmets around the country.

The first professional African-American chef, Hemings was born a slave in 1765 and was 9 years old when he was sold to Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of independence. While jefferson apparently lost no sleep struggling with the titanic contradiction of being a defender of human rights while owning humans, he grumbled mightily that he could not find meals at home as scrumptious as those he enjoyed in Paris during his diplomatic trips there.

Jefferson sent Hemings, his personal manservant, to France in 1784 for the "particular purpose" of learning classic French culinary technique, a four-year sojourn that put Hemings under the tutelage of some of Paris' best chefs of the day. Upon his return to the United States, Hemings worked as Jefferson's chef in Philadelphia and Monticello, Va., until he became a freed man with culinary skills in 1796.

Today blacks are finding careers in the culinary arts personally satisfying as well as financially rewarding. Never known for being on the cutting edge of social change, the food service industry has been forced by America's fastest-growing industry--travel and tourism--and by consumers' increasing dining expenditures outside the home to embrace blacks as executive chefs, sous-chefs, pastry chefs, and even chef-owners.

Notable black chefs--including the French-trained Patrick Clark at the Hay-Adams Hotel in Washington, D.C.; Johnny Rivers, the executive chef of Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla.; Benjamin Gordon, the executive chef of Restaurant 2110 in Baltimore; Walter Hinds, the executive chef of Lolabelle, in New York City; Steve Simmons, the chef of One Market in San Francisco; and the legendary chef (now an author) Edna Lewis of the famed Gage and Tollner in Brooklyn--are making their marks on the nation's culinary landscape and changing a few details along the way.

"I see light at the end of the tunnel," says Earlest Bell, the 36-year-old executive banquet chef at Marriott's World Center Hotel in Orlando. On any given day, Bell might direct his 30-person kitchen staff in the preparation of some 5,000 meals. "Ten to 20 years ago, you did not see the penetration of blacks in the food professions as you do today," he says. "Our parents used to tell us, |Don't ever work in the restaurant industry, it's low-end,' but that is not the case anymore."

"That's one reason why I feel so strongly about alerting the younger generation to this career," Bell continues. "They see the waiters and the busboys, but what they don't realize is that the chefs are making more money than the guys in the suits."

Herman Cain, the highest-placed black executive in the restaurant industry as the president of the 526-unit Godfather's Pizza chain, based in Omaha, Neb., has long lamented that most blacks are still harboring an inaccurate and ancient stereotype of food service. "For older black people, the restaurant business was associated with low pay, long hours, and equated with the domestic service work of Pullman porters and the like," he observes. The 48-year-old Cain will have an opportunity in the spring to make a major assault on that perception. That is when he will become the first black American to be named president of the 75-year-old National Restaurant Association, one of the most influential trade groups in the nation.

Despite the lingering perception that restaurant jobs represent a dead-end occupation, the U.S. Census Bureau reports that blacks slowly have been making sizable inroads in the culinary arts. In the 1980 census, approximately 248,700 black Americans listed their occupations as cooks, the vast majority so-called short-order cooks. By 1990, the most recent year for which numbers are available, the Census Bureau counted 386,900 blacks who called themselves cooks, a 56 percent increase. (The glaring problem with the Census Bureau data is that after the 1980 census, the government stopped trying to distinguish the degree of professionalism in the kitchen, lumping all occupations--from a McDonald's grill man up to a pastry chef at Tavern on the Green--under "cook.")

Those in the field say that they don't need Census Bureau numbers to see that African Americans are increasingly joining the ranks of professional chefs. In fact, certain individuals are making sure the trend continues by starting scholarship funds for young black students who want to pursue the culinary arts. While most of these efforts are less than two years old, the founders of these movements constitute a motivated group.

"The food service industry is big business," says Jason Wallace, a 28-year-old sous-chef at the Highlawn Pavilion in West Orange, N.J., a European-style American regional restaurant. "We're talking about annual sales of $275 billion and an employee base of 9 million people. Blacks have always been in the field, but mostly in the lower and middle rungs. Now it is time to go to the next level, to executive chef and owner. Why shouldn't I try to get my boss's job?"