This was perhaps a result of Senegal’s tradition of ribald, intertribal mockery, or the cosmopolitanism that comes from being a historic port of call, or because its independence leader, Léopold Sédar Senghor, was a poet. After independence, the country avoided the strongman dictators and ethnic conflicts that have troubled many of its neighbors. Under French colonialism, crops like peanuts were cultivated for export, while local rice was rejected in favor of broken grains imported from French Indochina, where it would otherwise have been fed to animals. It was first settled roughly 3,000 years ago, and from the mid-1800s until 1960, the country was one of the jewels of France’s second colonial empire, a center of education and the seat of government in West Africa. With a western coastline crisscrossed by fertile river deltas, Senegal has a long and well-traveled culinary memory. Despite this success, he shuttered both restaurants-Yolélé in 2005 and Le Grand Dakar in 2011-to satisfy his wanderlust, reach a larger swath of people than he could staying put and, most important, return home more often. Both were touchstones for the multicultural Brooklyn of the moment, hangouts where one might run into artists like Wangechi Mutu or Kehinde Wiley or actor Jeffrey Wright, whose birthday Thiam catered. The city, located roughly 160 miles from Dakar, is the birthplace of Senegal’s national dish, thiéboudienne.īy 2001, Thiam had opened his own place, the West African fusion restaurant Yolélé in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, followed by the eatery-cum–cultural center Le Grand Dakar in Clinton Hill in 2006. SEA CHANGE Fishermen’s boats in Saint-Louis, Senegal, the capital during the French colonial period. My mother said, ‘If that’s your path, that’s fine, too.’ It was like coming out of the closet!” When I finally told my parents, they were supportive. Finally one of my cousins found out and called me. I didn’t even tell my parents for the first couple of years that I was working in a kitchen. “My mother used to have all these 1970s cookbooks with different international food, and I was fascinated,” he recalls. Cooking was a long-forbidden dream this was the first time Thiam saw men behind a stove, other than a Vietnamese godfather back in Dakar. So Thiam did as many a newly arrived immigrant does and found work in a restaurant kitchen. The then 23-year-old landed there on what was supposed to be a short layover before continuing on to attend Baldwin Wallace University in Ohio, but an acquaintance stole all of his money. Diners responded, and chef Bludorn has built some dishes on the permanent menu based on techniques he learned from Thiam.īorn in Dakar into a family of diplomats, Thiam began his culinary career in New York City in 1989. “The biggest surprise to me in working with Pierre was how refined and complex the spices were,” says Boulud. At Café Boulud in New York City, chef-owner Daniel Boulud and executive chef Aaron Bludorn worked with Thiam to develop a series of Senegalese dishes as part of the restaurant’s rotating Le Voyage menu last spring, based on different international cuisines. “The growing middle class here is getting a taste for it,” says Thiam. “I told them, ‘Just use local ingredients and your memories.’ ” In the years since, Senegalese food “cooked like home” is becoming more widely available in genteel Dakar luncheonettes where business meetings are as likely to take place over a plate of thiéboudienne, the national dish of fried thiof, a local whitefish, as they once would have over a blanquette de veau. “You’d be in a beautiful African city, and there’d be nothing African on the menu at the hotel,” Thiam says. He had grown frustrated by what he saw as a disregard for Senegalese cuisine by the culinary establishment. ![]() ![]() While we eat, Thiam recalls a cooking demonstration he gave in 2008 to the École Nationale de Formation Hôtelière et Touristique, Senegal’s only public hospitality school, in which he convinced the head chef to teach local recipes alongside the more typical French ones. These recent projects have only bolstered Thiam’s overall mission to, as he puts it in his melodic bass voice, “valorize what we have.” His second cookbook, Senegal: Modern Senegalese Recipes From the Source to the Bowl, was a finalist for a James Beard Award in 2016. He has led Anthony Bourdain around Senegal for his CNN show Parts Unknown, done battle over papayas with Bobby Flay on Iron Chef America and is executive chef of the contemporary African restaurant Nok by Alara in Lagos. With decades of experience cooking and eating all over Africa, Thiam, 52, is a logical ambassador of Senegalese cuisine to the wider world. Chef Pierre Thiam enjoys a meal at Restaurant Le Djembé in Dakar.
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