![]() ![]() As Onwuachi details in his 2019 book, Notes From a Young Black Chef, The Shaw Bijou represented Onwuachi’s unique experience - growing up in New York City, cutting his teeth at Per Se and Eleven Madison Park, and connecting with his heritage as a black man - and then finally getting a chance to run his own solo restaurant. chef Kwame Onwuachi’s restaurant, The Shaw Bijou. ![]() The situation immediately calls to mind the abrupt closing of Washington D.C. Employees at the hotel’s reception desk have also apparently been instructed to say nothing and to forward all inquiries to Craveable. Pam Wiznitzer, who opened the attached bar, Gibson + Luce, and ran Henry’s bar program, quietly left back in January. Johnson offered a firm “no comment” about the closing. Craveable Hospitality issued a boilerplate statement that the company has “concluded their collaboration at Life Hotel in New York City,” as if Henry were little more than a pop-up. With Henry, none of that happened and the seeming silence feels unsettling, almost as if people want us to forget that the restaurant even existed in the first place.Ī veritable blockade has been thrown up by everyone involved. When restaurants close - especially restaurants that display all the trappings of success - owners and chefs often scramble to publicly thank their supporters, offer their condolences to the employees who will lose their jobs, and (almost inevitably) discuss the difficulty of running a small business in New York. (And a banner celebrating Johnson’s Beard Award still pops up when you visit Craveable’s website.) No one involved - Johnson, the management company Craveable Hospitality Group, or the hotel - offered a reason why. The restaurant’s website disappeared, as did its social-media accounts. If Johnson knew the end was nigh, his mile-wide smile didn’t betray it, but the finish appears to have arrived swiftly. (Johnson’s first cookbook, Between Harlem and Heaven, won a James Beard Award in May.)Īnd then, suddenly, the restaurant closed. What’s more, Johnson appeared just this week in an ambitious Times profile of black chefs who are changing the American food scene. He earned a glowing one star from the New York Times, and landed on both critic Pete Wells’s and GQ critic Brett Martin’s lists of the best new restaurants of 2018. The restaurant’s mission, as Johnson told me when it opened, was to expose the world to the power and the potential of African-inspired cooking in an environment that was unapologetically black, where hip-hop would blare, where the staff was comprised almost entirely of people of color, and where the dining room featured one of the most diverse crowds south of 125th Street.ĭuring its 11-month run, Johnson had no problem drawing critical acclaim around his restaurant’s cuisine. ![]() Johnson’s kitchen specialized in Pan-African cuisine, mixing staple dishes of the African diaspora and beyond - jollof, piri piri sauce, West African peanut sauce - into the fine-dining tradition. It’s not often that you can say a restaurant was truly original, but in the case of Henry at the Life Hotel, it’s an apt description. The gaudiness of the restaurant, in itself, wasn’t authentically me.A neon sign featuring J.J. “The price point wasn’t authentically me. Shaw Bijou “was all packaged in a way that wasn’t authentically me,” he told the Washington Post. He’s also, in principle, learned from the horrible experience of closing his first solo restaurant, realizing he strayed too far from his own style to be successful. The Bronx native will call on his heritage, basing the menu around Caribbean, Creole and West African cookery. The 96-seat restaurant will be a more casual offering than Shaw Bijou. Now the 27-year-old chef is mounting a comeback, and getting ready to open Kith/Kin in October. After Shaw Bijou shuttered, Onwuachi told the Washington Post that he considered quitting the business altogether and went down a “Netflix rabbit hole” for a month. The ambitious restaurant couldn’t survive being panned by critics and dogged by its very pricey tasting menu. While bumps and bruises are expected for a debut restaurant, most wouldn’t have expected Onwuachi restaurant to flame out so disastrously, closing less than three months after opening. Taste Test: Buffalo Trace’s New Experimental Bourbon Is Too Intense to Work ![]() Two-Thirds of Americans Have a Negative View of Tipping, According to a New Surveyīenriach’s New 40-Year-Old Single Malt Is an Uncommonly Peaty Speyside Whisky ![]()
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