Marcus Samuelsson

Table of Contents

References & Edit History Quick Facts & Related Topics

Images

Marcus Samuelsson

Q: What is Marcus Samuelsson known for?

Marcus Samuelsson is an Ethiopian-born chef, restaurateur, author, and television personality. He became the youngest chef to earn a three-star rating from The New York Times and has won many awards, including being named the best chef in New York City by the James Beard Foundation in 2003.

Q: What challenges did Marcus Samuelsson face in his early life?

Marcus Samuelsson, his older sister, and his mother contracted tuberculosis , and his mother died after a journey on foot to a hospital in Addis Ababa . He and his sister were later adopted by a Swedish couple and moved to Sweden .

Ethiopian-born chef

Also known as: Kassahun Tsegie

Written by René Ostberg

Fact-checked by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Last Updated: Apr 2, 2025 • Article History

Quick Facts

Original name:: Kassahun Tsegie

Born:: November 6, 1970, Abrugandana, Ethiopia (age 54)

See all related content

What is Marcus Samuelsson known for?

What challenges did Marcus Samuelsson face in his early life?

Marcus Samuelsson (born November 6, 1970, Abrugandana, Ethiopia) is an Ethiopian-born chef, restaurateur, author, and television personality. In 1995, as executive chef of Aquavit, a Scandinavian restaurant in New York City, Samuelsson, at age 24, became the youngest chef to earn a three-star rating from The New York Times. He has won many awards, including being named the city’s best chef by the James Beard Foundation in 2003, has written several best-selling cookbooks, and hosted the culinary travel show No Passport Required (2018–20).

Early life

Samuelsson was born Kassahun Tsegie in Abrugandana, a small village about two hours outside Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital. He and his older sister, Fantaye Tsegie, did not know their father, Tsegie, who was a priest and leader of the Amhara people. (Samuelsson met his father on a trip to Ethiopia as an adult.) They lived with their mother, Ahnu—an Orthodox Ethiopian Christian who sold crafts—in a hut that Samuelsson described in his 2012 memoir as “the size of two restaurant tables.” When Kassahun Tsegie was two years old, he, his mother, and his sister contracted tuberculosis. They journeyed more than 75 miles (120 km) on foot to an Addis Ababa hospital, where his mother died.

“Food and flavors have become my first language. Not English, not Swedish, not Amharic. Whether I’m with the injera makers in their hut [in Ethiopia] or a sushi chef in Tokyo, we speak a common language. We are all on the search for flavors.”

—Marcus Samuelsson, in his memoir Yes, Chef

Kassahun and Fantaye Tsegie were adopted in 1973 by Lennart and Ann Marie Samuelsson, a white middle-class couple from Gothenburg (Göteborg), Sweden. In their new home, the children were given new names: Kassahun was renamed Marcus and Fantaye, Linda. The Samuelssons also adopted a third child, Anna Samuelsson. Marcus Samuelsson had a happy childhood in Gothenburg, a blue-collar city he once described as “Pittsburgh by the sea.” He learned to fish and to speak Swedish, German, and English. His grandmother, a retired domestic worker, taught him to cook. Samuelsson excelled at soccer and wanted to play professionally, but after being told he was too small, he turned to cooking as a career.

Culinary career

When Samuelsson was 16, he applied for a job at a McDonald’s but was turned down because of his race. He later found work in the restaurant of a small hotel and enrolled at the Culinary Institute of Gothenburg. Eventually, he was hired as an assistant chef at the Park Avenue Hotel (now the Elite Park Avenue Hotel) in Gothenburg, where he was in charge of cleaning the fish. Samuelsson then began an 18-month apprenticeship as an assistant chef at the five-star Victoria-Jungfrau Grand Hotel & Spa in Interlaken, Switzerland, after which he worked in various restaurants in Switzerland and Austria.

Highly ambitious, Samuelsson wrote to celebrities in the United States, including Oprah Winfrey and David Letterman, for help in finding a position in America. In 1991 he moved to the United States for a few months to apprentice at Aquavit, a Scandinavian restaurant in Midtown Manhattan. After returning to Europe and working in France, he came back to Aquavit in 1994 and was soon promoted to executive chef following the death of the previous chef. Samuelsson was only 23.

Awards

2010: Top Chef Masters television cooking competition winner
2023: Daytime Emmy Award for outstanding short form program

James Beard Foundation Wins

1999: Rising Star Chef of the Year
2003: Best Chef New York City
2007: International (cookbook award)
2013: Writing and Literature
2016: Who’s Who of Food & Beverage in America
2019: Broadcast Media—Outstanding Personality/Host
2022: Broadcast Media—Commercial/Sponsored Visual Media

The following year Ruth Reichl, the food critic for The New York Times, published a review of Aquavit in which she wrote:

Mr. Samuelsson is cooking delicate and beautiful food, walking a tightrope between Swedish tradition and modern taste. Swedish food often balances salty with sweet—think of herring—but Mr. Samuelsson has appropriated the idea and made it his own. I found myself tasting his best dishes again and again, wondering where the sweetness came from. It was like a musical theme, fading in and out but never disappearing.

Reichl awarded the restaurant three stars, signifying “excellent.” With that review, Samuelsson became the youngest chef to receive a three-star review from the Times. In 1997 he became a partner in the restaurant with owner Hakan Swahn.

“Yes, Chef!”Chef Marcus Samuelsson conducting a cooking demonstration in Napa, California, on May 27, 2022.

Samuelsson remained executive chef at Aquavit until 2009. In the meantime his fame grew. He was named Rising Star Chef of the Year by the James Beard Foundation in 1999. His first book, Aquavit: And the New Scandinavian Cuisine, was published in 2003. The next year he and Swahn opened Riingo (whose executive chef was one of Samuelsson’s protégés), a Japanese fusion restaurant that brought together, according to a 2014 review in The New York Times, “the clean flavors of Tokyo and Gothenburg, as experienced in Manhattan.” (The restaurant closed in 2012.) Several more restaurants followed, including Red Rooster, which opened in Harlem in December 2010 and reimagined classic soul food. The restaurant received positive reviews for its celebration of Black American food culture, but some accused Samuelsson of contributing to the gentrification of the neighborhood. Samuelsson soon ventured beyond New York, opening restaurants domestically—Miami, Atlanta, and other cities—and internationally—Ethiopia, Canada, and The Bahamas.

In 2009 Samuelsson was the guest chef for the first state dinner hosted by U.S. Pres. Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama. The dinner, held in honor of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his wife, Gursharan Kaur, featured a mix of Indian flavors and African American standards such as okra and collard greens.

Publications and television appearances

Samuelsson is the author of many books, including The Soul of a New Cuisine: A Discovery of the Foods and Flavors of Africa (2006; winner of a 2007 James Beard Award for best international cookbook); Marcus Off Duty: The Recipes I Cook at Home (2014); The Red Rooster Cookbook: The Story of Food and Hustle in Harlem (2016); and The Rise: Black Cooks and the Soul of American Food (2020). His James Beard award-winning memoir, Yes, Chef, was published in 2013.

In his memoir, Samuelsson wrote about food’s universal meaning: “Food and flavors have become my first language. Not English, not Swedish, not Amharic. Whether I’m with the injera makers in their hut [in Ethiopia] or a sushi chef in Tokyo, we speak a common language. We are all on the search for flavors.” To that end, he has advocated for menus that make greater use of climate-friendly foods, such as the native African super grains sorghum, fonio, teff, and millet, not only to expand people’s palates, but also to create a market for African growers.

Samuelsson’s many TV appearances include the cooking shows Iron Chef and Chopped and the travel food show Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown. In 2010 he won the second season of the Bravo network’s cooking competition show Top Chef Masters. Samuelsson also hosted his own TV series—notably, No Passport Required (2018–20), which explores America’s food cultures. He was also the show’s executive producer and in 2019 won another James Beard Foundation Award, for outstanding personality/host. Samuelsson won a Daytime Emmy Award in the short-form category for the series My Mark in 2023.

Personal life

Samuelsson became a U.S. citizen in 2000. In 2009 he married Ethiopian fashion model Maya Haile. The couple has two children—son Zion Mandela Samuelsson, born in 2016, and daughter Grace Ethiopia Samuelsson, born in 2022. Samuelsson also has an adult daughter, Zoe Samuelsson, from a previous relationship.

René Ostberg

Harlem Renaissance

Table of Contents

References & Edit History Quick Facts & Related Topics

Images & Videos

What was the impact of the Harlem Renaissance?

Duke Ellington's original 14-member band

For Students

Harlem Renaissance Key Facts

Harlem Renaissance Timeline

Harlem Renaissance Causes and Effects

Harlem Renaissance

American literature and art

Written by George Hutchinson

Fact-checked by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Last Updated: Mar 31, 2025 • Article History

Quick Facts

Date:: c. 1918 - 1937

Location:: Harlem; New York; New York City; United States

Key People:: Langston Hughes; Zora Neale Hurston; James VanDerZee; Dorothy West; Aaron Douglas

See all related content

What was the Harlem Renaissance?

Who were notable people of the Harlem Renaissance?

When did the Harlem Renaissance occur?

Why was the Harlem Renaissance significant?

Harlem Renaissance, a blossoming (c. 1918–37) of African American culture, particularly in the creative arts, and the most influential movement in African American literary history. Embracing literary, musical, theatrical, and visual arts, participants sought to reconceptualize “the Negro” apart from the white stereotypes that had influenced Black peoples’ relationship to their heritage and to each other. They also sought to break free of Victorian moral values and bourgeois shame about aspects of their lives that might, as seen by white people, reinforce racist beliefs. Never dominated by a particular school of thought but rather characterized by intense debate, the movement laid the groundwork for all later African American literature and had an enormous impact on subsequent Black literature and consciousness worldwide. While the renaissance was not confined to the Harlem district of New York City, Harlem attracted a remarkable concentration of intellect and talent and served as the symbolic capital of this cultural awakening.

(Read W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1926 Britannica essay on African American literature.)

The background

The Harlem Renaissance was a phase of a larger New Negro movement that had emerged in the early 20th century and in some ways ushered in the civil rights movement of the late 1940s and early 1950s. The social foundations of this movement included the Great Migration of African Americans from rural to urban spaces and from South to North; dramatically rising levels of literacy; the creation of national organizations dedicated to pressing African American civil rights, “uplifting” the race, and opening socioeconomic opportunities; and developing race pride, including pan-African sensibilities and programs. Black exiles and expatriates from the Caribbean and Africa crossed paths in metropoles such as New York City and Paris after World War I and had an invigorating influence on each other that gave the broader “Negro renaissance” (as it was then known) a profoundly important international cast.

(Read Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Britannica essay on “Monuments of Hope.”)

*The Crisis*Cover of *The Crisis*'s October 1914 issue, which was dedicated to children's issues.

The Harlem Renaissance is unusual among literary and artistic movements for its close relationship to civil rights and reform organizations. Crucial to the movement were magazines such as The Crisis, published by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); Opportunity, published by the National Urban League; and The Messenger, a socialist journal eventually connected with the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a Black labor union. Negro World, the newspaper of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, also played a role, but few of the major authors or artists identified with Garvey’s “Back to Africa” movement, even if they contributed to the paper.

"Future Expectations" by James Van der Zee, c. 1925. James VanDerZee.

Britannica Quiz

Art of the Harlem Renaissance

The renaissance had many sources in Black culture, primarily of the United States and the Caribbean, and manifested itself well beyond Harlem. As its symbolic capital, Harlem was a catalyst for artistic experimentation and a highly popular nightlife destination. Its location in the communications capital of North America helped give the “New Negroes” visibility and opportunities for publication not evident elsewhere. Located just north of Central Park, Harlem was a formerly white residential district that by the early 1920s was becoming virtually a Black city within the borough of Manhattan. Other boroughs of New York City were also home to people now identified with the renaissance, but they often crossed paths in Harlem or went to special events at the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library. Black intellectuals from Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and other cities (where they had their own intellectual circles, theaters, and reading groups) also met in Harlem or settled there. New York City had an extraordinarily diverse and decentered Black social world in which no one group could monopolize cultural authority. As a result, it was a particularly fertile place for cultural experimentation.

While the renaissance built on earlier traditions of African American culture, it was profoundly affected by trends—such as primitivism—in European and white American artistic circles. Modernist primitivism was inspired partly by Freudian psychology, but it tended to extol “primitive” peoples as enjoying a more direct relationship to the natural world and to elemental human desires than “overcivilized” white people. The keys to artistic revolution and authentic expression, some intellectuals felt, would be found in the cultures of “primitive races,” and preeminent among these, in the stereotypical thinking of the day, were the cultures of sub-Saharan Africans and their descendants. Early in the 20th century, European avant-garde artists had drawn inspiration from African masks as they broke from realistic representational styles toward abstraction in painting and sculpture. The prestige of such experiments caused African American intellectuals to look on their African heritage with new eyes and in many cases with a desire to reconnect with a heritage long despised or misunderstood by both white and Black people.