A New Rap Album From Blvck Svm Gets Inspiration From Fine Dining Restaurants in SF and Chicago

When it comes to rap and food, the relationship between the two has somehow scantily been explored in song, let alone across an entire album from a true gastronomist. Comparatively speaking, notable productions outlining a rapper’s passion for the culinary world are few and far between, with memorable examples in hip-hop usually just using food as a metaphorical mise en place. Schoolboy Q and Kendrick Lamar’s “Collard Greens” is, in fact, about weed. MF Doom’s Mm..Food is more about using picnic fare as a vehicle for dizzying wordplay. And Kelis’s “Milkshake” is very much not about milkshakes at all, but rather about how it’s the singer’s certain je ne sais quoi that brings the boys to the yard.

With this dearth of rap about a deep love of the epicurean life, Ben Glover had no idea if his strategy would work. The emerging Florida-born, South Side Chicago-based rapper with an affinity for fine dining, envisioned something akin to a “tasting menu of an album” for his debut as Blvck Svm (pronounced Black Sam) of what he dubs “Michelin-star rap.” Not only that, but Glover aspired to film music videos of him rapping in the middle of working fine dining kitchens. So he started reaching out to decorated chefs across the country out of the blue.

“With both rap and food, there are two big ways to approach things,” Glover says. “One is you do something that’s already been done a thousand times, but you do it really well. The other option is to do something new and inventive or totally out of the box and take a risk.”

After blanketing around a hundred DMs to chefs of restaurants he fawned over on Instagram (and who had an open-concept kitchen) with a pre-proposal for the project, Glover was amazed when he began to hear back from some notable executive chefs in the fine dining world. Garrett Hare at Oklahoma City’s Nonesuch, Dano Heinze of Vern’s in Charleston, South Carolina, and David Yoshimura of San Francisco’s Michelin-starred Nisei were among the first to respond. Before long, Glover’s lofty vision was realized; the rapper was traveling across the country to film videos for nearly all 13 tracks of his aptly titled album, michelinman, out Monday, November 11.

And for as worthy as Glover’s tight, stoic delivery over jazzy, Armagnac-flooded productions are, it’s in the videos of the album’s “Bvck of House” series that we see his imagination truly come to life. In “greymatter,” a silky beat drops alongside a sample of Ralph Fiennes’s nefarious chef Slowik’s monologue in The Menu. A vintage microphone hangs from the hood in Nisei’s kitchen while a team of 10 moves in concert, prepping a kinmedai bigeye snapper and eel as Blvck Svm takes center stage rapping, “Otoro, chutoro cleansing all of my sorrows / Soy sauce is only an option if flavor need to be borrowed.” The rapper exudes calm amidst the kitchen chaos, as Yoshimura pours a bowl of his signature pine nut miso in zen like fashion in the background.

“I wanted the kitchen to live and breathe — not just standing there,” Glover says. “And they were flying all over the place. Somehow it was exactly as I had pictured it.”

For Yoshimura, Glover’s pitch tugged at his familial heartstrings. His mother is a visual artist and he once did a painting/listening pairing dinner with her. “I’m generally interested in collaborations that cross multiple art forms,” the chef says. And Nisei itself is a place that understands the symbiosis of music with the food it serves. Hearing Beyonce’s “Break My Soul” while being served seasonal Sawara mackerel with misozuke apple and shiso helps cut through any pretentiousness that might accompany dining on a gloriously paced 13-course tasting menu.

“Food and music are two things that everyone in the world can comment about and have an opinion about,” Yohsimura says, “but nobody understands the details like musicians and chefs themselves.” It’s the artistic passion for their respective craft that Blvck Svm shares with these chefs that make his music feel so well-presented in the videos at kitchens like Nisei, Chicago’s Asador Bastian, and Detroit’s Freya, which are also backdrops for Bvck of House videos.

Glover started rapping as a college student a decade ago, but it wasn’t until two years ago that he started making enough money off his music to do it full-time. That extra cash allowed him to dive into the fine dining world. An especially formative early visit to Chicago’s high-end Japanese restaurant Momotaro was the first time he had sushi. “That wasn’t a vehicle for spicy mayo and soy sauce,” he recalls. Then, a tasting menu experience at chef Christian Hunter’s Atelier in Chicago fully flipped a switch in his brain. Soon, his exploration of the Chicago fine dining scene was informing his music and seeping more deeply into his artistic vision. The confluence of these experiences is michelinman.

He looks at the dichotomy of rap and fine dining in a uniquely philosophical way, likening the food to lyrics, a chef’s presentation to the beat production, textures and temperatures to the tone of a song and how both expressions rely on a certain level of precision. But it struck him how despite these overlapping principles, the shared ingenuity was often lost.

“People who’ve experienced fine dining understand it to be art,” Glover says. “But I don’t think that same esteem is given to rap music in any shape — even in its more intellectual, high-brow forms. I want to illuminate the intersection of both respective art forms because they share so much.”