Marcus Samuelsson Comes Home | Bon Appétit

As we step into the elevator of an Addis Ababa skyscraper en route to Marcus Samuelsson’s restaurant on top of the tallest building in East Africa, he’s reminded of a moment from a year earlier when the most personal project of his career opened to the world.

Samuelsson’s relatives traveled from their remote village for the christening of Marcus Addis. But there was a hurdle: the elevator. The children among them were thrilled, even if they didn’t know what to expect stepping into a machine that cruises up 46 flights, opening to panoramic views that sprawl to the distant mountains of Ethiopia. “They were like, ‘Oh, we love it.’ But the older generation, they’ve never been in an elevator,” he said. “Going vertical is really something different.”

It’s early January, days before Ethiopian Christmas, and Samuelsson, along with his wife, Maya Haile Samuelsson, want to show the groundwork they’ve laid for the future of hospitality in Ethiopia. They are in the middle of a multiyear process of training staff, finding reliable purveyors, and creating a level of kitchen and dining room consistency that is on par with the kind of execution we take for granted at Samuelsson’s restaurants.

The moment symbolizes the empire Samuelsson has built, but also what he wants to leave the next generation of chefs, as well his kids, eight-year-old Zion and three-year-old Grace, as he continues to publicly explore his complex relationship with the country where he was born and spent a lifetime trying to learn. He’s paying tribute the way he knows how, through food.

Samuelsson was torn from Ethiopia in 1974, a two-year-old boy in the center of a civil war, sickened by a tuberculosis epidemic. After his mother died, he and his older sister were adopted by a nurturing Swedish family. He returned 25 years ago as one of the world’s most acclaimed chefs, but still a young man in search of his identity, armed with his greatest asset, a deep understanding of flavor to guide his search for a new cuisine that would include Africa, especially Ethiopia. “When you’re an adopted kid, you are ripped away from an identity…. It’s almost like swimming upward,” he says.

At 54 years old, Samuelsson is at the height of his career, no longer in search of identity. He’s carved his own path of what it means to be Ethiopian when you were raised in Sweden, trained in Europe, cooked across the world, and for most of your adult life called New York home. He’s constructed a new cuisine and in the process given a generation of Black chefs opportunities to explore their complex multicultural identities through their own food.

On that first trip, a local spice merchant told Samuelsson that Ethiopians use berbere in “everything.” Today it’s a workhorse on his menus. It adds heat to cocktails. It anchors the cure for one of his signature dishes, the Swediopian, a take on gravlax that appears on nearly all of his menus.