The titans of the culinary industry have long hailed from regions of Europe lionized for their cultural and intellectual prowess; regions that have sat at the top of the Michelin-starred food chain so long that some would say they’ve grown stale. Up until recently, a real chef was all but illegitimate if they weren’t trained in the classic French or Italian tradition. On the one hand, there’s good reason for this—French and Italian food is objectively delicious. But on the other, the unparalleled respect for white European food might discourage chefs with a diversity of backgrounds from learning about and valuing their own heritage through food. There is, however, a movement of upcoming chefs and foodie thinkers interested in an alternative to this discourse and in challenging the systems of power that elevate certain cuisines and not others. Among those engaged in the conversation are New York City chef JJ Johnson – currently kicking off the long-term residency program at Chefs Club in Soho – and Gabrielle Langholtz, author of America: The Cookbook.
“You go to culinary school and nobody is telling you to go to West Africa to cook.”
A darling of the N.Y.C. food scene—whose resumé is stacked with city-wide favorites such as Tropico, Jane, Tribeca Grill, Centro Vinoteca, and The Cecil—33-year-old JJ Johnson received his classical training at the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) before pursuing a career as a chef. After establishing himself as an exciting new talent, he accompanied chef Alexander Smalls on a trip to Ghana in 2012—a destination that is perhaps strange for a recent graduate of culinary school. “You go to culinary school and nobody is telling you to go to West Africa to cook,” Johnson says. “They’re only telling you about Spain, Italy, and France. Nobody is really pushing people to go work in places like Morocco, Senegal, Nigeria, or Burkina Faso; but these are the places that I believe people should be looking to cook. These are the places with new spices, flavors, and aromas that will give you a totally different insight on food.” While he credits his CIA education for much of his success, Johnson’s travels have given him a very different, and equally important, gastronomical education, complementary to what he learned in school.
“I’m a part of this movement of cooking the food of who you are.”
“Going to Ghana really opened my eyes,” he says. “Whenever I travel now, I’m looking through a diasporic lens. In Israel, I was surprised by how much Moroccan food there was. Going to Singapore and India, I understood so much more about the history of things like the Silk Road because of the foods we were eating.”
With roots in Puerto Rico, Barbados, and the old American South, Johnson is a child of the African diaspora himself. Once he began traveling regularly for work, he realized that his interest in the impact of the diaspora stemmed from a personal connection and what he saw as an institutional silence surrounding non-European food in culinary school. To promote more diversity in the culinary world, Johnson is a champion of learning the food of one’s past.
“I’m a part of this movement of cooking the food of who you are,” he says. “Going to Ghana made me look back into my heritage and honor the person that I am. It prompted me to really take a look at other parts of the world that the African diaspora has affected. That’s when I started pulling influences from places like Brazil, Portugal, the West Indies, and Peru into what I was cooking.”
Johnson’s initial trip to Ghana was his introduction to high-end African food; the first time he’d ever seen it elevated to a level typically reserved for European cuisines. “Almost always, before it becomes mainstream, the food of people of color is at one point seen as peasant food—like food that you can’t charge any serious money for,” he says. “This trip made me realize that this food can and should be taken seriously. And even though it was refined and professional, the meals we had there brought me right back to my grandmother’s cooking; back to childhood trips to Barbados, eating roti and making flapjacks. This kind of food is who I am, and it makes me feel really good when I cook it.”
These days, you can find JJ bopping to 90s hip-hop and R&B jams in the kitchen at the Chefs Club, where he is kicking off the restaurant’s long-term residency program. Melding ingredients and influence from all corners of the diaspora, he develops dishes like jerk tamarind barbecue chicken and West African peanut sauce with goat and udon noodles.
“I cook my history,” he says. “That’s how I’m able to express myself, like a painter.”
“America has long had a reputation for the ‘standard American diet,’ which is that it makes people sad, fat, and sick.”
Gabrielle Langholtz has a similar message about learning to appreciate food from the places we’re from, but in a distinctly American context. Her goliath of a cookbook, aptly titled America: The Cookbook, is full of can’t-miss recipes from all 50 states and accompanying essays by writers and chefs from around the country. For Langholtz, the book represents an important next step in the ongoing conversation about the value of “real American cuisine”—the celebration of which, she claims, is a recent phenomenon. According to Langholtz, when America pioneered the mass-production of foodstuffs and convenience eating in the 1950s, we entered an era where food and the way people ate it actually diluted our individuality instead of encouraging diversity. At the same time, our interest in the overall quality of the food we were eating plummeted, too.
“Internationally, America has long had a reputation for the ‘standard American diet,’ which is that it makes people sad, fat, and sick,” she says. “For at least a generation or two, the greats in the food world really looked down upon American food for that reason.”
Her book, however, is a celebration of those who refuse to believe that the U.S. is “just a nation of McDonald’s,” as she says.
“A lot of the essayists in the book talk about growing up wanting to leave American food behind, instead setting their sights on Italy and France, thinking about ‘cuisine’ as something that exists somewhere else,” Langholtz says. “Now, several of those writers wanted to write love-letters to their state. It’s like, ‘look at our country ham, our incredible lobster rolls, our dungeness crab in the Pacific Northwest, our gulf shrimp.’ There’s a lot to legitimately hold high, and I think that’s the theme in a lot of essays in this book.”
Inspired by the renaissance of American cooking that has swept the nation, Langholtz wants to remind people of the bounty available under our noses here in the States: “Why would we fly in asparagus from France when we have world class asparagus right here in New Jersey?” she asks.
“People are leaving home only to return and learn to appreciate the food they grew up with in an entirely different way.”
Langholtz references the late Chef Edna Lewis who cooked throughout the deep South and often encouraged other chefs to educate themselves about Alabaman cuisine, for example, before turning to Europe for culinary validation. This kind of introspection can be seen amongst popular American chefs of today, including Chef Travis Wilson, who worked under Wylie Dufresne in N.Y.C. for several years. Just recently, he moved back to Appalachia to “cook the food that his grandparents made,” Langholtz says.
“That’s the kind of thing I’m really excited to shine light on,” she says. “People are leaving home only to return and learn to appreciate the food they grew up with in an entirely different way. We’re discovering something new about ourselves that has always been there, we just didn’t notice it. The fact that the James Beard award this year was awarded to a book called Victuals, about Appalachian cuisine, is fantastic! It’s no longer seen as an oxymoron, it’s legitimate: Appalachian cuisine, as with the rest of American folk cooking, deserves to be taken seriously.”
As for what actually makes up “American cuisine,” the answer is complicated by our lack of a singular national identity.
“People think of ‘American food’ as roast chicken, mashed potatoes, and cherry pie,” she says. “But that makes up only, like, five percent of the menu. White people in New England are certainly Americans, but they’re not the only Americans and their food isn’t the only thing that makes up the cuisine of this diverse nation,” she says. The book features Korean pancakes and Ecuadorian or Syrian specialties, for example. The inclusion of these seemingly foreign recipes has caused confusion for some of Langholtz’s readers.
“A lot of the foods that people think of as classic Americana—the Applebee’s kid’s menu kind of stuff, like hamburgers and hot dogs—all of these things were brought here by immigrants,” she says. “Macaroni and cheese, spaghetti and meatballs, coffee, beer—literally apple pie. All of those things were brought here by immigrants! So when people ask me why there’s a Filipino or Guatemalan recipe in an American cookbook, my response is always, ‘well, why is there Italian food? It’s because people moved here and brought their food with them and we all eat it now.’ All of these foods are American food now, in a way.”
To further explain, she turns to the “melting pot” analogy commonly used to describe the diversity of the United States. Instead, she employs the “chopped salad” analogy, which, she argues, allows us to all be in the same bowl without rendering our flavors indistinguishable from one another, or dissolving into a one-note broth. “There’s a radish, there’s a scallion, there’s a tomato,” she says. “We all blend together well, but we don’t melt away our individual inheritances and identities. We’re a big, delicious chopped salad and this book is a chopped salad of amazing recipes.”
