NBC Nightly News with Tom Llamas - The Drink with Kate Snow: Marcus Samuelsson

Episode Date: July 19, 2020

Marcus Samuelsson is one of the most successful chefs and restaurateurs working today – he owns more than a dozen restaurants and hosts his own show, “No Passport Required.”

Hey everyone, this is Kate Snow. Before the coronavirus pandemic hit, I met with chef Marcus Samuelson for a drink at Ginny's Supper Club. It's one of the many restaurants he owns. I'm excited to share his story with you now. Marcus has an incredible life story that spans the globe from Ethiopia to Sweden, France, and America. He followed his passion for food and the experience that it can create and is now one of the world's top chefs and restaurant owners. This interview is part of my series The Drink with Kate Snow. You'll find other conversations with people at the top of their game at NBCNews.com slash The Drink. Marcus Samuelson. Yes. You have over a dozen famous restaurants, award-winning

chef. So the big question is how did how did you do that? Wow. Give me a short answer. Yeah I can tell you in a short way I had a lot of help. It was really my parents, my grandparents, and mentors. Yeah. Great mentors that saw more in me. Okay so what what do we have? What is this? Well, you have to spell it first. That's your first step. Glögg.

Glögg. Yeah. G-L-O. Two umlauts. It's the Swedish thing. Yeah, glögg. Glögg. Am I saying it right?

Yeah, glögg. You pronounce it that way. Glögg. Okay. So this is, right? Doesn't it smell great? It smells so good. Right? So this is basically like a... Oh, this is dangerous. It's like a German Glühwein, right? Doesn't it smell great? It smells so good. Right? So this is basically like a- Oh, this is dangerous.

It's like a German glue wine, right? Leftover red wine, some citrus, cinnamon, cardamom. And in Sweden, they put a lot of vodka in it too. So yeah. Vodka in this too? At least a little bit. Okay. You are Swedish. Yeah. and Ethiopian. Both.

And American. And American. And American, definitely. You were born in Ethiopia. Yeah. You were three years old when you got tuberculosis? Same exact age as my son is right now. My sister and I, and mom, we got tuberculosis and she eventually passed away.

She got us into a Swedish hospital. Your mom, I heard, carried you. We got tuberculosis and she eventually passed away. She got us into a Swedish hospital. Your mom, I heard, carried you. Yeah, walked us into, from the village all the way into the city. How far was that? Very, very far. Over 20 miles. Yeah. And she's holding you on her back. Yeah, and my sister, you know, she was four at the time.

So extremely tough journey, got to the city, got to the capital, eventually found us a Swedish hospital. Just happened to be a Swedish hospital. Yeah, and that's how, she passes away, but my sister and I survive. And here's really where the story changes, right? Luck, but also you need to see the goodness in others, right? In that hospital, the nurse that takes care of us,

she now realizes there's two more kids that don't have any parents. She has three kids of her own, but she takes us in. Wow. And she becomes, she took care of us until we get adopted. You got adopted by a couple from Sweden. Yeah. So they come down to Ethiopia, pick you up, I imagine, take you back to a completely different world. Yeah. Once I get to Sweden, you know, you're just like a Swedish kid.

You play hockey, you play, you know, you make, play in the snow and all of that stuff. You adjusted. You became Swedish. Yeah. And I grew up with, all our food was homemade, right? Wow. And so whether we bake bread, so whether we're picking lingonberries or fishing, that they preserve the fish. There's stuff that my grandmother Helga taught me that we still do to this day. I mean, she taught me how to cure chicken, for example.

Yeah. Salt cured chicken, you know, like. So in your restaurants now. Yeah, we still use that recipe. We cure it in salt and water and it firms it up. I heard that you wanted to be a soccer player. Yeah. You still play soccer? I do. Okay for fun. For fun. But you wanted to be like premier league soccer player go to the world cup right? And that didn't work out. It didn't work out. You know I draw still so much from soccer. It taught me so many things. It taught me teamwork, work ethic I got from home, but also from coach

and also from being on the team. It gives you humility. You can work. You realize when you play on a high level that there's always a kid working just as hard or even harder than you. And it taught me a lot about dreams. I took all that energy and I just started focusing on food. And then food really became an escape. Michelin wasn't in Sweden at that point. We wanted to work in France. I didn't speak French. Oh. But I prepared myself, so I started to teach myself French.

And I was that kid walking around with a Sony Walkman, but not with music, with French glasses. Trying to learn French. Trying to teach myself French, yeah. And eventually we worked over 30 restaurants, got a lot of no's. In France? In France, yeah. And eventually got one yes and got in. I mean, a lot of people would quit

after one or two letters. Yeah. Do you think that's one of the things, persistence or whatever that is inside you that has made you successful? Persistence really come from a combination of things. Your surrounding, but also that I knew I had support. My parents really support that dream. It was my dream. They supported me.

But you got 29 no's. Yes, a lot of no's. Or something like that. But it was also, at the same time, I was out there doing stuff. When I was writing to go to France, I was working in Switzerland. I was working in Austria. I had already been to Japan, so it wasn't that I sat home waiting for that. So that's another lesson. Yeah.

Don't wait for it. It's not going to happen that way. You just got to create your own opportunity. How do you end up going from Europe to New York? I was in France, worked in a Michelin restaurant. And Chef really told me, like, listen, your ambition, I don't think it's going to work out for you in Europe. You need to go somewhere. You need to go to America.

We're sitting in Red Rooster's upstairs. Yeah. This is like a speakeasy down here. Yeah, this is ginny's. For people who aren't from New York, this restaurant is huge. Everybody knows the Red Rooster in Harlem. Yeah, we're very fortunate. I always wanted to live in Harlem. I think I was always searching for a community.

We're really influenced by the migration and southern experience of southerners moving up to the north and really what African American culture has brought to this country from jazz to food to music to culture to art, all of it. It's all happening here at the Red Brewster. How do you describe the journey that you've had? Well my journey is shared, you know. Food is a place that's, whether you have a drink or whether you share somebody's food, it's better with others and it's shared. From Ethiopia to my growing up in Sweden,

where the food was very, very different, right? Pickled herring, meatballs, very, very different. Not Ethiopian. Not Ethiopian, exactly, but delicious. But I learned a lot from my parents and my grandparents and my sisters. We were obviously a family that looked very different in our neighborhood. We grew up in a predominantly white country, and we were three little black kids,

and our family looked very, very odd and different. But we didn't feel that different because we were surrounded around love. Who's your hero? Besides my mom, I would say... Oh, it could be your mom. Yeah, my mother, and I would say MLK. Best thing on your menu?

Your favorite thing? Fried chicken. What's your guilty pleasure? You gotta have one. New York pizza. Oh, there you go. Yeah. Coffee. Coffee.

You want to bring it in? Tell me what this is. This is Ethiopian coffee. And this is your wife's set, right? Yes, yes, yes. And then you pour the coffee, right? And then you just add a little bit of butter. Butter.

And this is the fermented butter that you add into the coffee. So this is instead of this. Is it sweet? No, it's salty. It's salty. Yes. Okay. Oh, I smell the butter.

Mm-hmm. It's rich. And there's a whole, normally a whole procedure, like a whole tradition of how you serve the coffee. Having a cup of coffee in Ethiopia is a one-hour endeavor, right? Yeah. Where you drink it, it goes fast, but eating peanuts and popcorn, you're toasting them, you're smelling that, you're pounding them, you bring the coffee to your bowl.

Like it's a whole procedure. It's wonderful. Thank you for sharing that with us. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you for coming. This was great.