• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 521 0

with stratospheric prices and equally elevated overhead. In the new economy, it was doomed; Clark closed it in 1990. He then moved to Los Angeles and became executive chef at Bice, an Italian restaurant. But the celebrity culture of the city and its finicky dining ethos did not suit Clark’s temperament, and after a two-year sojourn he returned to the East Coast, this time to Washington, D.C. There he became chef at the Hay-Adams Hotel, where the Clintons were frequent diners. By the spring of 1994, upon the retirement of White House chef Pierre Chambrin, Clark’s name was on the short list to become the Clintons’ White House chef. Clark, who would have been the first official African American White House chef, demurred. Activists and civil rights leaders, aware of the honor that went with the request, were saddened by his refusal of the post, but Clark stood firm, citing loyalty to the Hay-Adams and wariness about the loss of personal identity and creative flexibility that came with the job, despite its prestige. In 1995, though, Clark left the Hay-Adams and returned to New York, where he became the chef at Tavern on the Green. Clark’s promise was never fully attained. He died in 1998 from congestive heart failure at forty-two.

It was a shock from which the black culinary world is still recovering, because although blacks had been cooking for the white elite for centuries, Clark was the first black who seemed poised to enter the high-flying realm of twentieth-century superstar chefs. Although aware of the honor, Clark did not want to be categorized by race. “I consider myself a chef. The press has considered me a prominent black chef,” he boldly stated. He remained, however, keenly aware of his roots and his past. At Tavern on the Green, he installed the first barbecue grill and added items to the menu inspired by the classic African American Southern tastes he’d learned at his family’s table. More important, Clark also spent much of his free time mentoring young black culinary students and working with different organizations to raise funds for scholarships for them. The brevity of his life, cut short in the prime of his career, deprived him of several of the accolades received subsequently by his peers. Patrick Clark’s true renown came from the respect in which he was held by fellow chefs, from the delight of diners who ate at the various restaurants where he cooked, and from the ongoing admiration of a new generation of young black chefs for whom he became the “north star.”

Clark was a superstar chef yet spent most of his career working at establishments owned by others. The harsh reality was that even in the high-flying 1990s, restaurant ownership was difficult: Costs were prohibitive; backers were difficult to find; and banks were usually leery of loaning to African American chefs, who were still thought to know only how to prepare food from the classic Southern black repertoire. It required more than the creative entrepre-neurship of Thomas Downing or Barney Ford to open a restaurant in the 1990s. It seemed that the days when blacks gained fame and fortune through food had ended just at the point when the culinary realm became a profession of honor and not a service job.

Then, in 1994, New York magazine restaurant critic Gael Greene wrote an article titled “Soul Food Now,” which signaled the next step for the diverse traditions of African American food. Ironically, the three seminal voices of African American food of the period were women who had started their culinary journeys decades earlier: Edna Lewis in New York, South Carolina, and Georgia; Sylvia Woods in New York; and Leah Chase in New Orleans.

Edna Lewis was a quiet woman from Virginia whose regal bearing and uncompromising insistence on fresh ingredients and optimum taste made her the doyenne of fin de siècle African American food. It might seem odd that a superstar of the 1990s was born in 1916, in Freetown, Virginia, and was the granddaughter of an emancipated slave. But although Lewis’s culinary career began much earlier, she reached the heights of