For Kwame Onwuachi, taking a “vacation” isn’t easy.
Maybe it’s because he’s busy running Tatiana, his immensely popular restaurant in New York City’s Lincoln Center, which opened last November and is still impossible to get a reservation at. Before that, you could have placed the blame on his publishing schedule: In 2019, he wrote Notes From a Young Black Chef, followed by his cookbook My America: Recipes From a Young Black Chef. Between appearances on Top Chef, and now, all the work going into opening a new restaurant in Washington D.C.—coming this March—Onwuachi has a lot keeping him busy.
Work trips are his best bet at squeezing in some personal travel, which was the case last year when he spent a week in Jamaica. “I was going for a shoot, and I was able to go off and do my own thing in my free time,” says Onwuachi. “I don’t go on vacation, so this is it. It’s always like, okay, I’m doing an event over here, so I’m going to spend a couple days over there.”
Jamaica was a special one, though. Onwuachi, whose restaurants famously draw on his family’s Southern, African, and Caribbean heritage, was excited to return to the island largely on his own terms. “My family’s from Jamaica, so I went there as a kid and I’ve been back several times,” says Onwuachi. “But as an adult, it’s great because you can choose your own meals.” Whenever the cameras stopped rolling on the YesChef cooking class he was filming, that’s exactly what he did: he went out, and ate, devouring his way through Kingston, Negril, and Boston Beach over the course of a week.
Below, Onwuachi guides us through the high notes of his trip—from tasting a whole hog, in the birthplace of jerk, that took 12 hours to roast, to the morning cup that finally showed him how to appreciate coffee.
What was the first thing you ate when you got off the plane?
Whenever I fly into Kingston, I’m going to Devon House and I’m getting a curry goat patty, and then some grape nut ice cream. So that’s what I did on this trip. Grape nut is particular to the island, that’s really their thing—it’s like a cereal? I don’t really know what the hell it is, but it’s good.
What about your go-to breakfast every day?
Ackee and salt fish, ackee and salt fish, ackee and salt fish! That the traditional Jamaican breakfast. Ackee is this fruit that grows on a tree, and it has these large seeds that protrude out of it. When it’s ripe and safe to eat, it will open up; when the fruit is closed it’s poisonous. It tastes almost like scrambled eggs when it’s sauteed, and they do it with onions and peppers, and then they add salted cod. You eat it with either a fried boiled dumpling, or boiled green banana. So that’s an everyday thing. They serve it everywhere, but we went to Ziggy’s several times on this trip.
