No chef’s identity politics have been the topic of more discussion than Marcus Samuelsson’s. That’s in no small part because the Ethiopian-born, Swedish-raised Samuelsson made his name on the intersection of his dual heritage, first at NYC’s Aquavit, where at 23 he was the youngest chef to receive three stars from the New York Times. Years later, it became a central theme again at his Harlem flagship, Red Rooster, where dishes like gravlax and “Helga’s meatballs” sit side-by-side with a doro wat pot pie and beef kitfo. “I realized that Scandinavia wasn’t a big place, in terms of people having experienced it, and neither was Africa, so combining the two was a way to create really original food.”

But the celebrity chef has also come under fire for taking that cultural remix beyond his own diverse experience. When Red Rooster (named after a landmark speakeasy of the Harlem Renaissance) opened in 2010 on 125th Street, just down the block from Sylvia’s, people balked. Though Samuelsson had been living in the neighborhood since 2002, his attempt to synthesize the entirety of its cultural heritage into one glossy, $2 million restaurant struck some as uncomfortably appropriative. Eddie Huang, in a piece for the New York Observer, described it as “writing the report for a book he never read.” Samuelsson, for his part, has stated that he intended for Red Rooster to honor the African-American experience he grew up admiring from afar. "Just because I'm black doesn't mean I understand Harlem," he told the New York Times. "For the diaspora of people of color, it's a much larger culture." 

For Samuelsson, that kind of cultural synthesis is a natural part of his creative process. Before moving to New York, he embarked on a personal chef’s tour, traveling to Singapore, Japan, and beyond, gathering inspiration as he went. “I was never set with this idea that Europe has it all and that’s that,” he says. “I knew I had to go through Europe to get structure and training, but a good dish for me was something I’d eaten at the fish market in Tokyo, or one I’d eaten for breakfast in Singapore.” He used all of that experience at Aquavit, to great success. In that Times review, Ruth Reichl said he was “walking a tightrope between Swedish tradition and modern taste” in his use of  multicultural influences like Indian curry leaves and Chinese tea-smoked duck. It’s no wonder that he approached Harlem with the same scholarly eye, spending several years researching fried chicken alone, in places as varied as the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and neighborhood icon Charles' Pan-Fried Chicken.

Seven years in, Red Rooster has settled comfortably into its place, a tourist-and-local-trafficked mainstay of the new 125th Street. Samuelsson’s second Harlem venture, the casual Streetbird Rotisserie, opened on 116th Street to fewer (if not no) fireworks, a neighborhood spot serving chicken sandwiches under the glow of the neon sign salvaged from shuttered soul-food restaurant M&G Diner. As Samuelsson’s empire expands beyond New York’s borders—including a waterfront Bermuda hotel restaurant and a taqueria in Malmo, Sweden—his persona now encompasses an ever-expanding number of identities. And while he may remain the most high-profile proponent of Harlem's food scene, it's by no means the only trick in his book.

From Ethiopian comfort food, to the most technically difficult dish he ever executed, these are the 10 dishes that made Marcus Samuelsson’s career.

The day after school finished, my parents would drive me up to my dad’s fishing village. It’s not a question of what you do: You fix the boats or you fish. Everyone works in the fishing culture. In the late spring and early summer, mackerel really runs well, so we fished mackerel four to five days a week. If you got 40 mackerels, you smoked and pickled 10 each, and you gave five or 10 away to your neighbors who were elderly, and then you seared off the other five or 10. Outside our house we grew dill and chives and parsley, and on the other side we had fresh potatoes. We’d probably eat this three days a week during the summertime: seared mackerel in a black cast-iron pan, mashed potatoes, and maybe sour cream that was topped off with either fresh wild chives or dill. 

Shiro is the simplest dish, and it’s probably the one that people in Ethiopia eat the most. It’s a poor man’s dish: chickpea flour that you bring to a boil with water or tomato, and simmer for 40 minutes. You eat it like a porridge, often with dried injera bread that you just soak and heat up. When I got adopted, my mother walked up into the hospital, and shiro is one of the things that I know she had with her. If you’re traveling, especially in Africa, where there’s no refrigeration, dry chickpea flour is something you can set up anywhere. All you need is fire and a little bit of water. 

I’m cooking today because of hanging out with my grandmother and my older sisters in the kitchen. Doing your homework and doing your chores—you did it all in the kitchen. So cooking wasn’t an event, it was just part of what we did as a family. You didn’t sign up for two hours of cooking classes, you know?  The dish that we enjoyed making very much was meatballs, because you always have leftover meat at home, and you have an egg, and we always had breadcrumbs. My sisters and I rolled the meatballs, and my grandmother seared them in whatever fat she had saved up—pork fat, chicken fat. She taught me how to make a gravy with pickling liquid and lingonberries; just real cooking.

I was probably 12 years old when I was like, OK, I’m going to make this meal. That’s when I kind of knew I wanted to become a chef. I always loved char, and from picking mushrooms with my dad, I always knew exactly what type of chanterelles to pick. I cleaned them and I learned how to make my own stew with chives and onions and mushrooms, and I served it for my uncle and my dad. It was just an awesome thing to be able to do. When you’re the youngest and you lose every fight in the house to your two older sisters, any time you can do something and get a little bit of applause at home, you do it. 

When I started as a young chef at Aquavit, at that point I’d lived in Japan and Singapore. And now I was in New York, so I felt like I was seeing food in a different way. I did this tomato soup with a crab stuffing in August, treating the crab almost ceviche style, like a light acid salad with a lot of lime. In the soup I used kaffir lime leaves and Indian curry leaves. In her review of Aquavit, Ruth Reichl talked about “chasing flavors.” These were flavors for me that weren’t that strange because I’d been to that part of the world, but I guess in the setting of Scandinavian food, it was very strange. I was like, “Wow, she picked up on that. She must be so advanced as a writer!” This was early, it was ’95-96, so the internet wasn’t really connected to food yet.

When I worked in France, I cleaned so much foie gras for terrines, so I was intrigued by this idea of foie gras as great food. When I came to America, people seared it and served it with a chutney and toast—so very mid-’90s to me. I was like, “I’m not doing that, it’s not happening.” I wanted to create something that was hot and cold at the same time, and I came up with this flourless foie gras pudding that is crispy outside and moist inside, and I served it with garam masala ice cream. It’s technically one of the hardest dishes you can make. It took four or five years to develop. I feel like that was the height of my technical cooking at Aquavit.

Beef kitfo is a warm beef tartare from Ethiopia that’s just like a traditional beef tartare. But the fact that it’s warm makes it such a sophisticated dish. It comes from my wife’s tribe in Ethiopia—food in Ethiopia is very tribal, and you cook for parties or spiritual reasons, not just because you like something. It’s a little like eating turkey for Thanksgiving. You chop this beautiful beef and then in the pan you sauté up some chopped shallots in this fermented butter, and then you take the pan off the heat and you add the meat, you just kiss it in the pan. It’s something you’ve never tasted before. If you have a lineup of 15 people, you can find eight who love it and seven who don’t, but that doesn’t matter for me. It’s a dish that you’re going to remember.

I knew that in order to have a successful restaurant in Harlem, I wanted to fully master this dish. There were choices that I had to ask myself: skin on or off, dark meat or white meat, how many times do I fry it. What should my marinade be? What should the spice rub be? I had to make clear choices, and also in that set of choices try to be original. We went to Charles’ Pan-fried Chicken, ate fried chicken in the South. Trying to fully understand a dish that you didn’t grow up with but you knew it had to be a signature dish—I had a lot of fear around that. It took me about three years to fully understand. It’s a humbling journey, because you think you might improve but then the execution is wrong, or the execution was right but you had the wrong recipe—there are so many ways of evolving.

Going to Japan very early in my life, I’ve been inspired by sushi, but it’s something I’d never say that I’ve mastered. We do a dish with that sweet-flavored sushi rice that we then fry and put creamed wasabi and avocado on top, and then we put sea urchin on top of that. It’s a dish that I wouldn’t ever call sushi, but it’s obviously highly informed by and inspired by sushi. For a chef, words mean something, so you can’t say it’s sushi because then it means something real. There are certain titles where you don’t cross that boundary, and sushi is one of them. You don’t put that word on the menu unless it is. 

Herring is deeply personal to me. For every Swedish tradition you have a smorgasbord, and on that table there should be five versions of herring. I love a pickled or a matjes herring with potato salad and a little brown butter on top and some horseradish. That’s Sweden to me. I don’t have to travel, I can just have that with a little bit of rye bread and some hard cheese, and I’m in Sweden. Food can do that, it can create this sense of, “Oh, I’m here now.”