“What I ate every day was at hawker stands. ... I was always confused, like the street food here is better than what I'm cooking. But what am I doing? ... Do I need three tablecloths in order to make my food taste good?”
The Chef's Cut · Food & Beverage · October 2026
Asked whether young chefs are pushed to build a personal brand too early, Samuelsson goes back to cooking at a high-end hotel in Singapore while eating street food every day. His point is that a chef needs to be clear about why they are in food at all.
Transcript
Well, I can go over the lambs. I can go over lambs barbecue and get the detail. Adrian, Adrian, used to hang out on 50. Whatever that's for you, I know lambs. Yeah,
I know 75th and 50th character. Do you feel like today young chefs are under pressure to build a personal brand too early in their careers?
I never want to be the guy back in my day. What we did, that's just like not in this era. And for me, it comes down to like we can talk about Anthony and Tristan, for example, right? I think that live a good balance of both. Like, Tristan is not cooking because he's going to put it on social media. Like, he's cooking first and then it puts on social media, right? And I think everybody today have to do with what fits them. You know, everyone is not going to be a food nerd like us. Like, we're a very rare tribe. Like, everybody that comes from this platform, we are very rare, right? But if you're an auntie and you are doing Ethiopian food and you can sell it on IG and your kids knows how to push it, why not? That extra income food is not just this pressure place for us. It's such a big, beautiful tent. And I don't think what I saw that in Singapore, like, oh, because I was cooking at Raffles in Singapore, super high-end, all of that stuff. But what I ate every day was at hawker stands. So I knew there was a separation between my stuff and what I really dug. And I was always confused, like the street food here is better than what I'm cooking. But what am I doing? Why am I leaning towards this? Do I need three tablecloths in order to make my food taste good? How come this waka, how come this ginger chicken is the, it's not even close that it's the best chicken I've ever had in my life. It's the best by far. So I was like, and that's again, going back to hip-hop. Like, I do not have to be at Carnegie Hall only to appreciate music. I appreciate the guy on the subway, right? So you have to have clarity. Why are you in this space? And it's going to come very rough days and going to come amazing days. So for us that are in food, I think you have to have clarity where you are. And you can move that, right? You can be just a line cook or you can have a podcast or you can be on TV or you can bring it, whatever. It's your journey. Maybe clear on your journey, you know, whatever that is.
I mean, it's, I think, in your career is a great thing of like an evolution of like from fine dining to all these different things to TV. And I'm sure like when you started, could have any of this have been in, you know, even in your wildest dreams, like all the things you've done, you know, you're like, I always wanted to come to New York. You came, you know, 30 years later, you're still there. You built an empire. You built, you know, a legacy. You bid on, you know, billion shows. You got your newest cookbooks coming out in October.
Yeah, back to green. Yes. Very excited. Yeah. So is that, is that, is that number? Yeah. Yeah. I'm very excited about it. Thanks for bringing it up. Jamila Robinson and I, we had really fun writing the book. It was really about how can you bring in superfoods into everyday cooking, right? We know about chia seeds, we know about tech, we hear about these ingredients that have been in our surroundings. But, you know, how do I bring that in? But then the other thing was like, wait a minute, all this food is in the sun belt, right? That kind of goes from Hawaii to Mexico to the Caribbean to West Africa to Ethiopia to India. And I'm like, let's focus on these on this belt. And it's still underrepresented, yet this is really how we eat today. So we, again, highlighting some of the incredible chefs like Leanne Wong that I used to work with back in the day, is in the book. Like so many people that are amazing that some I've worked with, some I've not worked with, but they're just like coming from this space. And we were all at some point trained to do French cooking, but also then go back to do our own food. And it's about health, it's about delicious, it's about that these ingredients. Like if you want to make a John John, if you want to make a mushroom rice today, right? You can discover John John these amazing mushrooms from Haiti, right? And you can get them tried. Like back in the day, you couldn't maybe get them here. Today you can get them because of internet, right? So like the excuses of you, if you can get salmon from Whole Food, you can also get dried John John rice. Do you know what I mean? So the excuses are out. They are gone. Like if you want to cook with a sense of palate and delicious, we're now at the stage where we can do that.
Well, and I thought what's interesting to me is like, you know, what I was kind of reading about this book, this more like vegetable focus book, is that like, this is nothing new for you. You're talking about doing a vegetarian tasting media at Aqua V in 96. You know what I mean? Which people of us are just like, you know, losing their minds about. But also, like, I was reading the whole thing, and I think. It was maybe it was 2010 where it was like, I think Obaba had the, was it the prime minister of India or ambassador from India came in and he kicked a vegetarian meal out of the south lot of the white house?
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