{"id":2903,"date":"2014-02-22T17:48:38","date_gmt":"2014-02-22T17:48:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/raulmourao.com\/blog\/?p=2903"},"modified":"2014-02-23T01:00:46","modified_gmt":"2014-02-23T01:00:46","slug":"is-harlem-good-now-by-marcus-samuelsson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.archive.raulmourao.com\/blog\/?p=2903","title":{"rendered":"Is Harlem \u2018Good\u2019 Now? By Marcus Samuelsson"},"content":{"rendered":"

Deu no NYT domingo passado o texto abaixo e eu peguei l\u00e1 no site deles<\/a> agora.<\/p>\n

WHEN I was walking to work one day last summer, I noticed that Crab Man Mike was gone from his usual post at 125th Street and Fifth Avenue. Mike has been cooking shellfish in his special pot on the streets of Harlem for 23 years. Concerned, I began asking the other street vendors where he went. Johnny Portland, one of the Jamaican guys who also sets up some days at 125th and Fifth, told me Crab Mike had moved.<\/p>\n

I found him a few blocks farther uptown \u2014 132nd Street and Seventh Avenue, where he had set up his pot in front of Doug E.\u2019s Fresh Chicken and Waffles. He was serving up shellfish to his neighbors and friends. When I asked him why he switched locations, he told me it was because he could no longer recognize his customers at 125th and Fifth. There were too many crowds, too many new faces and businesses. He may have made more sales there, but on this quieter corner he felt more comfortable. The people he served here were people he had known for years. He knew their families, their troubles, their joys.<\/p>\n

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\nPatrons enjoying live music at Paris Blues, a bar that opened over 40 years ago on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard\u00a0and West 121st Street.\u00a0Byron Smith for The New York Times<\/span><\/div>\n
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This is what was more important to him as a cook \u2014 being a part of his customers\u2019 lives. I was struck by this decision. To me it resonated with one of the most valuable lessons I\u2019ve learned from living in Harlem for the last 10 years and operating a restaurant here \u2014 Red Rooster Harlem \u2014 for three: a culture of hospitality.<\/p>\n

When I first started coming to Harlem, it was the late 1990s. I had just moved to New York from France to work at Aquavit, and I had the typical nomadic life of the recent New York transplant. I lived with multiple roommates and moved every few months, searching for a foothold and a place that felt like home. I lived in the East Village and then Hell\u2019s Kitchen, neither too far from the restaurant, where I worked long shifts. When I needed to unwind after work, I always found myself taking the subway uptown.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d take a corner seat at Sylvia\u2019s. Also, the lounge annex of Sylvia\u2019s restaurant, where the chef Melba Wilson worked at the time. \u201cHi, Sugar,\u201d she would say when she walked up to my table. After a long day running a three-star kitchen where we served from the left, cleared from the right, and could make or break our careers on how we julienned vegetables, I found her warmth disarming. I would order a beer, listen to jazz, hip-hop and poetry \u2014 and relax.<\/p>\n

For so long Harlem had just been an idea to me, found in books and music when growing up in Sweden and then working in France. It was Langston Hughes and Miles Davis, the Apollo and the Y, and Malcolm X sitting in a dark corner of Small\u2019s Paradise. It was the center of black culture, the center of cool, a place so remote to me in Europe that I could hardly imagine it. Now I was here, feeling it.<\/p>\n

Those nights were some of the first times in my life when I wasn\u2019t a minority in the room. I\u2019d eat a dinner of soul food at Miss Mamie\u2019s Spoonbread Too, where Norma Jean Darden cooked her mother\u2019s recipes, and then wander the neighborhood. I\u2019d browse the old bookshops and street vendors, surrounded by people from all over the world: Ghana and Senegal, Jamaica and Puerto Rico. Students marched for equal rights, civil-rights activists passed out leaflets, and old native Harlemites fund-raised for churches and schools. There were hardships on the street, poverty and violence at times, but everyone had flair, style and pride. I found movement in the hustle on 125th Street \u2014 a sense of excitement and possibility.<\/p>\n

Everywhere I went in Harlem I felt welcome. I began to recognize a kind of hospitality that I hadn\u2019t known before and that I hadn\u2019t found in fine dining. In the Michelin restaurants in France where I trained early in my career, I was taught excellence in ingredients, presentation and manners. But I wasn\u2019t taught the joy and magic I felt walking into the bars and soul food joints in Harlem.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s this feeling that I most want to convey when asked about Harlem now. Business isn\u2019t just about food and drink, it\u2019s about restoring and sustaining a community that is changing quickly. In the local bars, like Paris Blues, my favorite jazz haunt, there are often crockpots of free food set up in the corner for anyone who\u2019s hungry. At Just Lorraine\u2019s Place on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, near 132nd Street, under a dusty portrait of Thelonious Monk, a poster announces the celebration of a woman\u2019s birthday, with well wishes scrawled in marker next to her portrait. When I stopped by A Touch of Dee on Lenox Avenue at 143rd Street last November, a sign let me know that Corinne was serving that night and a poster announced that Mrs. Dee herself would host a free Thanksgiving dinner. At Showmans Jazz Club, there\u2019s never a cover to hear incredible jazz and R&B, and appetizers and snacks are often free at the bar. These are the places I go to relax, where I can leave my busy life at the door and speak to my neighbors for a while.<\/p>\n

RIGHT now, Harlem is on the verge. Since 2010, there\u2019s been a restaurant boom. Dick Parsons has opened The Cecil in the ground floor of the old Cecil Hotel. The Grange on Amsterdam Avenue at 141st Street features signature cocktails and seasonal local produce on its menu. Bier International, a beer garden with a brilliantly curated range of brews, and the speakeasy 67 Orange have become popular nightspots.<\/p>\n

To a community with 19 percent unemployment, these places bring hundreds of jobs that can\u2019t be outsourced. They don\u2019t just offer cooking and serving positions, but jobs for artists and musicians, lighting and sound engineers, handymen and electricians. Now people are coming uptown for a night out.<\/p>\n

I travel all over the world for work and I am constantly asked to define Harlem. What\u2019s it like, people ask. Is it cool? Is it safe? When I go to places like the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to speak among celebrated thinkers and leaders, I\u2019m often asked: Is Harlem good now? I always have to pause before answering. Good compared with what? To when? These questions all miss the mark. Is Harlem good now? That is a question loaded with long-held ideas about race and class, one that dismisses the complex, vital history of this neighborhood and its people, their contributions to civil rights and art, under one word: \u201cbad.\u201d<\/p>\n

Good or bad doesn\u2019t begin to describe this neighborhood I love. The beauty of Harlem is that it isn\u2019t definable as one thing or another. It has always been a place for the strivers: immigrants of all races and nationalities, artists and musicians and entrepreneurs. People have sought refuge here and have felt the need to seek refuge from here. It\u2019s been brought to its knees by poverty and drugs and unemployment and has been pulled up by its art, its music, its food and its people.<\/p>\n

After talking to Crab Man Mike that day on the street, I invited him to host a summer crab fest as guest chef at Red Rooster. Like any great chef, he brought his own equipment \u2014 his magic pot \u2014 and he cooked up delicious fresh crabs and clams from the Hunts Point Market, seasoned with his secret spice blend. It was one of the most memorable nights we\u2019ve had at the Rooster. Living and working here and walking these streets, I have learned a new sense of hospitality from Harlem. It\u2019s the feeling that lets me know I\u2019m home.<\/p>\n

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Marcus Samuelsson is a co-owner of Red Rooster Harlem.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

A version of this op-ed appears in print on February 16, 2014, on page SR9 of the\u00a0New York edition\u00a0with the headline: Is Harlem \u2018Good\u2019 Now?<\/span>
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