Marcus Samuelsson (born November 6, 1970, Abrugandana, Ethiopia) is an Ethiopian-born chef, restaurateur, author, and television personality. In 1995, as executive chef of Aquavit, a Scandinavian restaurant in New York City, Samuelsson, at age 24, became the youngest chef to earn a three-star rating from The New York Times. He has won many awards, including being named the city’s best chef by the James Beard Foundation in 2003, has written several best-selling cookbooks, and hosted the culinary travel show No Passport Required (2018–20).

Early life

Samuelsson was born Kassahun Tsegie in Abrugandana, a small village about two hours outside Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital. He and his older sister, Fantaye Tsegie, did not know their father, Tsegie, who was a priest and leader of the Amhara people. (Samuelsson met his father on a trip to Ethiopia as an adult.) They lived with their mother, Ahnu—an Orthodox Ethiopian Christian who sold crafts—in a hut that Samuelsson described in his 2012 memoir as “the size of two restaurant tables.” When Kassahun Tsegie was two years old, he, his mother, and his sister contracted tuberculosis. They journeyed more than 75 miles (120 km) on foot to an Addis Ababa hospital, where his mother died.

Kassahun and Fantaye Tsegie were adopted in 1973 by Lennart and Ann Marie Samuelsson, a white middle-class couple from Gothenburg (Göteborg), Sweden. In their new home, the children were given new names: Kassahun was renamed Marcus and Fantaye, Linda. The Samuelssons also adopted a third child, Anna Samuelsson. Marcus Samuelsson had a happy childhood in Gothenburg, a blue-collar city he once described as “Pittsburgh by the sea.” He learned to fish and to speak Swedish, German, and English. His grandmother, a retired domestic worker, taught him to cook. Samuelsson excelled at soccer and wanted to play professionally, but after being told he was too small, he turned to cooking as a career.

Culinary career

When Samuelsson was 16, he applied for a job at a McDonald’s but was turned down because of his race. He later found work in the restaurant of a small hotel and enrolled at the Culinary Institute of Gothenburg. Eventually, he was hired as an assistant chef at the Park Avenue Hotel (now the Elite Park Avenue Hotel) in Gothenburg, where he was in charge of cleaning the fish. Samuelsson then began an 18-month apprenticeship as an assistant chef at the five-star Victoria-Jungfrau Grand Hotel & Spa in Interlaken, Switzerland, after which he worked in various restaurants in Switzerland and Austria.

Highly ambitious, Samuelsson wrote to celebrities in the United States, including Oprah Winfrey and David Letterman, for help in finding a position in America. In 1991 he moved to the United States for a few months to apprentice at Aquavit, a Scandinavian restaurant in Midtown Manhattan. After returning to Europe and working in France, he came back to Aquavit in 1994 and was soon promoted to executive chef following the death of the previous chef. Samuelsson was only 23.

The following year Ruth Reichl, the food critic for The New York Times, published a review of Aquavit in which she wrote:

Mr. Samuelsson is cooking delicate and beautiful food, walking a tightrope between Swedish tradition and modern taste. Swedish food often balances salty with sweet—think of herring—but Mr. Samuelsson has appropriated the idea and made it his own. I found myself tasting his best dishes again and again, wondering where the sweetness came from. It was like a musical theme, fading in and out but never disappearing.

Reichl awarded the restaurant three stars, signifying “excellent.” With that review, Samuelsson became the youngest chef to receive a three-star review from the Times. In 1997 he became a partner in the restaurant with owner Hakan Swahn.

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Samuelsson remained executive chef at Aquavit until 2009. In the meantime his fame grew. He was named Rising Star Chef of the Year by the James Beard Foundation in 1999. His first book, Aquavit: And the New Scandinavian Cuisine, was published in 2003. The next year he and Swahn opened Riingo (whose executive chef was one of Samuelsson’s protégés), a Japanese fusion restaurant that brought together, according to a 2014 review in The New York Times, “the clean flavors of Tokyo and Gothenburg, as experienced in Manhattan.” (The restaurant closed in 2012.) Several more restaurants followed, including Red Rooster, which opened in Harlem in December 2010 and reimagined classic soul food. The restaurant received positive reviews for its celebration of Black American food culture, but some accused Samuelsson of contributing to the gentrification of the neighborhood. Samuelsson soon ventured beyond New York, opening restaurants domestically—Miami, Atlanta, and other cities—and internationally—Ethiopia, Canada, and The Bahamas.

In 2009 Samuelsson was the guest chef for the first state dinner hosted by U.S. Pres. Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama. The dinner, held in honor of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his wife, Gursharan Kaur, featured a mix of Indian flavors and African American standards such as okra and collard greens.

Publications and television appearances

Samuelsson is the author of many books, including The Soul of a New Cuisine: A Discovery of the Foods and Flavors of Africa (2006; winner of a 2007 James Beard Award for best international cookbook); Marcus Off Duty: The Recipes I Cook at Home (2014); The Red Rooster Cookbook: The Story of Food and Hustle in Harlem (2016); and The Rise: Black Cooks and the Soul of American Food (2020). His James Beard award-winning memoir, Yes, Chef, was published in 2013.

In his memoir, Samuelsson wrote about food’s universal meaning: “Food and flavors have become my first language. Not English, not Swedish, not Amharic. Whether I’m with the injera makers in their hut [in Ethiopia] or a sushi chef in Tokyo, we speak a common language. We are all on the search for flavors.” To that end, he has advocated for menus that make greater use of climate-friendly foods, such as the native African super grains sorghum, fonio, teff, and millet, not only to expand people’s palates, but also to create a market for African growers.

Samuelsson’s many TV appearances include the cooking shows Iron Chef and Chopped and the travel food show Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown. In 2010 he won the second season of the Bravo network’s cooking competition show Top Chef Masters. Samuelsson also hosted his own TV series—notably, No Passport Required (2018–20), which explores America’s food cultures. He was also the show’s executive producer and in 2019 won another James Beard Foundation Award, for outstanding personality/host. Samuelsson won a Daytime Emmy Award in the short-form category for the series My Mark in 2023.

Personal life

Samuelsson became a U.S. citizen in 2000. In 2009 he married Ethiopian fashion model Maya Haile. The couple has two children—son Zion Mandela Samuelsson, born in 2016, and daughter Grace Ethiopia Samuelsson, born in 2022. Samuelsson also has an adult daughter, Zoe Samuelsson, from a previous relationship.