A table at Tatiana, the Afro-Caribbean restaurant at Lincoln Center, is among the hardest gets in New York — Wagyu short rib, head-on shrimp in Creole butter, that kind of menu. Its chef-owner, Kwame Onwuachi, goes home and boils Top Ramen. “I don’t want to do dishes. I just want to eat quickly,” he tells the Journal’s Nora Knoepflmacher in this weekend’s In My Kitchen. Home is newly acquired: at 36, splitting his time between New York and Los Angeles, he recently bought a house in the San Fernando Valley, drawn in part by the size of its kitchen.
The ramen isn’t a bit. Onwuachi grew up on the instant stuff — the flavor is unmatched, he says — and his weekend version, adapted from his new cookbook All Hours, out this month, is what he calls the triple-deluxe: actual shrimp rather than shrimp flavoring, a seafood broth and real crab, and it’s still cheap and nearly effortless. It runs 20 minutes and serves two. The components: two 3-ounce packets of shrimp-flavored Top Ramen or Maruchan, seasoning included; half a pound of shrimp seasoned with his House Spice; 3 cups of seafood or chicken stock; 2 tablespoons of cold butter; a cup of jumbo lump crab; hoisin, sesame seeds and scallions on top.
His mother’s spice, and her business
He puts House Spice on nearly everything, and the recipe is his mother’s: a Creole-Cajun blend of salt, pepper, granulated onion and garlic, cayenne and paprika, plus a little Worcestershire powder he adds for acidity. It gets its own salt cellar beside the salt. She’s a chef who ran a catering company out of the house, and the whole family helped out to keep the lights on. The other side of his family is Nigerian, where he says a meal takes a whole day to make, and as a boy there he helped raise livestock and grow vegetables, learning to use every part of the animal. He grew up in the Bronx, rural Nigeria and Louisiana, and the cookbook draws on all three, from weeknight shortcuts to a Hawaiian whole-roasted duck. His mother blessed the new kitchen the way you’d expect: steamed mussels in coconut cream, rib-eye, chicken, rice and sautéed mushrooms. As for fame, he says it’s just cooking dinner; the real pressure belongs to the brain surgeon whose patient’s family is waiting outside.
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The cash-flow lesson (M5) is the recipe itself. The best splurge is often an upgrade to a cheap staple: the base is a couple of instant-ramen packets, the money goes to the shrimp, the crab and the stock, and the result beats fighting for a reservation. That’s a household pattern worth copying beyond dinner — spend on the part that changes the experience, not the part that changes the label. It holds for the car, the vacation and the kitchen remodel.
The business-owner story is the quieter one. A catering company run from the house, with the whole family helping to keep the lights on, is how a lot of family enterprises start — and how a lot of them end up undocumented: no separate accounts, no succession plan, no idea what the business is worth until somebody has to know. Onwuachi’s version produced a chef with restaurants in three cities and a cookbook. Most versions need a fifteen-minute conversation about where the business stops and the household starts. Bring the statement; bring the recipe if you like.