Chris Scott on Mentorship & his Generation of Black Chefs

Last week Chris Scott sent me an email with a link to a video he made about the power of mentorship and what he hopes to teach the next generation of Black chefs. I asked chef Scott if I could post the video on this site and if we could chat about the inspiration behind the video and the importance of mentorship between generations of Black chefs. What follows is an excerpt of our call. - Korsha

Cooking is where I lose myself and find myself again. As a chef from time to time you ask yourself, ‘why am I even doing this shit?’ It’s in that mix that I try to reconnect with why I do what I do. Having a mentor is so useful in that sense. Talking to someone who has walked the walk and can rein you in on why what you’re working on matters, is invaluable.  

Recently I was talking to a mentor of mine, chef Al Paris, about a dinner I did at the James Beard Foundation in New York City. I mentioned to him that cooking that dinner was a way for me to get rid of all the anger, sadness and frustration at feeling typecast and like people only wanted soul food and fried chicken from me. He said, ‘This food didn’t do anything to you and the fact that people gravitate towards you when you do this type of food has nothing to do with fried chicken, per se. It's about the love and the story behind it. It's about the beautiful things you put into it and they come to you and love you for that.’ It made sense to me. I’m so grateful I’m able to bounce ideas off of someone like chef Paris.

Being Black chefs, our baskets are quite full, especially when you’re talking about chefs in my generation. We've done it all. We've owned, we've lost, we've created, we've destroyed, we've loved, we've felt pain. As someone who has owned three restaurants, and gone through bad partnerships with white folks that don't want to hear my narrative and only wanted financial gain for themselves, I want to pass those lessons on to the next generation of chefs like Kurt Evans, Omar Tate, Jonny Rhodes, to all those guys. I want to be able to help them and say, ‘here's where I fucked up and here's where you can be strong’. That's the kind of mentorship that I'm talking about.

Mentors of mine from back in the day would let me do my thing, but they pulled me in when necessary and let me grow to become the chef that I am. They let me explore my voice and try different things, but they were there to help or to scold or to love or to embrace me like a good parent. I think that there needs to be more mentors that are ready to do that for the next generation of Black chefs. 

It’s important that people from my generation are there for mentorship. Not necessarily mentorship in terms of how to cook, because they already got that, and not necessarily on how to find a voice, because they've already got that too, but the same type of mentorship that went from guys like Carême to Escoffier, from Escoffier to Bocuse, from Bocuse to all these guys now. Those chefs looked out for each other, built upon each others work. They also provided mentorship on skills, business savvy, financials. They got that important hands on mentorship before they went out on their own. If these chefs had any questions about anything, there was always someone there to pull them back in, guide them, show them the way that they needed to go and not many African American chefs have that. 

I want young Black chefs to know this: you have to recognize your own power. You have to recognize what you bring to the table and the struggle that you went through to even be where you are. If you stop for a second and look at how far you’ve come and where you come from, it’ll make you proud. Look at your story with respect and love and pass that on. 

I also want Black chefs to know that exposure is not the goal. We don’t need to battle for exposure, or wait for that phone call from a magazine. Only a select few get that anyway and you don’t need to be on stage or even stage left to be worthy of love and respect. 

Because we’ve been overlooked as chefs, sometimes we’re too busy trying to get shine and it feels like it's us beating each other down to grab the mic. Maybe your work will get picked up by Esquire, by Food and Wine, maybe not, but rather than us fighting each other I want us to redirect and take all of that knowledge, take all of our experiences, kitchen wisdom and teach it to the next generation. We know this craft from cooking to prepping to growing to learning to business management to media stuff to seasonal cooking to heritage cooking. We’re highly skilled and exposure doesn’t define that knowledge. 

I remember watching police brutality against Rodney King on TV with my parents in the house and just how that felt like it moved everything culturally. I think the current climate and the ongoing pain of seeing our people killed by the hands of police has spilled over to us being frustrated with the food world and the constant exclusion of a lot of Black chefs. But I want us to see us and not compete with another. I’m hoping mentorship can be the beautiful thing that comes out of all of this. 

I wonder if everyone was in a healthy state of mind, where everyone is equal and recognized equally for their beauty, what would the food world look like? How beautiful would that be? Older white chefs are certainly idolized and you hear things about Bocuse and all these old head guys like Norman van Aken and Charlie Trotter all the time, but no one ever comes to the older generation black chefs although we inspired the current generation. We broke open the doors. But no one wants to come to us for reflection. Our generation is filled with so many brilliant, intelligent, creative, artistic, black chefs, writers and everybody in the industry just doing their thing, but nobody knew who the fuck they were. We have a shit ton of knowledge to share. There's a million of us so celebrate all million of us, the same way it is in the white world. 

I often think about how our grandparents were before Obama became president. Think of how it felt for them seeing him as president of the United States with Michelle and his children, living in the white house. That shit must've blown their minds. But talking to my 17 year old daughter, she’s like, ‘of course a Black person can be president’. That’s her reality. It's a totally different context from my grandparents generation to hers.

That's how I'm looking at the art of this next generation moving forward in food. Hopefully it’s moving into a better place where it's going to be so much easier for them to be called on and recognized and their voice to be heard. I'm hoping that people like me, Rodney Frazer, Brother Luck and Herb Wilson and the old heads can take a few of these young cats and just be there for them if they need us. I want our own to embrace the next because that helps them have it much easier.

- As told to Korsha Wilson