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Harlem cuisine emphasizes comfort food. When renowned chef Marcus Samuelsson opens his newest restaurant the Red Rooster, near West 125th Street and Lenox Avenue, in a few weeks, his menu will also feature American comfort foods, but with his own twist.
“We feel it fits right with the Rooster. Why American comfort food? I want to do something that celebrates the everyday,” Samuelsson says, in an interview at the Upper East Side offices of his hospitality management and food media company, the Marcus Samuelsson Group.
The Red Rooster's "eat-friendly" bar. (Photo by Farhod Family)
An Ethiopian native raised in Sweden, Samuelsson moved to Harlem almost seven years ago, and says the 3300 square foot restaurant, representing an investment of more than $2 million, reflects Harlem’s culture.
“We’re bringing in artwork by artists who live or worked in Harlem, same for the music,” an upbeat Samuelsson says, dressed in slim jeans and a bright plaid shirt. “When we did the interior of the restaurant, we looked at the brownstones and the colors you find in Harlem.”
Samuelsson, 39, became executive chef of the acclaimed midtown restaurant Aquavit when he was just 24. In 2003, the James Beard Foundation named him“Best Chef: New York City.” His other restaurants include the Japanese-American-inspired Riingo, in midtown, and C-House in Chicago.
Like so many well-known chefs, he’s become a brand, an award-winning cookbook author and co-founder of the Townhouse Restaurant Group, a restaurant consulting company. Samuelsson has partnered with the Bluestar company to create a line of ranges for home kitchens and competed on and won Bravo’s “Top Chef Masters.” He’s just launched a six-week series on Sirius XM’s Martha Stewart Living Radio, called “At the Red Rooster with Marcus Samuelsson.”
His decision to open a restaurant in Harlem stems partly from his desire to cook in his own community.
“It’s a food desert,” says Samuelsson, citing the predominance of bodegas and small markets, “and I was like, stop talking about it and put something there. Cooking in the community means a lot to me.”
To celebrate the everyday, the Red Rooster will assume various guises: In the morning it will be a café where customers can read the paper over coffee and croissants; at lunch and dinner, it will resemble a more traditional restaurant dining room. The menu will offer inexpensive snacks like house-made cornbread, served with tomato jam, for around $4. Entrees will start around $14.
“There will be appetizers for four or five bucks to entrees for 26 bucks — that’s affordable,” says Samuelsson.
After hours, the open and spacious downstairs will feature a speakeasy lounge with musicians and open mic nights.
The concept came from Samuelsson’s love for the recently closed M and G Diner, at the corner of West 125th Street and Morningside Avenue.
“Harlem has always had this incredible diner culture,” he says. “I loved M and G Diner because people would come in and celebrate the restaurant. They would sit at the counter, eat their breakfast, their lunch and dinner, too.”
The interior of the Red Rooster will feature a brownstone-colored bar in the middle of the spacious dining room. Diner inspired, the bar is lower to the ground and “eat-friendly,” Samuelsson says. Rustic shelves on the walls alongside the bar are filled with art, kitchen tools and books.
The Red Rooster joins a neighborhood undergoing a transformation, its new restaurants and wine stores contrasting with aging cash-for-gold stores, sneaker and cell phone shops.
“The whole neighborhood is changing. You’ve got places opening up like the German beer garden and Harlem Vintage,” says Mark Roth, general manager of the Red Rooster. “Right next door, Chez Lucienne is a Michelin-recommended restaurant.”
Surrounding restaurateurs see the Red Rooster as a boost. “It’s going to be good for the neighborhood and our business,” says Seydou Kabore, a bartender at Chez Lucienne, a French bistro that opened almost two years ago a few doors down from the Red Rooster. “It will attract a lot of people. They will see our restaurant, and next time they come to Harlem, they will try our place.”
Samuelsson says he hopes the Red Rooster does draw more restaurants to Harlem. “It gives a sense of trust and more reason to come uptown,” he says. “We need to start inviting people to come uptown, spend the money in the community, and rather than complain about it you have to create something fun and affordable.”
Wentworth Brown, superintendent of the building the Red Rooster occupies, believes that it will bring “a balanced crowd,” and add to Harlem’s tourism. “It’s going to bring the downtown crowd uptown,” he says.
The restaurant has been holding a few private events, which Samuelsson calls “test runs,” and is scheduled to open mid-December. It will take several months, Samuelsson says, to develop any financial analysis. “You always have to give a restaurant a 90-day opening period and right now we are only at the pre-opening.
