For a chef who had opened a new restaurant an hour ago, Kwame Onwuachi looked very calm. The place is called Sirius, and it is a four-seat tasting counter inside another restaurant, Dogon. Mr. Onwuachi opened Dogon itself a month earlier, on Sept. 9, inside the Salamander Washington DC hotel.
So really, he was overseeing two infant restaurants. He also had lines to remember. One of the four customers that night at Sirius was going to propose right after the Wagyu oxtails, and had asked Mr. Onwuachi to present the ring under a cloche with a little speech saying that the course represented “love and a lifetime of commitment and trust.”
ImageMr. Onwuachi’s menus trace the global paths of the African diaspora.Credit...Scott Suchman for The New York TimesImageAt Dogon, lobster is given a Jamaican-style escovitch treatment.Credit...Scott Suchman for The New York TimesImage
If any of this was weighing on Mr. Onwuachi, there was no sign of it in his confident smile as he walked through Dogon’s packed dining room, stopping to greet a friend here, pose for a photo there. And all of it, including the proposal, went off without a hitch, as seems to be the case lately with most things Mr. Onwuachi touches.
At 34, he has achieved a prominence that eludes peers who have been cooking for longer and control more restaurants. The past decade has given us car-seat food critics and TikTok bakers, but hardly any new stars whose fame came primarily from working in a restaurant.
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