Nobody is quite sure what's going on in the event room of the Westwood Baptist Church, University Center. Not the older black ladies from the surrounding North Nashville neighborhood, who arrive exactly on time, summoned by a mysterious postcard sent to 300 homes, like the first chapter of an Agatha Christie novel:
Not the young white people from farther afield, with their vacuum-sealed water bottles and social-justice 5K T-shirts, who heard about this meeting on NPR or in the local alt-weekly. Not even the pastor, who pops his head into the room, where the long, folding tables are normally used for repasts and Bible-study groups, with a look of puzzlement. The fluorescent bulbs hum, the sneakers of each arrivee squeak on the linoleum floor, and those already seated squirm and murmur to each other awkwardly.
At the head of the main table sits their host: slim, bearded, 35 years old, dressed in a dark dress shirt and slacks, and in no hurry to interrupt whatever ripples of uncertainty are traveling up and down the table. A helper moves in and out of an adjacent kitchen, quietly delivering Dixie Ultra paper plates of food. On them sits a southern meat-and-three by way of Africa: a version of efo riro, made with cooked-down collard greens; a pottage of mashed plantains; and finally, a Nigerian take on Nashville's most famous culinary export—hot chicken. The name of this event is Hot Chicken Shit. The aforementioned “twist” is that while dinner is free for the black residents of the neighborhood, the prices for white visitors are listed on a pledge form at their seats: $100 for one piece of chicken; $1,000 for four pieces. For a whole bird, with sides, you must donate the deed to a property in North Nashville.
Eventually the man at the head of the table speaks: “My name is Tunde Wey. I am Nigerian. I am a cook. I am here trying to sell chicken for enormous amounts of money.” The plan, he goes on, is to thus end gentrification. There is laughter around the table. “I know,” he says, smiling. “But the problem is outrageous. I thought I'd come up with an equally outrageous plan to fix it.”
You couldn't hope for a more succinct credo to sum up the work that Tunde Wey has been engaged in over the past several years—a hybrid of political action, performance art, revolutionary rhetoric, impish provocation, and other assorted acts of public intellectualism, all built around a critique of the way we eat in America today.
Perhaps you're looking for a story about how Food Brings Us Together. About how even in These Dark Times, we can always gather around The Table to experience the healing Power of Food.
If so, I'm sorry.
Those are the kinds of platitudes that Wey, who is a prolific texter, might respond to with one of his favorite emojis: the little face laughing so hard that tears gush out of both eyes. In fact, he does not consider such comforting narratives any kind of laughing matter. He believes they are dangerous, and it's his goal, as he travels across the country, to expose and erase them.
In New Orleans, where he now lives, he opened a lunch stall at which white people were asked to pay two and a half times more for a plate of food than people of color, the rough equivalent of the income disparity between the two groups. In Ann Arbor, white customers lined up to experience the highs and lows of random wealth distribution at Wey's food truck, which utilized an elaborate algorithm to choose which diners would receive lunch for their money and which would get stuck with empty boxes. In New York and Durham and San Francisco and a dozen other cities, he's hosted dinners where the food and drink is the pretense for facilitating the kinds of conversations that Americans do their best to avoid ever having.
In the meantime, Wey, an autodidact with no formal training in either cooking or political theory, has all but run an abattoir for food-world sacred cows. In a semi-regular column for the San Francisco Chronicle, he excoriated LocoL, chefs Roy Choi and Daniel Patterson's experiment in progressive fast food. (Unless ownership of LocoL was transferred to the poor neighborhoods it was purporting to help, he demanded, it should “leave Watts, Oakland and its other proposed communities, or shed its narrative of change.”) In another column, he took on Anthony Bourdain's televised adventures in Africa. (“His usual brand of charm, which plays well in an American context, only read as imperial. His tired and standard offer of a countercultural perspective was cloying, and it dissolved—like sugar in garri—to reveal the expansive firmament of White Americanness he represents.”) In the Oxford American, he declared that white southern chefs should stop cooking dishes derived from the African slave trade and he upbraided author and Southern Foodways Alliance head John T. Edge: “John T., you have endorsed and celebrated the appropriation of black Southern food without consequence, and the consequences have compounded with interest,” he wrote. “You have to strip yourself of the marginal benefits of this appropriation willingly, with grace, or unwillingly by force and with shame.” This, mind you, was in Edge's own column, which he had invited Wey to share. And the men are friends. You might argue with any of Wey's conclusions, but there is no question that he is intent on punching up.
That Wey's absolutism and his choice of targets have endeared him to the food establishment, rather than alienated him from it—coverage of his events has all but universally glowed, and he's become a regular invitee at conferences and festivals—is a testament to the convergence of two trends: One is the ever expanding role of the chef as thinker, talker, activist, and nearly anything else that doesn't involve standing at a stove. The other is a moment of intense self-scrutiny in the food world, one that began even before the chef and restaurant #MeToo scandals of the past year and a half—an interrogation that has come to include food's role in everything from gender and the environment to mental health and, yes, of course, race.
There has arisen a boomlet of racially focused dining experiences. They range from the subtly pedantic (Seattle's JuneBaby offers an online encyclopedia of African-American culinary history) and civic-minded (the Los Angeles City Council recently sponsored 100 free dinners around the city to facilitate racial dialogue) to the high-concept (the tasting menu at Indigo, in Houston, promises a “revised reflection of what it is like eating through the ‘isms’ of America as a copper-colored person” and features dishes with names like Descendants of Igbo and Eradication of Appropriation) and the bordering-on-parody (chef Jenny Dorsey's “Asian in America” dinners posit sweetbreads as “the model minority of the offal world” and incorporate spoken-word poetry and virtual reality).
Of these, Wey's projects are the least forgiving and most direct. Food at his dinners is not metaphor; it is Trojan horse. There are times when it appears that food does not even particularly interest him. His hands—expressive, slender, and soft—are not chef's hands. The act of cooking has become about as central to his work as throwing a football is to Colin Kaepernick's. Indeed, if there's a model for Wey's short, incendiary career, it is Kaepernick, whose most radical transgression has been to blast away the notion that sports can be simply a realm of mindless escape. Wey wants to do the same for food.
To be sure, there's also an element of self-flagellation, if not outright Radical Chic, in the spectacle of white liberal foodies lining up to be dressed down at what some reviews have proudly labeled “discomfort dinners.” It is a dynamic that Wey both counts on and is ambivalent about.
“White folks will consume me. They will consume my work and feel gratification for being abused or however they perceive it,” he says. “But the implication that I'm here to do a service, which is to make you uncomfortable… That's such an egocentric response. It's not about you! What I want is racial equity. The discomfort is just something that happens along the way.”
Wey makes an unusual firebrand. He listens more than he talks, though when he gets rolling it is in full, composed sentences. He speaks with the deliberate effort and occasional hitch of a lifelong stutterer. He dislikes confrontation—though obviously not so much as to avoid it when he feels confrontation is necessary. In a crowd, he can even seem insecure, but a significant part of his charisma comes from the rare ability to sit comfortably with being uncomfortable.
I first met Wey in 2015, during the brief, five-month period of his life when he was acting most like a traditional chef. Ironically, it was at the white-hot center of a gentrification debate in New Orleans. I live down the street from a onetime public market called the St. Roch Market that had been moribund since Hurricane Katrina. By the time it reopened, with the help of several million dollars of federal disaster-relief money, the surrounding neighborhoods, which had once been predominantly working-class African-American, had come to uneasily include a significant group of white professionals, artists, and other transplants. I don't think I need to tell you to which population the resurrected St. Roch Market, a spiffy, bright food hall featuring a cocktail bar, organic grain bowls, and a nominal grocery area offering urban-farm-grown herbs, was designed to appeal. Wey was invited to open a Nigerian food stall there. He called it Lagos, which was also the name of a traveling series of pop-ups he had been staging for the past year.
Lagos is where Wey is from. He was born there, Akintunde Asuquo Osaigbuovo Ojo Wey, in 1983. He grew up in a comfortably middle-class Yoruba family; his grandfather had been second-in-command during the military junta that ruled the country from 1966 to 1979. It was a close family—Wey remembers his mother chewing particularly tough pieces of meat before passing them to her children—but also pressure-filled. Wey's parents had a plan: One of their sons would become an engineer. Another, an architect. Their daughter would become a lawyer, and Tunde would round out the set by becoming a doctor.
He grew up steeped in black American culture: He listened to hip-hop and dressed in streetwear unsuited for the Nigerian climate. He played American video games. (Twenty years later, when engaged in a particularly heated game of Ping-Pong, he will mutter under his breath the immortal line from Mortal Kombat: “Finish him!”) Wey was a precocious high school student, graduating at 15. Soon after, the decision was made to send him and his brothers to live with an aunt who had settled in Detroit. He kicked around community college for a few years, trying to reconcile his parents' hopes for his medical career with the fact that he had neither the interest nor the aptitude. Finally, Wey and a partner opened a space in Hamtramck to host a rotating roster of pop-ups. They called it Revolver. At some point, his visa expired, and Wey quietly slipped into the ranks of 10.7 million undocumented immigrants living and working in every state and city across the nation.
By January 2015, his Lagos pop-ups had grown popular enough to attract some national buzz. He had moved to New Orleans to be with his girlfriend and soon-to-be wife, a community organizer named Claire Nelson, and signed on to the St. Roch Market. He had enticed The New York Times to send a video crew to an upcoming installment of Lagos in Los Angeles.
“I thought it was going to change my life,” Wey says.
It did. Because of his legal status, Wey was doing most of his traveling by Greyhound bus, thus avoiding airports. This was not a well-thought-out strategy. While his Nigerian passport allowed him to proceed through TSA checkpoints largely without incident, the bus route from New Orleans to L.A. took him directly through the heart of America's immigration-enforcement belt.
Almost 20 hours into the trip, not far from Las Cruces, New Mexico, Wey was sitting in the back, zoning out and listening to music. He barely noticed that the bus had rolled to a stop. When he looked up, a border-patrol officer was making his way down the aisle. Every few rows, he would stop and ask a passenger if they were a U.S. citizen.
“Should I lie?” Wey asked himself as the cop got closer. He probably could. The cop was taking some of the answers he was getting at face value, only occasionally asking for passengers' papers. He certainly wasn't out at this southwestern checkpoint looking for itinerant Nigerian chefs.
“In my head, I decided to lie,” Wey says. “I was going to lie.”
The cop reached his row. “Are you a U.S. citizen?” he asked.
Wey's brain said, Lie, lie, lie.
He told the truth.
“I don't know why,” he says, puzzling over it even now. “I just didn't have the balls. I couldn't do it.” Instead, he started explaining that he had been a student but his visa had expired. The cop sighed and asked him to step off the bus. He went off to check Wey's name in his computer. Standing there in the desert, Wey was suddenly overcome by chills. “I was freezing. Started shaking violently. I was thinking, ‘It's not cold enough out here to cause this. What the fuck is happening?’ ”
The cop returned. “I think we're just going to let the bus go,” he said. “Get your stuff.”
“It was the worst thing that had ever happened in my life,” Wey says. “I didn't know what was on the other side of this. Am I going to Nigeria? Am I going to prison?”
Wey's unpreparedness for the eventuality of being detained was, in part, his own brand of optimistic flakiness, but it was also a necessary accommodation faced by millions every day: It's precisely because you can be picked up at any time, ending life as you know it in an instant, that it's impossible to keep that fact constantly in mind without going mad.
“What preparation could I do?” Wey says. “It was just permanent reality. It was like living with a chronic illness: constant unease.”
On Wey's first night in detention, his biggest fear was physical violence. “He's going to get fucked in prison,” someone whispered to Wey about a fellow detainee.
“I thought, ‘Are they fucking people in here?! I don't want to be in this situation,’ ” he says.
The next day, he was sent to a facility and housed with other detainees clad in blue jumpsuits to signify that they were nonviolent offenders. The detainees, almost all of them Hispanic, slept in huge barracks lined with bunk beds. Finally, after 20 days, Wey was brought before a judge who would decide whether he would be allowed to post bond while awaiting a hearing. “It was a moment that only happens in movies,” he remembers. “I was sweating. My palms were wet. Very few people feel that feeling: when you have no control over your whole life.” The judge granted bond, with a hearing set for two years later, which effectively placed Wey into a kind of limbo: not in imminent danger of being picked up or deported, but unable to re-enter the country if he left or, technically, to work. Still, it was the first safe status he'd had since being a student. It was the freest he'd felt in years.
I loved Wey's okra at the St. Roch Market, cooked down to the gelatinous consistency of Ghostbusters slime. And I found myself nearly addicted to his egusi stew, a deeply funky bowl of pulverized melon seeds, tomato, and greens. But even I wasn't able to be the kind of regular customer he needed if he was going to survive. To the out-of-town visitors at whom the market was pitched, such meals were an even tougher sell, up against more recognizable Louisianan specialties. Eventually, the market's owners came to Wey and asked him to put a chicken sandwich on the menu. “I did it,” he said, “but I was also like, ‘Fuck this. I'm not here for a chicken sandwich.’ ” When the chance came to open his own freestanding restaurant on the edge of the French Quarter, Wey jumped on it. I was excited to see what he could do with a full menu and service, but it was not to be; the space fell through. And anyway, Wey was by then onto a different trail.
The Lagos dinners hadn't been explicitly political, but neither were they pitched at foodies. Wey found himself increasingly repelled by American food culture, which he found simultaneously abstract and intellectual, and seemingly about nothing that really mattered: “When you examined it, there was no morality there. I don't mean morality in terms of good or evil, I mean a relevant message—or a message, period—outside of food on a plate.”
Meanwhile, the Black Lives Matter movement was gaining momentum. Wey began to read deeply about America's racial past and present, from W. E. B. Du Bois to Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, whose 2003 book, Racism Without Racists, became a particular touchstone. In it, Bonilla-Silva points a damning finger at those who know enough to know that overt racism is no longer socially acceptable but stop short of challenging the fundamental structures that keep a racist society alive. That is to say: nearly all of us.
In March 2016, at a local butcher shop called Shank Charcuterie, Wey returned to pop-ups with a series of four dinners, but this time was different: Attendees were given a reading list to study up on before arriving. At the tables were questions for discussion. Dinner included jollof rice, pepper soup, whole fish, and presentations from, among others, the leader of a nonprofit aimed at helping African-American girls in New Orleans. In his flyer for the event, Wey had promised: “Spicy Nigerian Food. Adult Beverages. Dim Lights. Sexy Chef. Sexy Music. Sexy Guests. Honest and Respectful Conversations. A Good Ass Party.” And so it proved.
“It was the beginning, and I just had people come up and talk about shit,” Wey says. “I had no idea what I was doing, and I just kept doing it.”
There has remained an improvisatory nature to the dinners as Wey has staged them around the country over the past three years. Some have speakers, but discussion has become the focal point. Wey himself often says little, other than to call on people and pose the occasional prompting question. Some of the dinners were confrontational, others stilted. (The BYO booze often proves to be the most important course in this regard.) It is not unusual for there to be tears.
For Wey, it is navigating the immediate present of the events that matters most. He has markedly little interest in discussing them afterward, when he is often left spent, barely leaving his French Quarter apartment except to play pickup games of soccer. “I give a lot of energy, and I need a lot of downtime,” he says.
At one dinner in New Orleans last fall, he told a group of stunned urban planners—all of whom surely considered themselves progressive, justice-minded activists who had sacrificed much for their social ideals—that they should quit their jobs. It was the harshest I'd seen him be, and the most dogmatic in his insistence that an abstract wrong obliterated the possibility of some concrete good. I asked how he felt about the attendees' reactions: “I'm happy with people leaving feeling however they feel,” he answered. “I feel bad for them personally. But I also don't have the capacity to assuage everyone's upset feelings.” Later he told me, “These are all people who have bachelor's degrees. I'm sure they'll be fine.”
That it is painful and frustrating to be told that one's individual history, feelings, and intentions mean nothing because of one's income or skin color is, obviously, precisely the point. Still, pain and frustration are pain and frustration. A couple of years ago, Wey took me to task for a profile I'd written for this magazine about a white already-quite-famous southern chef who was battling an autoimmune disease. It was, he said, an example of the media's obsession with “the minutiae of whiteness.” I said I had written about a person, not “whiteness,” whatever that meant. He said that the fact I didn't know was part of the problem. I wondered whether, in the age of Trump, he thought this was really the best use of his formidable skills and growing power.
“People are dying, Brett,” he said.
“But not from chef profiles!” I sputtered. And of course then he had me.
“Wouldn't you agree,” he said, switching to graduate-student mode, “that the aggregate of all these disparate reinforcements of whiteness or white fantasy or white power and privilege creates the conglomerate oppressive power?”
Another time, I accused Wey of hating food. I said I sometimes suspected that his indignation at foodie culture was, at least in part, a puffed-up justification for what was really a deep ambivalence about pleasure. I told him I thought it was actually his most American trait.
“I love to eat. I love to fuck. I love to sleep,” he said. Of course, he went on, there should be places where dining is simple pleasure, where food is respite and solace. “The problem is that we have too many spaces where food is just that. We need spaces where we can eat and not think about shit, but if all your spaces are spaces where you eat and don't think about shit, then you're never thinking about shit!”
Finish him!
Still, anybody who has been on the receiving end of Wey's critique might reasonably find themselves asking a version of my question: Why spend so much time going after potential allies when there are so many more egregious and obvious threats and enemies?
“In critique, you have to be hyperbolic. In practice, you need to be nuanced. But one feeds the other. It's hyperbole that creates the space for the nuance,” he says. “And what is the role of the critic? To state the obvious? Or to point to the hidden and understated?”
And who can say he isn't being strategic? The night after the Hot Chicken Shit event, I went by myself to a new restaurant in East Nashville. It was in every way a lovely example of today's modern, placeless, immaculately tasteful restaurant: the menu of ItaloCaliAsian New American dishes (made for sharing), the clever cocktail list, the open kitchen, the exposed ducts and unfinished walls and concrete floors that gave the extremely expensive look of a space whose contractor quit three days before finishing. It was all so nice. The very quintessence of nice. And I sat at the bar feeling a nagging disquiet, a dissatisfaction that I sensed would not go away no matter how many clam pizzas and fluke crudos and Manhattan variations I poured down my throat in an attempt to quell it. That was when I found myself cursing Tunde Wey.
Wey was dispirited in the weeks before he went to Nashville last July to conduct research for what would become the Hot Chicken Shit dinners. “I'm doing all these projects asking white people to give something up,” he said, shaking his head. “And I'm realizing they aren't going to. White people will never give anything up.”
Then he held a preliminary series of Nashville dinners. The Music City has been booming in recent years—even before Amazon announced in November that it would open a new operations center there—and the troubles of gentrification have predictably boomed with it. The transformation of such neighborhoods as East Nashville, Salemtown, and Germantown has been all but complete for years. North Nashville, a neighborhood with deep African-American roots, has not yet undergone that process, but the signs are all there that it's next up in developers' crosshairs. After he'd been in town a few weeks, Wey's tone changed. He had been meeting with local community leaders, city officials, and activists, he texted me, and he had seized on the notion of a community land trust—a strategy that was originally deployed to protect black and poor farmers from losing their land. A CLT in North Nashville would take ownership of the area's housing stock and legally guarantee that it would remain affordable in perpetuity. In other words, Wey wanted to buy every vacant and potentially vacant residence in North Nashville.
“It's all that's occupied my brain. It's doing my head in,” he texted, followed by two emoji heads exploding.
In hot chicken he found a characteristically potent entry point for the project: a uniquely black food that has been flagrantly appropriated in recent years. Invented, the legend goes, by a vengeful lover of a man named Thornton Prince (who, instead of howling in pain, went on to perfect the dish, at Prince's Hot Chicken Shack, in North Nashville), hot chicken has become so popular in recent years that the three most famous examples in the world right now are served by a white couple inside a food court in L.A.'s Chinatown, an Australian who was invited to serve his at last year's MAD Symposium in Copenhagen, and KFC.
As the neighborhood women pick at Wey's Nigerian version at Westwood Baptist, they talk about their homes, the years in them calculated by recalling the ages of children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. They talk about the phone calls, the unannounced doorbell rings, the literal stacks of letters and postcards they receive every week, all from real estate speculators offering to buy their houses. And then, if they're uninterested in selling, the sudden wild increases in property taxes and the mysterious code violations designed to encourage cutting bait and getting out of the neighborhood. It's easy for white people to think of gentrification debates as being about aesthetic encroachment and individual decision-making, and so to be alternately puzzled in response (“Who doesn't like nice things?”) and defensive (“Who are we to blow against the wind?”). This was gentrification experienced as policy, as conspiracy, as existential threat.
Elois Freeman, a 60-something minister at Westwood Baptist who sits at the center of the table wearing a jean jacket and purple earrings, does not mince words: “I think it's a form of cultural genocide,” she says.
Wey sits even more quietly than usual during this dinner, allowing the residents to speak and the potential allies present to offer practical advice: Contact local city-council members, organize a community board, keep on meeting like this. There's a white lawyer there who tells the story of successfully fighting a development project in his own, far more tony neighborhood. “So you'll be able to offer these people advice?” Wey asks. Sure, says the lawyer.
“Pro bono,” Wey adds, not a question.
The next morning, I meet Wey at a soccer game he's found on a field at Vanderbilt University. Soccer is one of Wey's mental escapes and a connection to the country that still feels most like home. There are times when his homesickness is palpable; he has not seen his mother in ten years.
We have lunch at Slim & Husky's, a wildly popular black-owned pizza business that opened in 2017, not far from Westwood Baptist. I ask about the swerve the night had taken away from the high concept of Hot Chicken Shit.
“It's always good when you change your expectations to meet reality,” he says. “I had an audacious goal, and it failed.” In this case, “reality” had been a practical problem to solve: people who needed help staying in their homes. And the approach bears fruit: An attendee at the third Hot Chicken Shit dinner ends up donating $100,000 to the cause. Not enough to buy any houses, but plenty to start a process of neighborhood organization and education. And not bad in exchange for a plate of chicken and some honest conversation.
For a moment, at Slim & Husky's, I have the disconcerting image of Wey going straight. After all, he's now being asked to speak at Columbia University and with United Nations officials. He applied (though it was hard to say how seriously) for the vacant position of restaurant critic at the San Francisco Chronicle. He recently received a book contract from MCD, an imprint of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Maybe his future was one of quiet, earnest community activism in rooms like the one at Westwood Baptist, with its folding tables and buzzing lights and vital, very local dreams. Then Wey starts telling me about the idea for his next set of dinners: Marry an Immigrant. See, the menu would be all aphrodisiacs, and attendees would be paired on blind dates with undocumented immigrants. At the end, they'd all get married.
“It's illegal, but of course it's very legal because that's how people get married these days,” Wey said. “It's through the Internet. It's through matchmaking services. It happens on The Bachelor.” He considered it happily, this absurd, crazy, dangerous idea. We laughed.
The dinners, redubbed Marriage Trumps All, began taking place in Pittsburgh in early February.
But before that, on January 7, the morning after Epiphany, Wey dressed in a dark three-piece suit and, with Nelson, made his way to the 18th floor of a building on Poydras Street, where U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has its New Orleans office. There, after a brief interview under oath, watched over by a scowling portrait of Donald Trump, in the midst of a federal-government shutdown predicated on keeping immigrants out of the United States, in the heart of a city that was once the largest market for African bodies in North America, Tunde Wey was granted the status of legal resident.
Briefly overcome by this minor miracle, I texted: “Tell me why this story's ending isn't now a warm, fuzzy message about how, despite it all, America still works.”
Immediately the three dots of a return message being composed appeared, and I smiled; Wey isn't the only one who knows how to provoke. The dots stayed for a long time, and I readied myself for the screed about to arrive. But when the message came, it was just one line:
“'Cus you know better.”
Brett Martin is a GQ correspondent.
A version of this story originally appeared in the March 2019 issue with the title "The Provocations of Chef Tunde Wey."
