In a cultural moment when the word “activist” is thrown around constantly, Ghetto Gastro founders Jon Gray, Pierre Serrao and Lester Walker are genuinely deserving of the accolade.
Since establishing the Bronx-based collective in 2012, the trio has become a favourite of both Hollywood and the fashion industry. Case in point: earlier this year, Ghetto Gastro collaborated with Wolfgang Puck on the Governors Ball menu for the Oscars, while Rick Owens and Michelle Lamy have had them cater their Thanksgiving dinners. “Nowadays, we might have the best party of New York Fashion Week, too, and we’re not even a fashion house,” Gray says with a laugh over the phone from New York.
Yet the group has never lost sight of its original mission: social justice reform. During the pandemic, it delivered thousands of meals to people in need across the Bronx – teaming up with the nonprofit Rethink Food to create a service inspired by the Black Panthers’ free breakfast programme. “Being raised in a community where you see the symptoms of oppression on a daily basis, you understand that the government and the powers that be can’t really be depended on,” Gray told Vogue at the time. “So, we were just like, ‘How can we take our privilege and our power to organise and connect that and just do the work?’ We call ourselves the Black Power Kitchen – a phrase coined by [Black Panthers’ leader] Stokely Carmichael – so we really wanted to lean into that history and culture, to take what our ancestors had done and reimagine and execute it.”
As the group translates that philosophy to its first cookbook, Black Power Kitchen, Gray tells Vogue about how the project came to life, and why it’s far more than just a collection of recipes.
Black Power Kitchen is out now.
In a way, it feels strange to me that this is Ghetto Gastro’s first cookbook, but at the same time, you’ve followed such an unconventional path, it makes sense. What was the genesis of Black Power Kitchen, exactly?
It’s crazy for us because it’s true that we’ve made a habit of going right when everyone else is going left, pushing against the so-called rules of the food world. So when everybody was like, “Do you think you want a restaurant?” It was a no. “Are you gonna do a book?” Again, the answer was always no. So when we first started talking about this project [after a publisher approached us], we knew it wasn’t going to be a straightforward cookbook. That’s how booksellers might categorise it, but we saw it as something different. We started jamming on it in 2020, and have worked on it for two years, but honestly our whole lives are distilled into the printed matter of Black Power Kitchen.
As you would expect from Ghetto Gastro, the visuals are incredibly strong – it’s not every cookbook that juxtaposes a recipe for a green salad with a Toyin Ojih Odutola painting, or devotes a two-page spread to Kerry James Marshall’s “Past Times”. How did you decide who and what to include?
Well, from day one, we were really focused on how everything would look, because some people are visual learners. If they don’t read anything, what’s going to be striking enough to make them understand what we’re trying to do? We realised we had to take a fresh approach. So we linked up with Nayquan Shuler, who’s known for his still-lifes, to photograph the actual dishes – he had never shot food before, which is crazy. Then Joshua Woods – a distinguished fashion photographer who’s been with us since the really early days of GG – came with us to the Bronx, hitting Orchard Beach, talking to families, shooting the establishments that raised us, like Green Garden Juice Bar. And then, when it came to the recipes themselves, we focused on signature GG dishes that we really wanted to get out into the world because, for us, food is really a medium to tell a story – it’s not just something you put on a plate – so it’s a way for us to get our message across.
Maybe this is too optimistic, but with certain releases– like Bryant Terry’s Black Food – it feels like there’s been an awakening about the extent to which global cuisine has actually been shaped by African and African-American traditions. Do you feel that people are becoming more aware of how much we owe to the Black community food-wise?
I do, but I still think it’s essential to have more Black voices telling these Black stories, rather than our narratives being transmitted through someone else. When you look at the culinary traditions of West Africa – and of Indigenous Americans – those are actually the root of American cuisine. After the uprising in 2020 [following the death of George Floyd], no one can pretend to be ignorant of the past and keep their head in the clouds anymore. You have to pay attention. A lot of people, especially the younger generation, have a real thirst for knowledge about our food history, so shout out to Dr Jessica B Harris for being able to distil so much of that information into High on the Hog, and having it picked up by Netflix.
