Whether it’s the latest faux barbecue shack in Chelsea or a new Shanghainese joint in Queens, restaurants in this restless immigrant city are always in the business of assimilation and translation. No one has been more adept at this, over the years, than Marcus Samuelsson, the talented chef and co-proprietor of the great Scandinavian establishment Aquavit.
But with the opening of his latest venture, Merkato 55, Samuelsson has set himself quite a task. As every devout chef-groupie knows, Samuelsson was born in Ethiopia but grew up with his adoptive parents in Sweden. And now, having explored one side of his culinary heritage, he is turning his attention to the other. But Merkato 55 isn’t an Ethiopian restaurant, exactly; it’s an “African” one. And it’s not opening on some distant corner of the Lower East Side; it’s on Gansevoort Street, in the epicenter of the meatpacking district. Samuelsson’s reckless, slightly loony ambition, it seems, is to bring the jumbled palates and cuisines of an entire continent together under one roof and simultaneously to make them cool.
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