Chefs And The City

The Bronx-based cooking collective known as Ghetto Gastro is borough-proud, boundary-busting—and world-conquering.

- Ghetto Gastro

GHETTO GASTRO IS COMPOSED of several chefs, though it’s the guy who is not a chef who came up with the group’s name. “It came to me in a dream,” says Jon Gray, a.k.a. Fidel Gastro. He had just eaten at Abistro on Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn, then one of the few places around serving Senegalese fried chicken. “When I woke up, the name was there,” Gray recalls. And it has worked like a charm. “It turns people off who are supposed to be turned off, and it interests people who are into trying different things—after all, ghetto is nothing but creativity that hasn’t been stolen yet.”