A Virtuoso Chef Whose Time Has Come

At Tatiana, Kwame Onwuachi has drawn inspiration from New York City's history, and his own roots, to create one of America's best Afro-Caribbean restaurants and Manhattan's hottest reservation

- By Jeff Gordinier

The oxtails take forever. Four days, really, but the process of preparing and cooking them has so many steps that you lose track when chef Kwame Onwuachi tries to explain it.

Better to go down into the basement kitchen beneath Tatiana, Onwuachi's new Afro-Caribbean restaurant in New York City's beloved hub of the performing arts, Lincoln Center, and see for yourself. Over here, cook Jamal Lewis mixes up a Caribbean-inflected marinade-fresh bay leaves and cinnamon and allspice and a ginger-garlic paste and some of Onwuachi's grandfather's hot sauce. Over there, Onwuachi dips a spoon into a cauldron in which vegetables and roasted chickens and hundreds of chicken feet boil and bob for hours as they're rendered into gelatinous, deeply flavored stock. The oxtails soak in the marinade for 24 hours. They're seared. They're braised in the stock. Eventually they're served in a pond of funky, fatty, gleaming sauce that is the result of these flavors combining, converging, cooking down. The sauce is so sticky that it clings to your fingernails all the way to the next morning, and you can't imagine being mad about that, because it's one of the most delicious things you will ever taste.