Osayi Endolyn Transcript
Kerry Diamond:
Hi everyone. You are listening to Radio Cherry Bombe, and I'm your host, Kerry Diamond, coming to you from Newsstand Studios at Rockefeller Center in the heart of New York City. Each week we feature interviews with the coolest culinary personalities around. Joining me today in the studio is Osayi Endolyn, journalist, author, and board member of The Edna Lewis Foundation.
Osayi co-authored one of the most anticipated cookbooks of the fall, Ghetto Gastro's Black Power Kitchen. Hopefully, you caught my chat with Ghetto Gastro co-founder Jon Gray in our previous episode. If you did, you know this book is way more than a cookbook. In today's episode, we do a deep dive with Osayi about her life and vital work as a writer. In addition to Black Power Kitchen, she's co-authored The Rise: Black Cooks and the Soul of American Food with Chef Marcus Samuelsson, and she's contributed stories and essays to the likes of food and wine, the Oxford American, and the LA Times. Osayi will be joining me in just a minute, so stay tuned.
A little housekeeping, our annual Cooks and Books Festival is taking place November 5th and 6th at Ace Hotel Brooklyn. It's coming up soon. We've got panels, talks, and demos with so many amazing folks you've heard right here on Radio Cherry Bombe. Peeps like Ruth Reichl, Erin French, Grace Young, Tanya Holland, Adrienne Cheatham, Athena Calderone, and lots of new friends too.
If you love cookbooks and writers, this is the place to be. Snag your tickets and check out the talent lineup at cherrybombe.com. If you'd like to make a weekend of it, head over to acehotel.com/brooklyn. That's acehotel.com/brooklyn, for a special Cooks and Books room package. I hope to see you at Cooks and Books. The Cherry Bombe Cooks and Books Festival is presented by our friends at Kerrygold.
Now let's check in with today's guest. Osayi Endolyn, welcome to Radio Cherry Bombe.
Osayi Endolyn:
Thank you.
Kerry Diamond:
Okay, got a few softballs for you for the first few questions. Where did you grow up?
Osayi Endolyn:
I grew up throughout California, born and raised California. Second generation, La Jolla was first pit stop, that's near San Diego on the South Side, then Bay Area, Central Valley, and then back in Southern California, I went to college in L.A.
Kerry Diamond:
What were your favorite foods when you were a little kid?
Osayi Endolyn:
Ooh, California rolls, hamburgers, sweet plantain, pretty much any candy if I could get it.
Kerry Diamond:
You know what popped in my head? I used to eat... I still don't know how children were allowed to eat these things and how they were allowed to be marketed to children, I guess that's why we're lucky to have people like Marion Nestle policing things like this, but I ate Sugar Smacks for breakfast every morning.
Osayi Endolyn:
I don't even know what those were.
Kerry Diamond:
It was puffed rice cereal coated with sugar.
Osayi Endolyn:
Oh yeah. That wasn't happening in my household, no.
Kerry Diamond:
No? What was the deal?
Osayi Endolyn:
We had cereal, but it was going to be like Cheerios, like plain jane Cheerios or my mom loved Raisin Bran, anything with grains and nuts, she was buying all that, which is great in retrospect. At the time it was kind of like the Lucky Charms were not happening, it wasn't going to happen. There was a lot of Quaker Oats.
Kerry Diamond:
A lot of fiber.
Osayi Endolyn:
Yeah fortify, trying to keep us solid for the day ahead, yeah. We were a non-dairy household too, we ate eggs, but we didn't have milk and..
Kerry Diamond:
So what'd you do with those Cheerios? Straight up?
Osayi Endolyn:
It was alt-milk time, it was soy milk or something.
Kerry Diamond:
Okay.
Osayi Endolyn:
They weren't hippie-dippies, they were just health conscious in that way, or tried to be.
Kerry Diamond:
Who cooked?
Osayi Endolyn:
Both of my parents, but they had different repertoires. My mom probably cooked more often. My mom, Angela, it depended, it could be California cuisine, stir fries type of vibe or things that were more kind of reminiscent of things she might have grown up eating. My mother and my aunt grew up in L.A., but they were raised by an aunt of my grandfather's, we called her Annie, so she did a lot of the cooking because my maternal grandmother was a career woman and so she was up and out and a lot of times traveling.
So they grew up with a really traditional kind of southern, great migration repertoire foods. But my mom didn't have... A working mom herself without the benefit of some extended auntie being around. She didn't have the time to do those kinds of recipes and I'm not even really sure she was paying attention like that. I think now she's gotten a lot more into thinking about those recipes and establishing some of her own iconic dishes. And then my dad, he would cook dishes that he knew from his upbringing, he was Nigerian, Edo people, and the Benin people and he would make stews a lot.
Kerry Diamond:
Did you pitch in in the kitchen?
Osayi Endolyn:
I tried to, yeah. I had a little cookbook going on, I can't remember what it was, but it was some bound thing that I had a few go-to recipes. I think one was a popcorn ball thing. And I tried to make pancakes sometimes, and getting there. My mom and I would sometimes make cakes, but again, we weren't doing that from scratch, it was from the bag.
Kerry Diamond:
Who did back then, I didn't know anybody that did back then.
Osayi Endolyn:
This was the nineties, so at this time it was like, bonding time was a couple whisks and it was done, okay clean up.
Kerry Diamond:
And that was homemade back then.
Osayi Endolyn:
When I was little, I remember frying wontons in the kitchen with my mom. That was when we were in the Bay Area, my parents were in grad school, I remember that tiny kitchen. I definitely got put on cleanup duty, I know that.
Kerry Diamond:
Yes chores.
Osayi Endolyn:
I was the eldest, so I always had that going.
Kerry Diamond:
Yeah me too, how many kids?
Osayi Endolyn:
So there are three of us with my mom and my dad. My father had two more boys who I recently met. So I have four brothers and there's also a half sister out there who I haven't met yet, but she's on the other side of the world. My dad was complicated.
Kerry Diamond:
I'm the oldest of five. And I think your mom, I don't know how old your dad was, but I know you've talked about your mom being young when she had you.
Osayi Endolyn:
Yeah, she was just out of college.
Kerry Diamond:
Yeah, my mom was 20.
Osayi Endolyn:
Yeah, I think she was 22, she had me. And it was just a different situation back then than a lot of people. That seems par for the course in terms of the ratio of the age of the parents and first borns that I grow up with, it's twice that now. It's like a lot of my friends are 40, having their first child.
Kerry Diamond:
Were there any signs that you might grow up to be a writer?
Osayi Endolyn:
For sure, yes. I was a early reader. My mom says, probably three I think I started reading and very independent at that. And I have some old homework assignments from early elementary school that were books and stories. I'm sure they were just things we all had to do, but I definitely enjoyed telling a story, illustrating it.
Kerry Diamond:
So you made little books when you were a kid?
Osayi Endolyn:
Yeah, these are little projects that were-
Kerry Diamond:
I love that. What were you writing about?
Osayi Endolyn:
They're kind of awful actually. You forget that the fairy tales you grew up with were pretty violent, as I got older, I was always very strong on the essay projects and things like that, but I didn't really think about it when I got to college for some reason.
Kerry Diamond:
You majored in French.
Osayi Endolyn:
And that was kind of a Hail Mary because I started off as a English major conceptualizing going into law.
Kerry Diamond:
Oh, interesting.
Osayi Endolyn:
Yeah, I don't know.
Kerry Diamond:
Was that short lived?
Osayi Endolyn:
Yeah, because majoring in English was not the business for me. I did not like the way it was set up to really just critique white male European authors, at least for the majority of your curriculum. And then once you get into these upper class courses, suddenly you can talk about American literature and American women, women of color, black writers. It was just a very weird... I didn't love it. I feel like a lot of universities have this identity crisis, just thinking about what the story is we're telling really. Shout out to Milton and T.S Elliot, all those dudes, we have some homegrown classics that are rural representative of, I think the conversations that we would be having as writers or critics today. So I was like, why can't I study Sonia Sanchez and Nikki Giovanni? Why do I have to wait?
So I got out of there during a part of this curriculum called the 10 Series that UCLA [University of California Los Angeles], the English department was renowned for at the time, weeded a lot of people out. And I think about the irony of that now, how is it that you work so hard to be part of an institution and then the institution prides itself on de-inspiring you from the work, can you believe that? So then I was taking French already, as part of a fulfillment of the English major, you have to take a foreign language. And I had studied it all throughout junior high and high school, kind of inspired by my aunt Patrice, who had studied French. My mom had taken French too, but I feel like my aunt and I were more in communication about it. And then I had picked up Afro-American studies as a minor and that really, I think, saved me because college got to be kind of hard for me toward the end. But having that community and really the student leadership that was really led by a lot of those African student union, black student union, all those kids that really kind of supported this otherwise kind of very daunting place.
Kerry Diamond:
Did you gravitate toward those subjects because of personal interest or did you have career aspirations related to them?
Osayi Endolyn:
Oh, after the law thing kind of disappeared, I didn't know what I was going to do. I was just trying to learn and be inspired and learn to think critically and feel like I had some sense of robust knowledge around the world. I liked the way that... What the French major did was get into some of the more global conversation around culture that for some reason wasn't available in the English department. So in the crossover with the way that Afro-American studies program was designed, it was interdisciplinary. So you could be taking a class that was listed as history or psychology or literature or something like that and it would all... Because it is cross pollinated. So it got me into the political science chair, it got me into all these different thoughts that... This was also the first time that I was seeing black identity in a curriculum.
And that in and of itself is crazy that that's a privilege, still. But I think everyone deserves to have themselves feel centered at the conversation. And it was really great to be in those classes because of the representation at the front of the room was different. Those were my first black teachers, in probably, I think my entire education as a public school kid in Cali. The classmates' makeup was different and these classes tended to be smaller as well. So it wasn't career focused, I was interning at the same time, that period, in a TV development at a small production company. I didn't really get to see a lot of stuff go into production. But it was more around... For people who don't know, development is where people conceptualize what's going to eventually be on your TV series or movie or TV film.
Kerry Diamond:
I thought you were going to say development is where ideas go to die.
Osayi Endolyn:
Oh well yeah, that too.
Kerry Diamond:
That too sometimes.
Osayi Endolyn:
It is a graveyard. But its people like, "Oh this book came out, let's see if the rights are available, is there something here?" So I was thinking about storytelling from that perspective and I remember one of the producers there said to me, because I was thinking, am I just blowing in the wind with this random French major? I don't know. And he was like, not everybody needs to be a film and TV studies, go learn something about the world, go figure something out, go explore and decide some things and come to storytelling from a point of view. And I think that was some of the best advice I ever got.
Kerry Diamond:
That's amazing advice.
Osayi Endolyn:
That was Phil Kruner. Shout out Phil.
Kerry Diamond:
Did you ever think about being a professor?
Osayi Endolyn:
Yeah, I've got some sights... my aunt says to wait, she spent some time in academia herself, right now she's the chair of the pop music program at USC [University of Southern California]. So she was my crosstown rival.
Kerry Diamond:
So she says, wait. Okay, well. So then eventually you went and gotten MFA [Masters of Fine Arts] in writing.
Osayi Endolyn:
But that wasn't until later, later.
Kerry Diamond:
How much time in between?
Osayi Endolyn:
That was six years.
Kerry Diamond:
Okay. What led to that decision?
Osayi Endolyn:
Well, I had finally run out of avoiding the thing I had always wanted to do, and I really tried.
Kerry Diamond:
And that thing being writing.
Osayi Endolyn:
Yeah. Because for some reason I had just felt... I can't say I just knew I wanted to be a writer and kept myself from doing that, there was just an expression I wanted to have and I didn't quite know how to go about it. And it took some time for me to, I think, feel confident enough and to feel like, yeah you deserve to do something that maybe doesn't feel like super... Some people get guided around this very creative, choose your own adventure kind of life. And then some of us have kind of that thing, but it's very tailored to these progression steps. And I feel like there was a permission I didn't have to move back and forth between creative, creative meaning maybe more free form, less prescriptive, and also structure, meaning maybe some linear forward movement. And I just had to give myself permission to be little messy and not know.
And that was really very hard for me. And I finally got to a place where I was just so depressed with what my life was like. I was working a lot of retail, which a lot of people are really great at that and God bless them because we need those folks, but I wasn't one of those people. And trying to start little businesses here and there and realizing that that's probably even less productive than working in a mall. Because I feel like at that time I was meeting a lot of folks as well and apprenticing myself to folks and learning.
Kerry Diamond:
But I think this is good for folks to hear, I know from the number of pitches we get, so many people want to be writers and aren't quite sure where to start or how to do it. And I think it's good to hear your journey, that it wasn't so linear.
Osayi Endolyn:
And really it just came down to me saying one night, what would you do if you could do anything? I think I just asked myself this and this tiny, tiny voice said, you'd be a writer dummy. And I was like, Oh. But then I was like, I kind of had a purpose, so then I had to explore it. I said, okay, let me chase this down. I was nervous that if I got right into some kind of program, I would just be doing the program. I wanted to be writer Osayi first and see if I could give myself that. And so I had a lot of benchmarks, milestones that I made for myself. I think at that time I set up a blog, I think I had a little tiny newsletter, it was not major, but it was just something that gave me some cadence.
I started a writer's group, I started to pick up magazines and things around like the business of writing. I spoke to one of my mentors, he really helped me, his name is Mike Decastro. He was the father of one of my best friends, Bailey [Decastro]. And he really supported me in just giving me things to read and reading stuff that I wrote and after almost a year of that, I felt like, okay, I've asserted myself here, now time for me to go get some more information. And that's when I decided to apply for an MFA.
Kerry Diamond:
You were on the Afros and Knives podcast with our friend Tiffani Rozier. You mentioned that fiction writing scares you, did you know which direction you wanted to head? Nonfiction, fiction?
Osayi Endolyn:
All writing kind of scares me. I knew that I wanted to be in nonfiction because I was really inspired by just that literary journalism, narrative nonfiction. I was reading a lot of Joan Didion at the time. I love fiction because of all the things that it provides for you with character and the internal world of a person, the symbolism, all those things. But I love what is possible when you can shape stories that have been rooted in, what's so... I guess you could also say that's what fiction is too, but I don't want to say the stories that are true because I think fiction is some of the truest literature out there. But yeah, I think you know what I'm trying to say, basically I saw myself in non-fiction very, very early. And I still haven't really gotten to the things I actually wanted to really do.
Kerry Diamond:
Oh, you got your whole life ahead of you.
Osayi Endolyn:
Yeah. This food thing just sort of went - and I was like, oh.
Kerry Diamond:
That's my next question. How did food start to emerge as your thing?
Osayi Endolyn:
Well, in that early stage of my blogging, email newsletter thing, whatever, Google reader, whatever that was, whenever I wrote about food people perked up. I always thought that was funny, I'm over here trying to draw some correlation out about a art performance I saw, but then y'all are excited about this soup dumpling, okay. I just wasn't connected to it, I was like, okay, fine.
Kerry Diamond:
So you're like, okay, I'm going to give the people what they want.
Osayi Endolyn:
No, not even. That was the first blip. And then what happened was, while I was at SCAD [Savannah College of Art and Design] Atlanta doing my MFA in writing, I had been concurrently enjoying more on my own about the craft beer scene that was really starting to flourish in the city and starting to connect the dots that... And I had been doing this the last couple of years in a different direction that was more based with the military and American identity, around that stories. And I realized any non-fiction writer has to have a beat. And so you need things that you're kind of drilling down and then focused in.
Kerry Diamond:
Tell folks what a beat is in case they don't know.
Osayi Endolyn:
Oh, just giving yourself a subject to deepen your knowledge and to have relationships within. So I get pitches sometimes that are like check out this new design couch and I'm like, well, I don't write about design, I don't write about couches. So that's like an unfortunate pitch in this direction. So you might be a health reporter and that doesn't mean you cover all health, but it means that you have relationships or knowledge base in that subject area and so you can be well versed in that topic.
Kerry Diamond:
I always think the fun of being a writer is okay, how do you take the couch pitch but make it about food?
Osayi Endolyn:
That's not my ministry.
Kerry Diamond:
But it is a fun exercise to think, huh? how many people actually eat-
Osayi Endolyn:
That is a fun exercise. There's a lot of essays there.
Kerry Diamond:
There's so many pretty pictures of dining rooms and nooks and all those things, but the reality is how many meals do you just eat sitting there?
Osayi Endolyn:
I know, I took a recent headshot on my couch. I was like, let's tell the truth, let's tell the truth about who we are.
Kerry Diamond:
Mine would be all my interior design decisions made around having a cat that destroys all the furniture.
Osayi Endolyn:
Oh man.
Kerry Diamond:
So yeah, I'm still waiting for some design company to come to me to design the first cat lady-
Osayi Endolyn:
Cat proof.
Kerry Diamond:
...furniture collection
Osayi Endolyn:
Abode. Good luck.
Kerry Diamond:
I won't pitch you that story, don't worry.
Osayi Endolyn:
Cats are not my animals.
Kerry Diamond:
No, no? Okay, we won't turn this into conversation about animals or couches. I'm going to take us back to food. Okay, let's jump ahead to your cookbook career because I do not want to run out of time because you've got two spectacular things under your belt and we really need to talk about them, plus all the books you contributed to. But I want to talk about the books co-authored, The Rise: Black Cooks and the Soul of American Food: A Cookbook Dedicated to Black Excellence, you've got lots of our favorite people in there, Mashama Bailey, Dr. Jessica B. Harris, Toni Tipton-Martin is in there, you were the co-author. What does that mean for folks when they see the names of people who contribute to a book? What's the co-author's job?
Osayi Endolyn:
It's one of those titles that is hard to define because every project and every collaboration is different. For me, it has meant that I am responsible for shaping the narrative of the book on The Rise, that meant that I had a mandate from Marcus Samuelsson and the publisher and these big ideas that were floating around. And it was my job to say, okay, how do these discreet ideas and storytelling goals become something that we can thread through a book and consume through words and food.
Kerry Diamond:
I should note you, there are 150-ish recipes in that book. And one thing I've come to learn, I won't put words in your mouth, but I'm sure you feel the same way, chef's relationships to recipes is like language and everyone has their own language.
Osayi Endolyn:
Yes. Now I will say that the recipes in this cookbook were developed by two recipe developers. And it was Marcus' desire toward the end of the project to pay homage to various figures, because The Rise focuses on the personal stories of many folks in the culinary world to articulate the cultural diversity, but also the geographical scope and range of black food ways in the us.
Kerry Diamond:
Big project.
Osayi Endolyn:
So an incredibly ambitious goal he had, he wanted to make sure he could try to acknowledge as many folks as possible. And it's a hard thing to do in a book because there's only so many pages.
Kerry Diamond:
What drew you to the project?
Osayi Endolyn:
Well, it was the first time anyone had talked to me about doing a cookbook, which I had never even considered. I was attracted to the editorial responsibility of taking this conversation and trying to do something new with it that hadn't been done before in modern cookbook storytelling. I was already thinking and writing a lot about food and identity, food in our cultural histories beyond what dishes look like and things taste like. And thinking about really the identities of folks who make this food or what it's like to consume these dishes in different spaces and just all the stuff around food that pushes us into some more critical thought. So it just kind of felt like this was a cool opportunity to see, can I translate this message in another way? That's what always has attracted me into new platforms of storytelling, even on TV it's like, how does this work in this way, it's still to storytelling, it still starts with a narrative idea. So that's why I started on it.
Kerry Diamond:
How long did it take?
Osayi Endolyn:
Much longer than it was expected.
Kerry Diamond:
Books always do.
Osayi Endolyn:
Yeah. I signed onto that project at the tail end of 2017 and there were lots of fits and starts. Marcus has spoken openly, there was a lot of debates or a lot of challenges. I realized, okay, he's really a big ideas person and big ideas is important and it can be inspiring, but then someone has to figure out how to execute that thing and that part, especially when you're working in a new framework, folks who haven't seen The Rise, it's not organized the way most cookbooks are. Most cookbooks, and this is happening, we can talk about this too, industry-wide, leaving behind this very prescriptive take a restaurant and map that menu that already has a story, already has an identity, and just put it in book form. You adjust the recipes for the home cook, boom, boom, that's a lot of books out there.And then there are a lot of things that are more technique driven or maybe focused on around an identity of the celebrity chef or whoever. Now we're getting into a lot more narrative driven storytelling and that pulls in a lot of stuff, pulls in personal things of a person, social history, politics, its a lot of other things. And now you're talking about a lot of the narrative stuff we mentioned earlier and how do you weave that into something that is still supposed to be a technically rooted book. Well, that takes a lot of time when you're not even really realizing that's what you decided to do. Our editor, Michaels Ervan, who I've had a really beautiful relationship with, since the project started off, we were kind of tussling.
We were bucking up and it's hard to trust the person who just got there. I was very new. And I also was kind of like, I just got here, why am I the one having to bring up all these things that are, we can't do it that way, or we have to be cognizant of this, or just trying to be a voice of, the old model can't work here, both in the ways that Marcus had done storytelling before, because he'd always been kind of focused on his story and his restaurant. And so I was challenging him, this is a more expansive conversation that you're having and so some of the declarations you're making, you got to make sure you're saying this in the way you really mean to say it. There are a lot of different backgrounds represented here, and I think that's one of the beautiful things about The Rise, it's also one of the challenges because how do you sum up something that is so vast? The African diaspora, the black diaspora is just incredibly rich and rich and rich and these are not stories that a lot of us get to hear about or seen. And so when you do have that platform, it's like you better do it right.
Kerry Diamond:
Yeah. There's no blueprint for these new types of cookbooks. That's why I think it's so easy for people to churn out the other ones.
Osayi Endolyn:
Exactly. And sometimes being early to the game is difficult because there's not much to compare to and people have so many high hopes. But my intention has always been to have the work that I do make it easier for anybody coming behind. So in the cookbook world, that means that I know The Rise is a comp on a lot of people's proposals, that's systemic change for me. Comp meaning they're listing that book as a comparative title that will support showing that their book can stand in the market. That's what these projects are, that I'm trying to be a part of, I don't want them to just be successful on their own merit in terms of the story we're telling, that's my measure of success, having the accuracy there, but also is this paving away? Is it supporting the way that it was paved for me? Is it challenging these more narrow ideas? And I think that's working so far from what I can tell behind the scenes.
Kerry Diamond:
Well this is a great lead up to the project we're ultimately here to talk about.
Osayi Endolyn:
Wooh.
Kerry Diamond:
Ghetto Gastro presents Black Power Kitchen. I'm so moved by this project, I just think it's such a beautiful book, I'm a big lover of cookbooks you can read and spend time with and not just cook from. And I just think this is a book that deserves so much of the reader's time and attention. I really felt like it instantly is catapulted into the list of a hundred books that a cookbook collector needs to own.
Osayi Endolyn:
Thank you.
Kerry Diamond:
I really think it's that level of special.
Osayi Endolyn:
Thank you Kerry.
Kerry Diamond:
How did you become involved in this project?
Osayi Endolyn:
I was introduced to Ghetto Gastro by Judy Prey, who is an executive editor at Artisan. I had known Judy for a few years through southern food Storytelling folks. She had edited all of Cheryl Day's cookbooks, who's a dear friend. So we had had that rapport and she was familiar with my work. And I had also written an essay in a collection called, You And I Eat The Same, that had been compiled by Chris Ying. I wrote an essay called Fried Chicken is Common Ground, for folks who didn't get that book, they can actually read that essay on Eater because the Eater ran that in full. So we had worked together in regards to just me contributing to that work as well. And so yeah, she reached out to my agent and said, probably going to work on a book with these guys, I would love Osayi to meet them. And I was one of a few folks brought in, It's a small world, so you kind of know everybody who's going in the door. And they at the time had wanted somebody who was based in New York. I was coincidentally already moving to New York at that time. This was early, early 2020. And as it turned out, I ended up being the only one in New York for a while with the way the pandemic ended up turning people around.
Kerry Diamond:
Surprise.
Osayi Endolyn:
So we met in February, 2020.
Kerry Diamond:
So the book started... Wow, it feels like it's been in the works a lot longer.
Osayi Endolyn:
Well that's because Ghetto Gastro has been working-
Kerry Diamond:
Right their 10 year anniversary.
Osayi Endolyn:
Yeah, they just hit 10 years so...
Kerry Diamond:
I think just the amount of work that went into the book, it seems like...
Osayi Endolyn:
Oh yeah, I definitely put 10 years worth of work down in this book and you make sure that these boys hear me say that. It felt like a lifetime because especially of all that we went through that year that we had no idea was coming.
Kerry Diamond:
And I talk about those years as, you really have to apply dog years to those years.
Osayi Endolyn:
That's what I'm saying.
Kerry Diamond:
Because a year was not a year.
Osayi Endolyn:
That's what I'm talking about. II don't know how much time. Yeah. So we met and then I sent forward some more things. It's funny, I hope she doesn't mind me telling the story, but my dear friend Nicole Taylor-
Kerry Diamond:
Love Nicole.
Osayi Endolyn:
I love her too. She met them after me, I knew she was coming in after me and she literally called me later and was just like, I just told them Osayi is the only one who can do this book. She was getting through her own beautiful - what is now Watermelon And Red Birds, so she had plenty to do. I laughed so much because there's people who will say your name, there's people who will say your name, you know what I mean? And I love that story because when she understood all the different elements that GG was asking for, there was a lot of synergy with what I had already been doing and just... you really got to be a strong person, fortitude, but also storyteller, strong point of view to both direct and corral the energy that is Pierre Serrao, Les [Lester] Walker, and Jon Gray. And there's a lot of me in here too.
Kerry Diamond:
That's what I wanted to ask you. The Ghetto Gastro voice is so distinct, how do you as a writer preserve your own voice in a project like this?
Osayi Endolyn:
You're right about that, they have a definitive energy. What they actually did not have is knowledge of how to distill that energy into book form. And that was one of the first things that they said when we met was like, we've got this, we've got that, we've done this, blah blah, blah, blah, but how does that become, you can flip these pages and this is what we... We can say, this is who we are. And I said, Well the how is my problem or my challenge, and all will be revealed. What is in the book feels and sounds like them because of that distillation of the individual voice, the collective voice, my own. I'm projecting some things, I'm kind of calling them forward and some things and I'm saying, can you meet this? Is this right? And they're saying, yeah, okay. I put it out there though.
So this book came together from, they wanted to talk about certain subject matter, they wanted to make sure they could reference these different ideas. And so I spoke to all of them individually. I had kind of read what was out there, a lot of the coverage was very, I would say, art, fashion, design focused. The food world in my opinion, really did not understand Ghetto Gastro at that point in time at least that I encountered them because not having a restaurant just breaks it, it just makes the brain melt for a lot of people. And being a collective that is interested in food as a means to as opposed to the point is also challenging for folks. And then the fact that you have three black men who are outside the scope of what, again, that linear approach that we've talked about, that just messes a lot of people up.
Reducing the multidimensionality of who these folks are, perhaps based on how they're showing up or how they sound, but what are you really looking at? I think that we all have a little bit of that hunger and wanted to really say, okay, we're going to do this in a different way, a very new way. So I had to create that outline based off of these discrete ideas. Another like, a lot of big ideas coming at me, but how do we actually draw this through? And then creating that narrative and supporting it with this is how we're going to get here, here are the sample, all the recipes you sent me, well here's what goes here, here's what goes here. Anytime I ask a question on these projects, the question that comes back, what do you think?
So I just learned, you know what, I'm going to present it to you and if it fits, great and if it doesn't, we're going to make adjustments. But I go along because now I'm like, that's why you pay me the big bucks, you don't come because you already have done all of it, you come because you're not sure, you don't know how. And you have this goal and let's go see if we can meet it. I really feel good about where we got in this project. We tussled a little bit, but it was with love.
Kerry Diamond:
I think all good creative projects, there's some tussling.
Osayi Endolyn:
Yeah, yeah. First the tussle was time, because they were like, "Baby, where is the sample copy?" And I was like, "Hey, let me cook, I'm working on it."
Kerry Diamond:
One of the things I absolutely loved about the book, and I talked to Jon Gray about this, was the feminine energy, which surprised me. And you've got Thelma Golden, you've got Dr. J as they call her, Dr. Jessica B. Harris, the moms, so many... you.
Osayi Endolyn:
Yes.
Kerry Diamond:
The recipe testers and developers. And that all really came through, I thought, so beautifully. Were you suggesting maybe Jessica would be great for the intro? Maybe we should have Thelma because there's so much art and culture in this book?
Osayi Endolyn:
Well, I will say Ghetto Gastro has never had trouble with the ladies of any scope or measure. I say that with love. But yeah, I mean there are a lot of women present in the Ghetto Gastro universe
Kerry Diamond:
Right behind the scenes.
Osayi Endolyn:
Supporting, strategizing, negotiating, advancing. And yeah, sometimes I would say it's a lot of dudes over here, let's mix it up. And sometimes it was just a matter of getting folks in the right space and slots. So knowing that, okay, we definitely want to have this voice or this energy, what's the best application of that? We didn't know we were going to do interviews at first, we thought we might have contributions, but as the project deepened, I started to feel, well, time was getting away from us in some ways, and then when you start farming things out, you may never see people again. And so that was a concern, but also I felt like we were getting to a very distilled, tight place in the voice and I said, I don't think I want to give it away to somebody else to take the energy out. I want to keep it, how can we include folks, but keep the energy here, keep the sensor here. And I said, oh, let's do these Q and A’s, that'll also be a lower lift for everybody. Let me say that again. A lower lift for everybody else. Someone still has to take this 7,000 word thing and reduce it to a compact two page spread.
Kerry Diamond:
When did you first have the book in your hands?
Osayi Endolyn:
I don't know, a couple months ago.
Kerry Diamond:
How did it feel?
Osayi Endolyn:
It was surreal, it was surreal. It takes me a minute to get to a place of excitement about a project like this coming out because I have been with it for so long. And sometimes you're working to such a degree, at least my work is, it's also very unconscious. People really don't understand this about what I do and it's very hard to defend when there are moments of high stress. This doesn't go away. Every restaurant that I'm in, any food show that I watch, any exchange I see through hospitality, they're all cues that I'm distilling and constantly thinking about and picking up on and tucking away, it's just a constant stream. When you're trying to target that stream into a project and you're giving it so much, and this book really did take a lot, you almost forget that it's going to be over one day. And then when you do realize that there's some grief at the end because you've had this thing with you and it was yours, and now you have to start letting other people into it.
And there's this tiny moment where you're like, I don't want to. And that's actually where it's hard to send. Jon will be like just send it to me, just give it to me. And I'm like, I don't want to, It's mine. That's in my head, it's like the tiny, tiny... That's a really deep writer thing that probably... That's more psyche stuff. But then you got to remember, this isn't mine, in terms of, I don't even mean contractually, I just mean the effort that comes through. Yes, some of that is my skill and talent, but a lot of that I feel I'm harnessing and channeling through.
And so it's like, all right, this is part of the agreement, you got to let it go. And then boom, it goes off to the races. And then you're supporting and protecting it.
Kerry Diamond:
You got to do things like sit here with me.
Osayi Endolyn:
Well, before you even get to that point, because it goes through editing and people are maybe challenging some parts of the copy or things. Although we had very supportive editorial process, I have to say. And this was a very challenging book in a lot of ways. It'll be spicy for some people.
Kerry Diamond:
How so?
Osayi Endolyn:
Because we're speaking truths that you're not used to seeing in this way. And talking about where the center of the story is. We're starting in the Bronx, we're starting with this incredible rich tapestry of the diversity of black people expanded to all these other global influences and cultures bridge through the experiences of these three unlikely guys coming through this gastronomic, rural traveler entrepreneur space. And then bringing it right back home. And it's an incredibly personal but very universal and galvanizing message that I think is going to really... As someone said, I'm not jealous of a lot of people's cookbooks, but I'm jealous of someone's.
Kerry Diamond:
I say that to Jon. I was like, you got to write the cookbook that so many people want to write, but they're stuck in what you were referring to earlier, that traditional head note, photo, recipe without a lot of narrative or storytelling in it.
Osayi Endolyn:
I'll have to say, as much as we pushed it, there are ways that I feel like I had to reign in Jon a little bit, reign in our designer, AXLE and Team and New Studio, because it's like, look, okay, I get what you're trying to do, but-
Kerry Diamond:
New Studio being the folks who designed the book, right?
Osayi Endolyn:
Yes.
Kerry Diamond:
They did a beautiful job.
Osayi Endolyn:
But it's like we still got to give people a framework from which they can reference physically to cook, this is still a cookbook. It's not a cookbook, it's a cookbook.
Kerry Diamond:
It's so many things.
Osayi Endolyn:
It is so many things. And it is beyond a cookbook. But I also think it's fun to kind of own that this is a cookbook because now what can cookbooks do? I've seen people look at it for the first time and their mouth just drops.
Kerry Diamond:
What does Jon say? Break the bread. Break bread, break the mold.
Osayi Endolyn:
Yeah.
Kerry Diamond:
You broke the-
Osayi Endolyn:
He's got a lot of -isms.
Kerry Diamond:
He does. You broke the cookbook mold on this one.
Osayi Endolyn:
Thank you.
Kerry Diamond:
Bravo.
Osayi Endolyn:
I think all of us brought our A game, but it really takes something to step out of the way and let people do their thing and trust that you got the right folks in the chair and Judy Prey and the folks at Artisan really did that, that's not typical.
Kerry Diamond:
It's got to be so gratifying because you can bring your A game and not wind up with A game product.
Osayi Endolyn:
I know, trust me.
Kerry Diamond:
This is the A game all the way.
Osayi Endolyn:
Listen, we can have a whole another episode on challenges of collaborations. An executive told me only about 20% of collaborations in the publishing world work, and that's across all disciplines, politics, music, memoir, all that stuff.
Kerry Diamond:
Relationships-
Osayi Endolyn:
It's really, really hard to meet someone for 30 minutes and then decide you want to spend the next three years of your life working very intimately with them and their world and their system. I got Ghetto Gastro'd for three years, it was pretty fun.
Kerry Diamond:
Thank you for sharing all of this with us. Would love to know how can people support what you're doing?
Osayi Endolyn:
Oh man. Well please click and buy whenever you see these projects and stay tuned because I've always got stuff in the works. I'm working on my own book that is on restaurant dining culture in the U.S.
Kerry Diamond:
Fantastic.
Osayi Endolyn:
It's a slow drip, but it's the juicy one.
Kerry Diamond:
And you've got a great link on your website, two published projects that you have right now.
Osayi Endolyn:
Yeah, I mean you know, its-
Kerry Diamond:
If people want to discover more of your world, it's out there.
Osayi Endolyn:
Yeah, it's out there, it'll come to you.
Kerry Diamond:
You're being very modest.
Osayi Endolyn:
It'll come to you.
Kerry Diamond:
You got some great writing out there.
Osayi Endolyn:
Yeah, I mean look, I'm in a few places, I guess the editorial connections have been nice to be able to tell different types of stories. So yeah, the Food and Travel magazines, food and Wine, travel and Leisure for sure. The New York Times, I wrote about High on the Hog, the beautiful show on Netflix, done by some great friends of mine. You can see me on television on Chef's Table and The Next Thing You Eat and Ugly Delicious, a little bit, popped in there with Chang [David Chang]. I try to have some intention around popping up where I do and-
Kerry Diamond:
That's super clear. So I'm very grateful you came on our show today.
Osayi Endolyn:
Thank you for having me.
Kerry Diamond:
That's it for today's show. Thank you so much to Osayi Endolyn for joining me. If you'd like to purchase a copy of Black Power Kitchen, head to ghettogastro.com or pick one up at your favorite black owned bookstore like The Lit. Bar in the Bronx. Don't forget our second annual Cooks and Books Festival taking place November 5th and 6th at Ace Hotel Brooklyn. Head to cherrybombe.com for tickets, all access passes and other details. Radio Cherry Bombe is a production of Cherry Bombe Magazine. Our theme song is by the band Tralala. Thanks to Joseph Hazan, studio engineer for Newsstand Studios at Rockefeller Center. And to our assistant producer, Jenna Sadhu. And thanks to you for listening, you're the Bombe.