Chef Kwame Onwuachi Returns to NYC With an Afro-Caribbean Lincoln Center Restaurant

Chef Kwame Onwuachi is returning to New York to open a restaurant at Lincoln Center, the New York Times reports. The star chef is opening a restaurant on the ground floor of performance venue David Geffen Hall, the headquarters of New York Philharmonic.

According to the publication, Onwuachi’s, unnamed restaurant, will focus on an Afro-Caribbean menu filtered through a New York lens, with dishes like “bodega-style chopped cheese buns made with beef, Taleggio cheese and truffles, Egusi soup dumplings and braised oxtails.”

The David Geffen Hall project is a homecoming for the native New Yorker, who grew up in the Bronx, and experienced a meteoric rise to fame in the restaurant world at a young age. Onwuachi got his start in heavy-hitter fine dining New York restaurants like Per Se and went on to compete on Top Chef.

In recent years, he was the chef of Kith/Kin in Washington, D.C. (he later resigned), which helped him nab a 2019 James Beard Award. In 2019 he published a tell-all memoir about his experience of being a young, Black chef working in fine dining restaurants, which is already being adapted as a movie.

Onwuachi’s new restaurant is a part of several hospitality projects set to open at Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall, undergoing a multimillion-dollar overhaul, years in the making. The building is relaunching this October, two years ahead of schedule, and it looks like Onwuachi’s New York restaurant may open this fall as well.

Eater has reached out to Onwuachi and Lincoln Center for more information.