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Culture


THE PROVOCATIONS OF CHEF TUNDE WEY

The NOLA-based Nigerian chef likes to serve up a side of political performance
art with his food, like charging black and white customers different prices to
mirror wealth disparity in America. Brett Martin joins Wey on the road, where
he's pushing his food-related instigations even further.

By Brett Martin

Photography by Edmund D. Fountain

March 6, 2019
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Nobody is quite sure what's going on in the event room of the Westwood Baptist
Church, University Center. Not the older black ladies from the surrounding North
Nashville neighborhood, who arrive exactly on time, summoned by a mysterious
postcard sent to 300 homes, like the first chapter of an Agatha Christie novel:

> Dear Neighbor,
> You are cordially invited to attend a community dinner where we will discuss
> how to end gentrification in North Nashville.… Dinner is FREE and will be
> delicious! Don't miss the twist!

Not the young white people from farther afield, with their vacuum-sealed water
bottles and social-justice 5K T-shirts, who heard about this meeting on NPR or
in the local alt-weekly. Not even the pastor, who pops his head into the room,
where the long, folding tables are normally used for repasts and Bible-study
groups, with a look of puzzlement. The fluorescent bulbs hum, the sneakers of
each arrivee squeak on the linoleum floor, and those already seated squirm and
murmur to each other awkwardly.

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At the head of the main table sits their host: slim, bearded, 35 years old,
dressed in a dark dress shirt and slacks, and in no hurry to interrupt whatever
ripples of uncertainty are traveling up and down the table. A helper moves in
and out of an adjacent kitchen, quietly delivering Dixie Ultra paper plates of
food. On them sits a southern meat-and-three by way of Africa: a version of efo
riro, made with cooked-down collard greens; a pottage of mashed plantains; and
finally, a Nigerian take on Nashville's most famous culinary export—hot chicken.
The name of this event is Hot Chicken Shit. The aforementioned “twist” is that
while dinner is free for the black residents of the neighborhood, the prices for
white visitors are listed on a pledge form at their seats: $100 for one piece of
chicken; $1,000 for four pieces. For a whole bird, with sides, you must donate
the deed to a property in North Nashville.





Eventually the man at the head of the table speaks: “My name is Tunde Wey. I am
Nigerian. I am a cook. I am here trying to sell chicken for enormous amounts of
money.” The plan, he goes on, is to thus end gentrification. There is laughter
around the table. “I know,” he says, smiling. “But the problem is outrageous. I
thought I'd come up with an equally outrageous plan to fix it.”

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You couldn't hope for a more succinct credo to sum up the work that Tunde Wey
has been engaged in over the past several years—a hybrid of political action,
performance art, revolutionary rhetoric, impish provocation, and other assorted
acts of public intellectualism, all built around a critique of the way we eat in
America today.



Perhaps you're looking for a story about how Food Brings Us Together. About how
even in These Dark Times, we can always gather around The Table to experience
the healing Power of Food.

If so, I'm sorry.

Those are the kinds of platitudes that Wey, who is a prolific texter, might
respond to with one of his favorite emojis: the little face laughing so hard
that tears gush out of both eyes. In fact, he does not consider such comforting
narratives any kind of laughing matter. He believes they are dangerous, and it's
his goal, as he travels across the country, to expose and erase them.

In New Orleans, where he now lives, he opened a lunch stall at which white
people were asked to pay two and a half times more for a plate of food than
people of color, the rough equivalent of the income disparity between the two
groups. In Ann Arbor, white customers lined up to experience the highs and lows
of random wealth distribution at Wey's food truck, which utilized an elaborate
algorithm to choose which diners would receive lunch for their money and which
would get stuck with empty boxes. In New York and Durham and San Francisco and a
dozen other cities, he's hosted dinners where the food and drink is the pretense
for facilitating the kinds of conversations that Americans do their best to
avoid ever having.

In the meantime, Wey, an autodidact with no formal training in either cooking or
political theory, has all but run an abattoir for food-world sacred cows. In a
semi-regular column for the San Francisco Chronicle, he excoriated LocoL, chefs
Roy Choi and Daniel Patterson's experiment in progressive fast food. (Unless
ownership of LocoL was transferred to the poor neighborhoods it was purporting
to help, he demanded, it should “leave Watts, Oakland and its other proposed
communities, or shed its narrative of change.”) In another column, he took on
Anthony Bourdain's televised adventures in Africa. (“His usual brand of charm,
which plays well in an American context, only read as imperial. His tired and
standard offer of a countercultural perspective was cloying, and it
dissolved—like sugar in garri—to reveal the expansive firmament of White
Americanness he represents.”) In the Oxford American, he declared that white
southern chefs should stop cooking dishes derived from the African slave trade
and he upbraided author and Southern Foodways Alliance head John T. Edge: “John
T., you have endorsed and celebrated the appropriation of black Southern food
without consequence, and the consequences have compounded with interest,” he
wrote. “You have to strip yourself of the marginal benefits of this
appropriation willingly, with grace, or unwillingly by force and with shame.”
This, mind you, was in Edge's own column, which he had invited Wey to share. And
the men are friends. You might argue with any of Wey's conclusions, but there is
no question that he is intent on punching up.



That Wey's absolutism and his choice of targets have endeared him to the food
establishment, rather than alienated him from it—coverage of his events has all
but universally glowed, and he's become a regular invitee at conferences and
festivals—is a testament to the convergence of two trends: One is the ever
expanding role of the chef as thinker, talker, activist, and nearly anything
else that doesn't involve standing at a stove. The other is a moment of intense
self-scrutiny in the food world, one that began even before the chef and
restaurant #MeToo scandals of the past year and a half—an interrogation that has
come to include food's role in everything from gender and the environment to
mental health and, yes, of course, race.

“My name is Tunde Wey. I am Nigerian. I am here trying to sell chicken for
enormous amounts of money.”

There has arisen a boomlet of racially focused dining experiences. They range
from the subtly pedantic (Seattle's JuneBaby offers an online encyclopedia of
African-American culinary history) and civic-minded (the Los Angeles City
Council recently sponsored 100 free dinners around the city to facilitate racial
dialogue) to the high-concept (the tasting menu at Indigo, in Houston, promises
a “revised reflection of what it is like eating through the ‘isms’ of America as
a copper-colored person” and features dishes with names like Descendants of Igbo
and Eradication of Appropriation) and the bordering-on-parody (chef Jenny
Dorsey's “Asian in America” dinners posit sweetbreads as “the model minority of
the offal world” and incorporate spoken-word poetry and virtual reality).

Of these, Wey's projects are the least forgiving and most direct. Food at his
dinners is not metaphor; it is Trojan horse. There are times when it appears
that food does not even particularly interest him. His hands—expressive,
slender, and soft—are not chef's hands. The act of cooking has become about as
central to his work as throwing a football is to Colin Kaepernick's. Indeed, if
there's a model for Wey's short, incendiary career, it is Kaepernick, whose most
radical transgression has been to blast away the notion that sports can be
simply a realm of mindless escape. Wey wants to do the same for food.



To be sure, there's also an element of self-flagellation, if not outright
Radical Chic, in the spectacle of white liberal foodies lining up to be dressed
down at what some reviews have proudly labeled “discomfort dinners.” It is a
dynamic that Wey both counts on and is ambivalent about.

“White folks will consume me. They will consume my work and feel gratification
for being abused or however they perceive it,” he says. “But the implication
that I'm here to do a service, which is to make you uncomfortable… That's such
an egocentric response. It's not about you! What I want is racial equity. The
discomfort is just something that happens along the way.”

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



A pop-up serving up both Wey's Nigerian cuisine and hard questions about racial
wealth disparity in America.

Anjali Prasertong


Wey makes an unusual firebrand. He listens more than he talks, though when he
gets rolling it is in full, composed sentences. He speaks with the deliberate
effort and occasional hitch of a lifelong stutterer. He dislikes
confrontation—though obviously not so much as to avoid it when he feels
confrontation is necessary. In a crowd, he can even seem insecure, but a
significant part of his charisma comes from the rare ability to sit comfortably
with being uncomfortable.

I first met Wey in 2015, during the brief, five-month period of his life when he
was acting most like a traditional chef. Ironically, it was at the white-hot
center of a gentrification debate in New Orleans. I live down the street from a
onetime public market called the St. Roch Market that had been moribund since
Hurricane Katrina. By the time it reopened, with the help of several million
dollars of federal disaster-relief money, the surrounding neighborhoods, which
had once been predominantly working-class African-American, had come to uneasily
include a significant group of white professionals, artists, and other
transplants. I don't think I need to tell you to which population the
resurrected St. Roch Market, a spiffy, bright food hall featuring a cocktail
bar, organic grain bowls, and a nominal grocery area offering urban-farm-grown
herbs, was designed to appeal. Wey was invited to open a Nigerian food stall
there. He called it Lagos, which was also the name of a traveling series of
pop-ups he had been staging for the past year.

Lagos is where Wey is from. He was born there, Akintunde Asuquo Osaigbuovo Ojo
Wey, in 1983. He grew up in a comfortably middle-class Yoruba family; his
grandfather had been second-in-command during the military junta that ruled the
country from 1966 to 1979. It was a close family—Wey remembers his mother
chewing particularly tough pieces of meat before passing them to her
children—but also pressure-filled. Wey's parents had a plan: One of their sons
would become an engineer. Another, an architect. Their daughter would become a
lawyer, and Tunde would round out the set by becoming a doctor.

He grew up steeped in black American culture: He listened to hip-hop and dressed
in streetwear unsuited for the Nigerian climate. He played American video games.
(Twenty years later, when engaged in a particularly heated game of Ping-Pong, he
will mutter under his breath the immortal line from Mortal Kombat: “Finish
him!”) Wey was a precocious high school student, graduating at 15. Soon after,
the decision was made to send him and his brothers to live with an aunt who had
settled in Detroit. He kicked around community college for a few years, trying
to reconcile his parents' hopes for his medical career with the fact that he had
neither the interest nor the aptitude. Finally, Wey and a partner opened a space
in Hamtramck to host a rotating roster of pop-ups. They called it Revolver. At
some point, his visa expired, and Wey quietly slipped into the ranks of 10.7
million undocumented immigrants living and working in every state and city
across the nation.

“I'm doing all these projects asking white people to give something up. And I'm
realizing…White people will never give anything up.”

By January 2015, his Lagos pop-ups had grown popular enough to attract some
national buzz. He had moved to New Orleans to be with his girlfriend and
soon-to-be wife, a community organizer named Claire Nelson, and signed on to the
St. Roch Market. He had enticed The New York Times to send a video crew to an
upcoming installment of Lagos in Los Angeles.



“I thought it was going to change my life,” Wey says.



It did. Because of his legal status, Wey was doing most of his traveling by
Greyhound bus, thus avoiding airports. This was not a well-thought-out strategy.
While his Nigerian passport allowed him to proceed through TSA checkpoints
largely without incident, the bus route from New Orleans to L.A. took him
directly through the heart of America's immigration-enforcement belt.

Almost 20 hours into the trip, not far from Las Cruces, New Mexico, Wey was
sitting in the back, zoning out and listening to music. He barely noticed that
the bus had rolled to a stop. When he looked up, a border-patrol officer was
making his way down the aisle. Every few rows, he would stop and ask a passenger
if they were a U.S. citizen.

“Should I lie?” Wey asked himself as the cop got closer. He probably could. The
cop was taking some of the answers he was getting at face value, only
occasionally asking for passengers' papers. He certainly wasn't out at this
southwestern checkpoint looking for itinerant Nigerian chefs.

“In my head, I decided to lie,” Wey says. “I was going to lie.”

The cop reached his row. “Are you a U.S. citizen?” he asked.

Wey's brain said, Lie, lie, lie.

He told the truth.

“I don't know why,” he says, puzzling over it even now. “I just didn't have the
balls. I couldn't do it.” Instead, he started explaining that he had been a
student but his visa had expired. The cop sighed and asked him to step off the
bus. He went off to check Wey's name in his computer. Standing there in the
desert, Wey was suddenly overcome by chills. “I was freezing. Started shaking
violently. I was thinking, ‘It's not cold enough out here to cause this. What
the fuck is happening?’ ”



The cop returned. “I think we're just going to let the bus go,” he said. “Get
your stuff.”

“It was the worst thing that had ever happened in my life,” Wey says. “I didn't
know what was on the other side of this. Am I going to Nigeria? Am I going to
prison?”

Wey's unpreparedness for the eventuality of being detained was, in part, his own
brand of optimistic flakiness, but it was also a necessary accommodation faced
by millions every day: It's precisely because you can be picked up at any time,
ending life as you know it in an instant, that it's impossible to keep that fact
constantly in mind without going mad.

“What preparation could I do?” Wey says. “It was just permanent reality. It was
like living with a chronic illness: constant unease.”

On Wey's first night in detention, his biggest fear was physical violence. “He's
going to get fucked in prison,” someone whispered to Wey about a fellow
detainee.

“I thought, ‘Are they fucking people in here?! I don't want to be in this
situation,’ ” he says.

The next day, he was sent to a facility and housed with other detainees clad in
blue jumpsuits to signify that they were nonviolent offenders. The detainees,
almost all of them Hispanic, slept in huge barracks lined with bunk beds.
Finally, after 20 days, Wey was brought before a judge who would decide whether
he would be allowed to post bond while awaiting a hearing. “It was a moment that
only happens in movies,” he remembers. “I was sweating. My palms were wet. Very
few people feel that feeling: when you have no control over your whole life.”
The judge granted bond, with a hearing set for two years later, which
effectively placed Wey into a kind of limbo: not in imminent danger of being
picked up or deported, but unable to re-enter the country if he left or,
technically, to work. Still, it was the first safe status he'd had since being a
student. It was the freest he'd felt in years.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



Photographs inside Wey's home in New Orleans.

I loved Wey's okra at the St. Roch Market, cooked down to the gelatinous
consistency of Ghostbusters slime. And I found myself nearly addicted to his
egusi stew, a deeply funky bowl of pulverized melon seeds, tomato, and greens.
But even I wasn't able to be the kind of regular customer he needed if he was
going to survive. To the out-of-town visitors at whom the market was pitched,
such meals were an even tougher sell, up against more recognizable Louisianan
specialties. Eventually, the market's owners came to Wey and asked him to put a
chicken sandwich on the menu. “I did it,” he said, “but I was also like, ‘Fuck
this. I'm not here for a chicken sandwich.’ ” When the chance came to open his
own freestanding restaurant on the edge of the French Quarter, Wey jumped on it.
I was excited to see what he could do with a full menu and service, but it was
not to be; the space fell through. And anyway, Wey was by then onto a different
trail.



The Lagos dinners hadn't been explicitly political, but neither were they
pitched at foodies. Wey found himself increasingly repelled by American food
culture, which he found simultaneously abstract and intellectual, and seemingly
about nothing that really mattered: “When you examined it, there was no morality
there. I don't mean morality in terms of good or evil, I mean a relevant
message—or a message, period—outside of food on a plate.”

Meanwhile, the Black Lives Matter movement was gaining momentum. Wey began to
read deeply about America's racial past and present, from W. E. B. Du Bois to
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, whose 2003 book, Racism Without Racists, became a
particular touchstone. In it, Bonilla-Silva points a damning finger at those who
know enough to know that overt racism is no longer socially acceptable but stop
short of challenging the fundamental structures that keep a racist society
alive. That is to say: nearly all of us.



In March 2016, at a local butcher shop called Shank Charcuterie, Wey returned to
pop-ups with a series of four dinners, but this time was different: Attendees
were given a reading list to study up on before arriving. At the tables were
questions for discussion. Dinner included jollof rice, pepper soup, whole fish,
and presentations from, among others, the leader of a nonprofit aimed at helping
African-American girls in New Orleans. In his flyer for the event, Wey had
promised: “Spicy Nigerian Food. Adult Beverages. Dim Lights. Sexy Chef. Sexy
Music. Sexy Guests. Honest and Respectful Conversations. A Good Ass Party.” And
so it proved.

“It was the beginning, and I just had people come up and talk about shit,” Wey
says. “I had no idea what I was doing, and I just kept doing it.”

There has remained an improvisatory nature to the dinners as Wey has staged them
around the country over the past three years. Some have speakers, but discussion
has become the focal point. Wey himself often says little, other than to call on
people and pose the occasional prompting question. Some of the dinners were
confrontational, others stilted. (The BYO booze often proves to be the most
important course in this regard.) It is not unusual for there to be tears.

For Wey, it is navigating the immediate present of the events that matters most.
He has markedly little interest in discussing them afterward, when he is often
left spent, barely leaving his French Quarter apartment except to play pickup
games of soccer. “I give a lot of energy, and I need a lot of downtime,” he
says.

At one dinner in New Orleans last fall, he told a group of stunned urban
planners—all of whom surely considered themselves progressive, justice-minded
activists who had sacrificed much for their social ideals—that they should quit
their jobs. It was the harshest I'd seen him be, and the most dogmatic in his
insistence that an abstract wrong obliterated the possibility of some concrete
good. I asked how he felt about the attendees' reactions: “I'm happy with people
leaving feeling however they feel,” he answered. “I feel bad for them
personally. But I also don't have the capacity to assuage everyone's upset
feelings.” Later he told me, “These are all people who have bachelor's degrees.
I'm sure they'll be fine.”

That it is painful and frustrating to be told that one's individual history,
feelings, and intentions mean nothing because of one's income or skin color is,
obviously, precisely the point. Still, pain and frustration are pain and
frustration. A couple of years ago, Wey took me to task for a profile I'd
written for this magazine about a white already-quite-famous southern chef who
was battling an autoimmune disease. It was, he said, an example of the media's
obsession with “the minutiae of whiteness.” I said I had written about a person,
not “whiteness,” whatever that meant. He said that the fact I didn't know was
part of the problem. I wondered whether, in the age of Trump, he thought this
was really the best use of his formidable skills and growing power.



“People are dying, Brett,” he said.



“But not from chef profiles!” I sputtered. And of course then he had me.

“Wouldn't you agree,” he said, switching to graduate-student mode, “that the
aggregate of all these disparate reinforcements of whiteness or white fantasy or
white power and privilege creates the conglomerate oppressive power?”

Another time, I accused Wey of hating food. I said I sometimes suspected that
his indignation at foodie culture was, at least in part, a puffed-up
justification for what was really a deep ambivalence about pleasure. I told him
I thought it was actually his most American trait.

“I love to eat. I love to fuck. I love to sleep,” he said. Of course, he went
on, there should be places where dining is simple pleasure, where food is
respite and solace. “The problem is that we have too many spaces where food is
just that. We need spaces where we can eat and not think about shit, but if all
your spaces are spaces where you eat and don't think about shit, then you're
never thinking about shit!”

Finish him!

Still, anybody who has been on the receiving end of Wey's critique might
reasonably find themselves asking a version of my question: Why spend so much
time going after potential allies when there are so many more egregious and
obvious threats and enemies?

“In critique, you have to be hyperbolic. In practice, you need to be nuanced.
But one feeds the other. It's hyperbole that creates the space for the nuance,”
he says. “And what is the role of the critic? To state the obvious? Or to point
to the hidden and understated?”

And who can say he isn't being strategic? The night after the Hot Chicken Shit
event, I went by myself to a new restaurant in East Nashville. It was in every
way a lovely example of today's modern, placeless, immaculately tasteful
restaurant: the menu of ItaloCaliAsian New American dishes (made for sharing),
the clever cocktail list, the open kitchen, the exposed ducts and unfinished
walls and concrete floors that gave the extremely expensive look of a space
whose contractor quit three days before finishing. It was all so nice. The very
quintessence of nice. And I sat at the bar feeling a nagging disquiet, a
dissatisfaction that I sensed would not go away no matter how many clam pizzas
and fluke crudos and Manhattan variations I poured down my throat in an attempt
to quell it. That was when I found myself cursing Tunde Wey.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



Books inside Wey's home in New Orleans.



Wey was dispirited in the weeks before he went to Nashville last July to conduct
research for what would become the Hot Chicken Shit dinners. “I'm doing all
these projects asking white people to give something up,” he said, shaking his
head. “And I'm realizing they aren't going to. White people will never give
anything up.”



Then he held a preliminary series of Nashville dinners. The Music City has been
booming in recent years—even before Amazon announced in November that it would
open a new operations center there—and the troubles of gentrification have
predictably boomed with it. The transformation of such neighborhoods as East
Nashville, Salemtown, and Germantown has been all but complete for years. North
Nashville, a neighborhood with deep African-American roots, has not yet
undergone that process, but the signs are all there that it's next up in
developers' crosshairs. After he'd been in town a few weeks, Wey's tone changed.
He had been meeting with local community leaders, city officials, and activists,
he texted me, and he had seized on the notion of a community land trust—a
strategy that was originally deployed to protect black and poor farmers from
losing their land. A CLT in North Nashville would take ownership of the area's
housing stock and legally guarantee that it would remain affordable in
perpetuity. In other words, Wey wanted to buy every vacant and potentially
vacant residence in North Nashville.

“It's all that's occupied my brain. It's doing my head in,” he texted, followed
by two emoji heads exploding.

In hot chicken he found a characteristically potent entry point for the project:
a uniquely black food that has been flagrantly appropriated in recent years.
Invented, the legend goes, by a vengeful lover of a man named Thornton Prince
(who, instead of howling in pain, went on to perfect the dish, at Prince's Hot
Chicken Shack, in North Nashville), hot chicken has become so popular in recent
years that the three most famous examples in the world right now are served by a
white couple inside a food court in L.A.'s Chinatown, an Australian who was
invited to serve his at last year's MAD Symposium in Copenhagen, and KFC.

As the neighborhood women pick at Wey's Nigerian version at Westwood Baptist,
they talk about their homes, the years in them calculated by recalling the ages
of children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. They talk about the phone
calls, the unannounced doorbell rings, the literal stacks of letters and
postcards they receive every week, all from real estate speculators offering to
buy their houses. And then, if they're uninterested in selling, the sudden wild
increases in property taxes and the mysterious code violations designed to
encourage cutting bait and getting out of the neighborhood. It's easy for white
people to think of gentrification debates as being about aesthetic encroachment
and individual decision-making, and so to be alternately puzzled in response
(“Who doesn't like nice things?”) and defensive (“Who are we to blow against the
wind?”). This was gentrification experienced as policy, as conspiracy, as
existential threat.



Elois Freeman, a 60-something minister at Westwood Baptist who sits at the
center of the table wearing a jean jacket and purple earrings, does not mince
words: “I think it's a form of cultural genocide,” she says.

Wey sits even more quietly than usual during this dinner, allowing the residents
to speak and the potential allies present to offer practical advice: Contact
local city-council members, organize a community board, keep on meeting like
this. There's a white lawyer there who tells the story of successfully fighting
a development project in his own, far more tony neighborhood. “So you'll be able
to offer these people advice?” Wey asks. Sure, says the lawyer.

“Pro bono,” Wey adds, not a question.

The next morning, I meet Wey at a soccer game he's found on a field at
Vanderbilt University. Soccer is one of Wey's mental escapes and a connection to
the country that still feels most like home. There are times when his
homesickness is palpable; he has not seen his mother in ten years.



We have lunch at Slim & Husky's, a wildly popular black-owned pizza business
that opened in 2017, not far from Westwood Baptist. I ask about the swerve the
night had taken away from the high concept of Hot Chicken Shit.

“It's always good when you change your expectations to meet reality,” he says.
“I had an audacious goal, and it failed.” In this case, “reality” had been a
practical problem to solve: people who needed help staying in their homes. And
the approach bears fruit: An attendee at the third Hot Chicken Shit dinner ends
up donating $100,000 to the cause. Not enough to buy any houses, but plenty to
start a process of neighborhood organization and education. And not bad in
exchange for a plate of chicken and some honest conversation.

For a moment, at Slim & Husky's, I have the disconcerting image of Wey going
straight. After all, he's now being asked to speak at Columbia University and
with United Nations officials. He applied (though it was hard to say how
seriously) for the vacant position of restaurant critic at the San Francisco
Chronicle. He recently received a book contract from MCD, an imprint of Farrar,
Straus & Giroux. Maybe his future was one of quiet, earnest community activism
in rooms like the one at Westwood Baptist, with its folding tables and buzzing
lights and vital, very local dreams. Then Wey starts telling me about the idea
for his next set of dinners: Marry an Immigrant. See, the menu would be all
aphrodisiacs, and attendees would be paired on blind dates with undocumented
immigrants. At the end, they'd all get married.

“It's illegal, but of course it's very legal because that's how people get
married these days,” Wey said. “It's through the Internet. It's through
matchmaking services. It happens on The Bachelor.” He considered it happily,
this absurd, crazy, dangerous idea. We laughed.

The dinners, redubbed Marriage Trumps All, began taking place in Pittsburgh in
early February.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

But before that, on January 7, the morning after Epiphany, Wey dressed in a dark
three-piece suit and, with Nelson, made his way to the 18th floor of a building
on Poydras Street, where U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has its New
Orleans office. There, after a brief interview under oath, watched over by a
scowling portrait of Donald Trump, in the midst of a federal-government shutdown
predicated on keeping immigrants out of the United States, in the heart of a
city that was once the largest market for African bodies in North America, Tunde
Wey was granted the status of legal resident.

Briefly overcome by this minor miracle, I texted: “Tell me why this story's
ending isn't now a warm, fuzzy message about how, despite it all, America still
works.”

Immediately the three dots of a return message being composed appeared, and I
smiled; Wey isn't the only one who knows how to provoke. The dots stayed for a
long time, and I readied myself for the screed about to arrive. But when the
message came, it was just one line:



“'Cus you know better.”

Brett Martin is a GQ correspondent.

A version of this story originally appeared in the March 2019 issue with the
title "The Provocations of Chef Tunde Wey."



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