Marcus Samuelsson (born Kassahun Tsegie in 1970 in Ethiopia) is the chef and co-owner of Aquavit restaurant in New York City and C-House Restaurant, located in the Affina Hotel in Chicago.
After their birth mother died in a tuberculosis epidemic when he was three years old, Kassahun Tsegie and his elder sister, Fantaye, were adopted by Ann Marie and Lennart Samuelsson, a homemaker and a geologist, who lived in Gothenburg, Sweden. The siblings' na...
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Marcus Samuelsson (born Kassahun Tsegie in 1970 in Ethiopia) is the chef and co-owner of Aquavit restaurant in New York City and C-House Restaurant, located in the Affina Hotel in Chicago.
After their birth mother died in a tuberculosis epidemic when he was three years old, Kassahun Tsegie and his elder sister, Fantaye, were adopted by Ann Marie and Lennart Samuelsson, a homemaker and a geologist, who lived in Gothenburg, Sweden. The siblings' names were changed to Marcus and Linda Samuelsson. They also have an adopted sister, Anna Samuelsson. Samuelsson's biological father, Tsegie, is a priest and father of eight of the chef's half-siblings; he still lives in the village where Samuelsson was born.
After becoming interested in cooking because of his maternal grandmother in Sweden, Samuelsson studied at the Culinary Institute in Gothenburg, where he grew up, apprenticed in Switzerland and Austria, and came to the United States in 1991 as an apprentice at Restaurant Aquavit. At 24,...
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