“Semo and Draw Soup”: Yemisi Ogbe shares a delicious conversation with chef, Reme Calvin Obaseki

by Yemisi Ogbe

Studio 54 had spent a day in his kitchen, and celebrities and well known personalities came and went from the restaurant like the restaurant had been around for years. I went quiet in shock and respect.  All this had happened in a year.

I’ve only met Reme in person once.  We’d been chatting via facebook and bb messages since February 2012 when I was still faced with the nerve racking task of finding a Nigerian chef for an article that I was writing for Arik Wings Magazine.

It didn’t make sense that it was so hard to find a Nigerian chef.  At the same time the particularities of the problem were clear.  The very definition of the word “chef” had changed in the last couple of years far beyond the man on the street’s conjectures or contemplation.
And it had done so in a globally dramatic manner.
BBC Lifestyle airing its quest for Master Chefs was partly responsible, so was the Food Network’s Iron Chef, so was every television programme that ended with the crowning of an immortal in the kitchen:   So was the controversial one hundred years old Michelin guide: The new global food fanaticism especially focused on fine dining & celebrity chefhood: The manic quest for unconventionality in cooking and eating promoted by the likes of food lab rat Heston Blumenthal and globe trotting fugu eating Anthony Bourdain: The innumerable food bloggers on the internet armed with amateur photography considered an annoying rash by some, and an exciting fount of ideas by others…It was no longer enough to hide away in the kitchen and send out good food.  All that you needed to accomplish that was to be a good cook.  But a chef had now become something completely unsystematic. An idea that ran away from home but hasn’t arrived at its destination.
 A. A. Gill in his Vanity Fair article attempting to make his way around the phenomenon described chefs as “…strange creatures; their trade more of a calling, a vocation, than a career.  They start young; the training is hard, the hours long, the pay meager.  Chefs work when others are having fun.  They don’t have real friends.  Their marriages don’t work; their children don’t like them.  And no one invites a chef round for dinner.”
Chefs had enduringly been these sorts of creatures, until the Michelin guide came along and offered them appreciation, recognition and the possibility of being celebrated. The son that stayed at home and did his father’s will finally got his own chapter in the bible.  The rumour is that the recognition went to his head.  Gill firmly places the blame at the feet of the Michelin guide.
The guide really only started off as a directory of places in France where a good meal and clean bed could be found.  In a hundred years it turned into the most prestigious guidebook in the world.  It became a star system awarding 1, 2 or 3 stars to establishments for food, ambiance, competence, creativity, the chef’s luminosity in a sweltering clamorous room that hitherto had only been regarded as the kitchen.  In other words putting the experience of dining, the entertainment value, the religious intensity in the limelight as opposed to the plain vanilla-ness of simply sitting down to a good meal provided by a good cook in a comfortable room with a nice view.
The Michelin is blamed for changing both the aspirations and personalities of kitchen staff as well as the personality of the client… for better or worse the merits of these changes are still being debated.  The point is there is no turning back and no sitting on the fence.  One can either be resolutely defined as that force behind a restaurant kitchen door, lording it over everyone and peremptorily telling the client what to go and do with his fork… or one cannot and is just a cook.
And in answer to anyone who thinks there are still chefs who just want to cook and do nothing more…I hope that person has a microscope astute enough to detect Michelin corruption in the heart.
So I had to find one of these creatures for my Arik Wings article and he had to be Nigerian.
I have spoken before about how I first went to the omniscient Google and typed in the words Nigerian Chef.  And how Google  cowered at the sight of the words, racked its brain furiously and shamefacedly spat out two words:
“Florence Troutman”
Troutman turned out to be a Nigerian home cook on Youtube in a pretty blue “gele”!
And that was how I immediately knew that I had my work cut out for me.  There was no way that I was going to write an article about African Chefs and not present a homegrown “Olowosibi” Nigerian chef with hard core experience and stories of good and bad food days, and a stockpot full of crankiness and ego and personality.
In January 2012, A friend invited me to a late lunch at an endearing eatery attached to a boutique hotel in Ikoyi called Casa D’Lydia. My expectations were swallowed up by anxiety over catching a flight later that evening.  I just wanted to eat and go.
The food arrived:
“Chicken chunks, snails, fresh-fish, chicken-gizzards, arranged on a wooden slab, covered with a generous blanket of gravy, served with seriously delicious, crunchy-on-the-outside, melting-on-the-inside yam-fries.”
I was stunned.  I asked who the Chef was.  My friend told a rambling tale of a fallout between two people who had started the business of Casa D’Lydia.  The one who had created the kitchen and conceptualised all the dishes on the menu including the one in front of us had since left over that disagreement.  She could barely think of his name, but the rumours of what happened were all over Lagos.
This had to be my chef and I had to find him by any and all means possible.
After bringing up my friend’s ramble in conversations with other friends, the axe head floated.  His name was Reme Obaseki.  I found him on facebook.  I sent him a longwinded message about eating at Casa D’Lydia and wanting to feature him in my article.
His response came back like a bucket of cold water.  Reme said he wasn’t so much a chef as he was a mixologist!
In his own words:
“…In fact when I came back to nigeria people knew me more for my drinks and were shocked to taste my dishes later…”
“What!” I thought…I didn’t know whether to scream or plead.  He was only slightly more helpful than standoffish.  He sounded like he was buried under the biggest pile of discouragement…I couldn’t ask of course.  I was afraid to bring up Casa D’Lydia because I didn’t want the door to completely slam in my face.  I didn’t want to come across like a tabloid journalist looking for a seedy story.
This guy sounded nothing like one of the specie of overconfident gods that had apprentices begging to learn at their feet…
I asked him a bunch of questions just to draw him out, but only trickles came out.  My deadline approached and I realised I had to take a chance and go with what I had and declare Reme either way.   It was either he was a chef on the same standing as my four other African chefs, who themselves were only recognised as chefs because the mountains had been levelled and the valleys raised in their kitchens.  In other words, Google knew them because they were as good as any chef anywhere in the world.
I kept insisting to Reme that he was more than a mixologist.  He kept insisting he was more or less a mixologist.
I put him up on my Blackberry dp and as if it was proof that the divine hand was pointing at him, I got one or two exciting responses from friends who thought that his food was extraordinary, and proclaimed him one of the best cooks they knew.
How did they know him?
Oh he’d cooked for them at some random place etc etc. The cook being a detail that stood out in those nondescript circumstances was interesting enough.
I was still going to have to take a chance, but something about that plate of food at Casa D’Lydia, the fact that the food was served on a rough grained wooden slab; the shape and dimensions of the chicken and fish; the Nigerian food sensibility that put snails and fish and chicken and gizzards in one dish and then went on to call it a sea food platter.  The yam chips cut elegantly like french fries, the perfect temperature of everything, the gravy like an afterthought but really like engine oil moving all the pieces along unctuously; even the tentacles on the snails left on because Nigerians like them on.  Everything suggested a way of seeing, an attention to detail, a love of food…it pointed to an obsessiveness with perfecting one plate that could only belong to a chef and a very very good one.
I was almost ready to bet one of my limbs that Reme was  the genuine article, so on a very strong instinct and with a very strong Nigerian food agenda, I wrote my article.
Its publication came and went and in that time I fell out with the publishers who condescendingly edited the piece…it was a bad marriage from the start anyway.
A few months passed and I got a BB message from Reme telling me how he had got a private catering job from someone who wanted a celebrity chef who had been featured in Arik Wings.  It felt like that was all client  initially wanted but the guests tasted his food and then the offers started to come in to cater privately, and they were coming in very fast.  Word of mouth has always been one of the best way of selling anything in Lagos.
We had a good laugh.  He was laughing because he thought we had successfully pulled a fast one.  He wasn’t really a celebrity chef was he?  I was laughing because I was being polite and we were not yet friends, but at the back of my mind, I wondered if he really didn’t know how good he was.
The irony of our not having met remained.
A few months passed and I got an excited message from Reme.  He was getting married!  No, I mean he had found someone to partner with in opening a restaurant in Lekki Peninsula.  It felt too good to be true that he had found the money to entrust his ideas in marriage to, and that the money was going to let him run the restaurant and express his ideas without constraints or interference.
The obsessive compulsive workaholic in Reme emerged.  My first ever meeting with him was at the uncompleted site of the restaurant.  It was on the night of 14th of August 2011.  We shook hands like we had known each other for years.  He showed me his kitchen, the view of the water, the dining chairs, his wine cellar, the tiles for the walls.  It was incredible.  He talked non-stop.  He was talking to me as well as talking to someone on the phone.  He was unbelievably skinny, unbelievably hyperactive.
This genuinely felt like the person who came up with the Casa D’Lydia menu.  He was going over everything with an intensity that was recognisable in one plate of food.
I asked him for the first time what was his favourite food and he answered:
“Semo and Draw Soup.”
On January 13th 2012 we were entertaining a visitor from Lagos at home in Calabar and the conversation suddenly turned to a very impressive restaurant in Lekki that the visitor and his wife had gone to recently.  The food was impeccable, no, better than that, the ambiance…everything was just flawless.  There was this particular dish… yes called “Longthroat”.  It was very good.  I nodded and said nothing until my guest had finished.  Then I told him that I knew Reme very well even though we had only met in person once, that I had been to the restaurant only once and it was before it was completed, and that I knew Longthroat very well even though I hadn’t eaten it…because it was named after the original ‘longthroat’…
And I had a picture of it somewhere…
I called Reme right after and raved about how his restaurant was being spoken off in such glowing terms all the way in Calabar.
He in turn told me about the gruelling training of staff that seemed continuous, the clients who insisted on calling in before coming in because they wanted to hint ahead at how special they were…so that they got special treatment. The three best selling dishes at Primi Piatti Waterfront: Longthroat, Chicken Campaniola and Chicken Parma.
Studio 54 had spent a day in his kitchen, and celebrities and well known personalities came and went from the restaurant like the restaurant had been around for years. I went quiet in shock and respect.  All this had happened in a year.
We spoke for over an hour about the restaurant.  I laughed the hardest when he related the incident of the lady and the Mojito:
The lady came in with her boyfriend and some other friends to eat.  They are having pre-dinner drinks.  She ordered a Mojito cocktail.  She got it.  She complained that she didn’t want the cocktail because a real Mojito shouldn’t have leaves in it.
Reme turned up to sort out the problem.  He explained to the lady that a Mojito, a real Mojito is made from mint leaves, rum, powdered sugar, lime and club soda.  The lime and mint “leaves” are imperative parts of the Mojito.  They activate each other.  The soda is the perfect priest for the marriage, the perfect synergistic medium. Without them, you don’t have a Mojito…
The lady scoffed and said that she drinks Mojitos at Las Gidi all the time and it is a clear cocktail with absolutely no leaves in it.
The boyfriend got upset with the back and forth and said he would like to make a complaint to the owner of the place after all “the customer is always right”
“No.” Reme said going into Chef mode.
“The customer is not always right.  Especially not when the customer does not know what a real Mojito is!”
The boyfriend demanded the restaurant owner’s number.  Reme reeled off his number to the boyfriend
“0 7 0 3 7 9 0 3 5 6 7”
The boyfriend dialled the number.  Reme’s phone rang and he picked it up.
“Yes.  Primi Piatti Waterfront.  How may I help you?”
Boyfriend was stunned and embarrassed.  He turned to the girlfriend and asked her why on earth she was making such a big fuss when she didn’t even know what a real Mojito is!
It may be all laughs but the point that Reme insists on is that the client is not always right.  No.  Not when he wants a croissant with his dinner instead of rosemary bread because the bread is not “sweet”; not when he wants to put ice in 18 year old scotch; not when he is demanding to meet the Chef when the Chef is busy in the kitchen; not when she sends her Carpaccio back demanding that it be cooked, and certainly not when the client is demanding that Scotch bonnet be put in his Carbonara.
I say perhaps he should be educating us gently instead of lambasting us.  The shame should only stick when we don’t know our own Nigerian food.  We shouldn’t be penalised if we don’t understand cuisine from another world.
Reme agrees as long as the diner comes to the experience with humility and a willingness to learn.
I think…how Iron Chef-like.  How confident.  How true to new world food lingua franca and the imbalance in power between the Chef and the paying Client.
I think how right I was.  Reme is the real McCoy.  Nigeria has its brilliant, competent, cocky voice at the global dining table but he really should be cooking Nigerian food.
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Yemisi Ogbe is a writer and food lover, and does both here.
Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.

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