Vibey Afro-Caribbean Restaurant Lucia celebrated its one-year anniversary this past weekend with three nights of Carnival-style festivities. And like a party, it’s powered by dancers gyrating alongside a percussionist Denise Zavala and DJ Paper, live better On Friday, May 29, chef Cleophus Hethington was in the kitchen, quietly doing what he always does.
Hethington, who has managed kitchens across the country and won the 2022 James Beard Award for Emerging Chef at. Benne to the Eagle in Asheville, North Carolina, is a devoted student of Black foodways. In Lucia, the Miami-raised Hethington takes inspiration from her extensive travels around the Caribbean as she focuses on exotic cooking.
Over the weekend, he showed off amazing dishes like crab-and-callaloo patty and cornmeal-crusted Pacific halibut with tomato-coconut sauce and peppa sauce. He served his riff on oil, which is the national dish of Grenada and a recipe he has always modified with prawns, snow crab claws or lobsters reserved for VIPs.
“I’ve always felt that the Caribbean is a map and a mirror to the rest of the world,” Hethington tells the Observer. “A place where continents collide and cultures meet, history has left its fingerprints on all the plates, there are all the languages and religions that exist, it’s in the soil, it’s in the music, it’s in the plates.
The Caribbean is where indigenous people live with groups from Africa, Asia, Europe and the United States. Hethington wants to showcase that diversity at Lucia, where he serves crowd-pleasing dishes like Trini-Chinese whole yardbird, eggplant-and-tomato choka, tamarind Caesar salad, fig leaf roast, jerk lamb shank and wagyu patties stuffed with beef cheeks (an ingredient he first discovered at the auroq restaurant).
Hethington was recovering from colon cancer and working as a culinary director at Kneads Bakeshop in Baltimore when he was approached about the opportunity in Lucia last year. He was not looking for a job, but he has been willing to take a new and important journey for a long time. Hethington, a U.S. Navy veteran whose culinary career previously took him to Canje in Austin and Zak the Baker in Miami (who was a James Beard finalist and earned Michelin Bib Gourmand status during his tenure), moved to Los Angeles on November 8 and began working at Lucia on November 11.
At first, he thought about consulting with Lucia, owned by businessman Sam Jordan. But Hethington decided he had to be there if he was going to put his name on the menu.
She says she still thinks about LA and is “still developing a life beyond the four walls of Lucia now.” He can do that now that things are on the mend at the Fairfax Avenue restaurant. In Hethington’s first weeks at Lucia, he wasn’t sure how long he would last and how the customers who came to the scene and the energy would respond to his cooking.
He says it took a while for Lucia’s customers to get it, but it turns out Los Angeles is more than ready to shake up his food. A glowing review from Los Angeles Times it cemented Hethington’s status as a master chef who made some of the scariest food the city had ever seen.
Oil reduction is usually made by cooking coconut milk until it separates and the oil separates. Hethington wants a low-fat sauce, so he reduces the coconut to a yogurt-like cream with sugar and nuts. He adds complexity and umami by adding coconut dashi with bonito flakes, kombu, saffron strips, turmeric, coriander and Scotch bonnet pepper. There is also a green seasoning with ginger, garlic, shallots and scallions in his bottom oil, finished with tamarind pulp, lime juice and sugarcane vinegar. At once sophisticated and familiar, it’s one of those dishes that makes you feel like you’re seeing different shades of your favorite colors.
“I’m not Kwame Onwuachi or Mashama Bailey or Erick Williams,” said Hethington, who is eager to talk about the influence of Black chefs he admires including Nina Compton, Paul Carmichael and Tavel Bristol-Joseph. “But I know I’m a valued voice and face in this industry. My passion is writing and cooking and history and ownership of our culture. It’s about allowing us to create new narratives and visions of what Black foodways look like.”
He remembers working for Jean-Georges in New York in 2012, during its second season The Chef’s Mind came out on PBS. The first episode featured Southern cooking icon Sean Brock traveling to Senegal.
“I’d be like, ‘What’s going on?'” Hethington said and then laughed. “That blew my mind.”
Seeing a prominent white chef go to Africa made Hethington want to go deeper into his roots, which originate from Senegal and Cameroon. Hethington looked at the cookbooks he had saved, from restaurants like Le Bernardin and the French Laundry. He realized he wanted to go in a different direction and focus on something that reflected his legacy. He started messaging Black nutritionists on Twitter. He didn’t hear anything from Jessica B. Harris and Toni Tipton-Martin, but he started conversations with Adrian Miller, Kevin Mitchell and Michael Twitty.
And he says many of the Black chefs making waves in restaurants across the country are deeply connected on social media. (Last week, ABL, a new Caribbean restaurant in Hollywood, announced its opening, and Hethington posted an Instagram story about her excitement.) Lucia is clearly part of the movement.
“It’s amazing to see so many restaurants like this open,” Hethington said. “It allows owners like Sam to take these risks and these opportunities.”
Hethington knows that Lucia is giving him the perfect platform to do what he’s been thinking about for over a decade. Los Angeles has never had a restaurant like Lucia, but Hethington doesn’t feel out of place here.
“For most of the Black chefs who come out here to explore our culture, history and food, it’s about taking the techniques we’ve learned from the Eurocentric restaurants we’ve worked in and combining them with the ingredients we’ve known and loved from childhood to adulthood and continue to love,” he said. “So how does it feel to do this in LA? To me, it feels normal.”
Lucia is available 351 N. Fairfax Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90036, and is open Wednesday-Sunday from 6pm to midnight.
