Adaeze Okonkwo is thirty-nine. She grew up cooking with her aunt in Surulere, Lagos, and moved to New York at twenty-two. For eleven years she worked lines she has since described to me as "educational, and once or twice medieval." In 2023 she turned down offers from two well-known restaurant groups and instead opened Late Kitchen, a twenty-four-seat canteen in Crown Heights that opens at nine in the evening and closes at four in the morning, and is patronised mostly by hospital night staff, freight workers, and the occasional insomniac writer. We spoke on a Wednesday, at eight in the evening, before service.
Q Why a canteen and not a restaurant?
A
A restaurant is a room that wants to be reviewed. A canteen is a room that wants to be eaten in. Those are two different projects. I have been in the first one, on the line, for eleven years. I did not want to now be the person on the phone with the second one. So I built the second kind of room. The people who come in at three don't want to be reviewed either. They want the sauce hot, the fish honest, and a chair that isn't rocking. That's the whole design.
Q The two offers you turned down — can you say what they were?
A
Two groups. Both had good pedigrees. Both were kind offers. One had the money and the location. The other had the money and the profile. They were both, to my ear, asking me to be a face — Adaeze on the door, Adaeze in the menu, Adaeze doing the tasting for the writer from the Times. And the deal, quietly, was that I would stop being on the pass. I would go to meetings. I would go to press. I would go to "a partner dinner." That is a job. It is not my job.
Q How did you know it wasn't your job?
A
Because at 2 a.m. I was still awake, and the sentence in my head was not "I want to say yes and figure it out." The sentence was "I want the canteen." I had been thinking about the canteen for six years. Nobody was offering me the canteen. I had to be my own offer.
Q Money. What did the two groups offer, and what does the canteen pay you?
A
I don't mind telling you. The groups were both around 220 base, plus equity, plus a car — one of them, a car. The canteen pays me, right now, 82. I take one full day off a week. I have not had a car since 2019. My private ledger — the actual one — says I am wealthier than I was a year ago. The public ledger says I took a 62 percent cut. Both are true. I picked the private one.
Q Who eats at Late Kitchen at three in the morning?
A
Night nurses from the two hospitals within a mile, mostly. A lot of ER staff who come off a twelve at eleven and want a real thing and not a bar. There's a woman from the airport freight who eats here on Fridays, always the fish. There's a novelist I won't name who comes on Sundays at 1 a.m., orders the beans, doesn't speak, and tips like a man who was raised right. There are couples on the way home from a bad night out. There is, occasionally, a mother of a nurse waiting for her daughter to finish shift. It is not a scene. It is a room.
Q The canteen is famously not on Instagram. Why?
A
It is on Instagram. It has 300 followers, all real. I post the day's menu at eight, and I post "closed" when we close. I do not post plating. I do not post me. I did the arithmetic and decided the room that a food account brings you is not the room that comes at three. The two rooms don't want the same thing. If I promise the food account, I let the freight woman down.
Q What did the eleven years on the line teach you that you use every night?
A
How to run a shift without shouting. That is the biggest thing. I worked for two chefs who shouted. Neither shouted at me, particularly — I was fast, I was quiet, I was Nigerian, they were both afraid of my mother — but the room shouted, and the room's food, at the end of the shift, tasted like a shouted-in room. My kitchen does not shout. If we are behind, we are behind. We tell the room. We serve on rhythm, not on adrenaline. My sous is a woman I have known for six years. She has never once heard me raise my voice at her. She has heard me raise my voice at a supplier.
Q You've said before that you wanted the kitchen to be "open at three in the morning." What does three in the morning let you do that eight in the evening does not?
A
Three in the morning is the honest hour. Nobody comes into a restaurant at three because they are performing. They come because they are hungry, or lonely, or ending a shift, or ending a marriage, or writing a chapter. The food you serve at three is not the food you serve at eight. At eight you are competing with the day. At three you are competing with sleep, and sleep is a fair opponent.
Q Would you ever open a second canteen?
A
No. Every woman I know who opened a second thing lost the first one. Not the room. The room stays. The attention. The first thing works because you were in it. The second thing asks you to be somewhere else. I have watched three women do it and regret it. I have watched none regret staying.
Q What advice do you give to young cooks — women, in particular — who are being offered a face job?
A
Turn it down for six weeks. Not forever. Six weeks. Say, "I need six weeks to think about this properly." In six weeks, you will know whether it was the money or the room. If it was the money, negotiate the money and stay on the line for two more years. If it was the room, build the room. Nobody will build it for you. That is the entire piece of advice, and it is not new.
Q Last question. What's on the menu tonight?
A
Grilled sea bream — Portuguese, off a boat that lands in New Bedford. White beans. A tomato salad that is not for the season, and I know that, and I have written a small apology on the board. There is a chocolate thing. There is one bottle of a wine I will not name because it is the last bottle. That is dinner. Come after two.
✦ End of Interview N° 03