Who

The face of Scandinavian cuisine in the city, Samuelsson is the chef and co-owner of the Nordic restaurant Aquavit.

Backstory

Born outside Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Kassahun Tsegie lost his parents to tuberculosis when he was three. Fortunately—for both young Kassahun and legions of future expense-account diners—a vacationing Swedish couple adopted him and his sister, renamed him Marcus Samuelsson, and raised the two kids back in Sweden. After attending culinary school in Gothenburg, Samuelsson had stints in Michelin-starred restaurants in Switzerland, France (in the kitchen of the Georges Blanc), and Austria before heading stateside to take a job at Aquavit, then a fairly unremarkable Scandanavian restaurant in Midtown where he'd briefly interned. When the restaurant's chef, Jan Sendel, suddenly died in 1995, owner Hakan Swan tapped Samuelsson to fill his shoes. That's when his culinary star exploded: At 24, he earned a three-star review from the Times' Ruth Reichl—making him the youngest three-star chef in the paper's history (a distinction he'd later lose to Paul Liebrandt)—as well as instant billing as the Next Big Thing. While Acquavit remains his flagship, he's expanded his restaurant portfolio—and the broader Marcus Sameulsson brand—considerably since then.

Of note

While Samuelsson's first post-Aquavit restaurant launch, an outpost of Aquavit in Minneapolis, didn't turn out so hot—it shut down in 2003 after enduring several years of meager business—his subsequent establishments have fared better, even if they haven't enjoyed Aquavit-level success. In 2004 he opened Riingo, a Japanese fusion spot in the Izak Senbahar-owned Alex Hotel on East 45th Street, and served as consulting chef on Philadelphia mega-restaurateur Stephen Starr's restaurant Washington Square. (Mutual animosity prompted him to sever ties with Starr six months in.) Since then, he's opened AQ Café, a dressed-down, cafeteria-style version of Aquavit in the Scandinavian House, and—most recently—a meatpacking district pan-African fusion restaurant called Merkato 55, launched in partnership with mono-named impresarios Kyky and Unik.

On the side

Restaurants are just part of Sameulsson's increasingly expansive culinary and media presence. Like any celebrity chef, he's amassed the obligatory cookbook oeuvre—his most recent, Africa-themed The Soul of a New Cuisine, came out in late 2006—and he's got his own TV show, Inner Chef, on the Discovery Home Channel. In his biggest extra-curricular gig to date, in August 2007 Samuelsson inked a blockbuster, first-of-its-kind deal with Starbucks to create two new coffee blends and two new pastries. Per the agreement, Starbucks will also stock The Soul of a New Cuisine in its thousands of retail locations.

Trophy case

Samuelsson won the James Beard award for "Rising Star Chef" in 1999; four years later, the Beard Foundation named him the best chef in New York City. And it's not just his food that draws wolf whistles: People proclaimed him the fifth-most eligible bachelor in America in 2000.

Pet cause

In whatever free time the exhaustively branded chef has left, Samuelsson acts as a spokesman for UNICEF.

Personal

The chronic bachelor, who once appeared 99 percent nude in a Vita-Mix blender ad (the blender covered the other 1 percent) is single. He lives in West Harlem.