NORMAN VAN AKEN
with Justin Van Aken
We call our style of cooking ‘New World Cuisine’. “What is New World Cuisine you may ask? Fair question. To answer that best is to learn a bit of my background, or as a friend of mine likes to say, “To know where I’m going you have to know where I’ve been!”
I began to cook as far south one can go and still be on the American mainland, Key West. It was the spring of 1971 when I first hitchhiked to an island town much more untamed back then than it is now. I got a job in a barbeque joint and started a career without really knowing much about cooking yet at all. Key West was beautifully unaware of her role of one day being the midwife of a new beckoning cuisine and I was just as blithely uninformed that I would have something to do with it all. That day would come…over the passage of time, heat, work and being with many different people who, often times without knowing it, taught me a great deal. No…more than that. It taught me the way.
After a few years of working my way up the restaurant ladder (and reading as much as I could) I began to perceive Key West and a great deal of Florida as a place expressing a kind of ‘crossroad’s cookery’. There are key places on Earth that had (and have) such a mix of people with backgrounds and family trees that create such a culinary vitality! South Florida seemed like a young New Orleans, a place, though just beginning her arc, to connect with the fusion of its roots. It became my mission to find a way of expressing something just as magical for my adopted home state.
I found that the flavors of Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa and Asia were amazing and needed more of a voice to showcase them. I set out to learn all that I could. What transpired over the years of my life between 1978 and 1988 became the crux of New World Cuisine. I learned that people from all over the world have something to bring to the table. Cuisine is a place for the celebration of inclusion and sharing. My role as a Chef is to create harmonies of flavors and make dishes and menus that I hope will not only feed your body but also to inspire your soul to take voyages and experience the myriad seductions of Florida and of the New World she is a star in.
I wrote the first cookbook on this new style of cooking in 1988. It took me around the United States. Journalists and guests kept asking me what kind of food I was doing. I smiled and offered up the words; ‘New World Cuisine’, and here we are twenty years later and it still continues to grow and find new forms of expression. By the time we wrote our fourth book it had changed even more. That is the beauty of art. It can never be finally defined. Like the stars in the sky and the coral in the Oceans, they move.
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