Vibey Afro-Caribbean restaurant Lucia celebrated its one-year anniversary this past weekend with three nights of Carnival-style festivities. And as the party, powered by dancers grooving alongside percussionist Denise Zavala and DJ Paper, got livelier and livelier on Friday, May 29, chef Cleophus Hethington was in the kitchen, quietly doing what he always does.
Hethington, who has run kitchens around the country and was a 2022 James Beard Award finalist for Emerging Chef at Benne on Eagle in Asheville, North Carolina, is a dedicated student of Black foodways. At Lucia, the Miami-raised Hethington takes inspiration from his extensive travels around the Caribbean as he focuses on diaspora cooking.
Over the weekend, he showcased wondrous new dishes like a crab-and-callaloo patty and cornmeal-crusted Pacific halibut with tomato-coconut water and peppa sauce. He served his riff on oil down, which is the national dish of Grenada and a recipe he’s been preparing with either prawns, snow crab claws or some lobster he’s saved for VIPs.
“I’ve always felt like the Caribbean is a map and a mirror to the world,” Hethington tells Observer. “It’s a place where continents collide and cultures converge. History has left its fingerprints on every plate. There’s every language and religion there. It’s in the soil. It’s in the music. It’s on the plates.”
The Caribbean is where Indigenous people coexist with groups who’ve migrated from Africa, Asia, Europe and the United States. Hethington wants to reflect that diversity at Lucia, where he’s serving crowd-pleasing dishes like Trini-Chinese whole yardbird, eggplant-and-tomato choka, tamarind Caesar salad, green fig leaf fish roast, jerk lamb shank and wagyu patties filled with beef cheeks (an ingredient he first discovered at “Eurocentric restaurants” and prepares in the style of coq au vin).
Hethington was recovering from an intestinal cancer procedure and working as culinary director at Kneads Bakeshop in Baltimore when he was approached about the opportunity at Lucia last year. He wasn’t looking for a job, but he’s long been willing to go on a new and important journey. Hethington, a U.S. Navy veteran whose cooking career previously took him to Canje in Austin and Zak the Baker in Miami (which became a James Beard finalist and earned Michelin Bib Gourmand status during his tenure), moved to Los Angeles on November 8 and started working at Lucia on November 11.
At first, he thought about just consulting at Lucia, which is owned by entrepreneur Sam Jordan. But Hethington decided he needed to be present if he was going to put his name on a menu.
He says he’s still figuring out L.A. and still “developing a life beyond the four walls of Lucia now.” He can do that now that things are more settled at the Fairfax Avenue restaurant. In Hethington’s initial weeks at Lucia, he wasn’t sure how long he would stay or how customers who came to the restaurant for the scene and the energy would react to his cooking.
He says it took a little while for customers at Lucia to get it, but it turned out that Los Angeles is more than ready to vibe to his food. A glowing review from the Los Angeles Times solidified Hethington’s status as a talented chef who’s making terrific food that this city had never seen before.
Oil down is typically made by cooking down coconut milk until it splits and the fat separates. Hethington wants a less oily sauce, so he reduces the coconut into a yogurt-like cream that’s sweet and nutty. He layers on complexity and umami by adding a coconut dashi with bonito flakes, kombu, saffron threads, turmeric, coriander and Scotch bonnet peppers. There’s also green seasoning with ginger, garlic, shallots and scallions in his oil down, which is finished with tamarind pulp, lime juice and cane vinegar. At once complex 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,” says Hethington, who is eager to talk about the influence of the Black chefs he admires, including Nina Compton, Paul Carmichael and Tavel Bristol-Joseph. “But I know I’m a voice and a face who’s valued in this industry. My passion is for authorship and cooking and history and ownership of our culture. It’s about allowing us to create a new narrative and perception of what Black foodways look like.”
He remembers working at New York’s Jean-Georges in 2012, when the second season of The Mind of a Chef came out on PBS. The first episode featured Southern cooking icon Sean Brock traveling to Senegal.
“I’m like, ‘What the fuck?’” Hethington says and laughs. “That blew my mind.”
Seeing a prominent white chef going to Africa made Hethington want to dive deeper into his roots, which trace back to Senegal and Cameroon. Hethington looked at the cookbooks he had in storage, from restaurants like Le Bernardin and the French Laundry. He realized he wanted to go on a different path and focus on something that reflected his heritage. He started messaging Black food scholars on Twitter. He never heard back from Jessica B. Harris and Toni Tipton-Martin, but he started conversations with Adrian Miller, Kevin Mitchell and Michael Twitty.
And he says that many of the Black chefs who are making waves at restaurants all over the country are closely connected on social media. (Last week, ABL, a new Caribbean restaurant in Hollywood, announced its opening, and Hethington posted an Instagram story about his excitement.) Lucia is clearly part of a movement.
“It’s an amazing thing to see so many restaurants of this caliber opening up,” Hethington says. “It’s allowing owners like Sam to take these risks and these chances.”
Hethington knows that Lucia gives him a glamorous platform to do what he’s been thinking about for more than a decade. Los Angeles hasn’t ever had a restaurant like Lucia, but Hethington doesn’t feel out of place here.
“For most Black chefs who are out here exploring our culture, history and cuisine, it’s about taking the techniques that we’ve learned at the Eurocentric restaurants we’ve worked in and intertwining that with the ingredients we’ve known and loved from childhood to adulthood and continue to love,” he says. “So what does it feel like to be doing this in L.A.? For me, it feels normal.”
Lucia is located at 351 N. Fairfax Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90036, and is open Wednesday-Sunday from 6 p.m. to midnight.
