Vibe Afro-Caribbean restaurant Lucia It celebrated its one-year anniversary last weekend with three nights of carnival-style celebrations. As a party, it is supported by grooving dancers along with a percussionist Dennis Zavala and DJ Pepper were getting livelier and more energetic on Friday, May 29, and Chef Cleophus Heathington was in the kitchen, quietly doing what he always does.
Heathington, who has run kitchens across the country and was a finalist for the 2022 James Beard Award for Emerging Chef in Penny on the eagle In Asheville, North Carolina, he is a student majoring in black foodways. At Lucia, the Miami-raised Heathington draws inspiration from his extensive travels around the Caribbean as he focuses on diaspora cooking.
Over the weekend, he showed off exciting new dishes like callaloo crab pot pie and cornmeal-crusted halibut with tomato-coconut water and pipa sauce. He served his food in oil, the national dish of Grenada and a recipe he prepared using either prawns, lobster claws or some lobster he saved for VIPs.
“I’ve always felt that the Caribbean is a map and a mirror of the world,” Hethington tells the Observer. “It’s a place where continents meet and cultures meet. History has left its mark on every plate. Every language and religion is there. It’s in the soil. It’s in the music. It’s on the plates.”
The Caribbean is a place where indigenous people coexist with groups that migrated from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the United States. Hethington wants to reflect this diversity at Lucia, serving crowd-pleasing dishes like whole Chinese yardage, eggplant and tomato chukka, tamarind Caesar salad, grilled green fig leaf fish, salted lamb shank, and wagyu patties filled with beef (an ingredient he first discovered in “central European restaurants” and prepared in the coq au vin style).
Heathington was recovering from bowel cancer surgery and working as a culinary director at a restaurant The bakery kneads in Baltimore when he was approached about the opportunity at Lucia last year. He was not looking for a job, but he had long been ready to go on a new and important journey. Hethington, a U.S. Navy veteran whose culinary career previously took him to Kanji in Austin and Zack the Baker in Miami (which became a James Beard finalist and achieved 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 just consulting at Lucia, owned by businessman Sam Jordan. But Heathington decided he needed to attend if he was going to put his name on the list.
He says he’s still exploring Los Angeles and is still “developing a life outside Lucia’s four walls now.” He could do that now that things were more stable at the Fairfax Avenue restaurant. In Heathington’s first weeks at Lucia’s, he wasn’t sure how long he would stay or how customers who came to the restaurant for the spectacle and energy would react to his cooking.
He says it took a while for customers in Lucia to get their hands on it, but it turns out Los Angeles is more than willing to enjoy his food. A Glowing review from Los Angeles Times He cemented Heathington’s position as a talented chef creating amazing food that this city has never seen before.
The oil is usually prepared by cooking coconut milk until it separates and the fat separates. Heathington wants a less oily sauce, so he turns coconut into a sweet, yogurt-like cream. He layers complexity and umami by adding coconut dashi with bonito flakes, kombu, saffron threads, turmeric, coriander, and Scotch bonnet pepper. There’s also a green seasoning with ginger, garlic, shallots and scallions in its oil, which is finished with tamarind pulp, lemon juice and cane vinegar. It’s complex and familiar at the same time, and it’s one of those dishes that makes you feel like you’re seeing different shades of your favorite colors.
“I’m not Kwame Onwuache, Mashama Bailey, or Eric Williams,” says 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 that I am a valuable voice and face in this industry. My passion is authorship, cooking, history, and ownership of our culture. It is about allowing us to create a new narrative and perception of what Black foodways look like.”
He remembers working at Jean-Georges in New York in 2012, when the second season of the series premiered Chef’s mind It came out on a TV show. The first episode featured Southern cooking icon Sean Brock traveling to Senegal.
“I’m like, ‘What the hell?'” Heathington says and laughs. “That blew my mind.”
Seeing a prominent white chef go to Africa made Hethington want to dive deeper into his roots, which go back to Senegal and Cameroon. Hethington looked at the cookbooks he had in stock, from restaurants like Le Bernardin and The French Laundry. He realized he wanted to go a different route and focus on something that reflected his heritage. He started messaging black food scholars on Twitter. He has not heard back from Jessica P. Harris and Tony Tipton-Martin, but has begun conversations with Adrian Miller, Kevin Mitchell and Michael Twitty.
He says many of the Black chefs making waves in restaurants across the country are closely tied to social media. (Last week, ABL, a new Caribbean restaurant in Hollywood, announced its opening, and Heathington posted an Instagram Story talking about his excitement.) Lucia is clearly part of a movement.
“It’s amazing to see so many restaurants opening at this level,” Hethington says. “It allows owners like Sam to take on these risks and these opportunities.”
Hethington knows that Lucia gives him a magical platform to do what he’s been thinking about for more than a decade. Los Angeles has never had a restaurant like Lucia’s, but Heathington doesn’t feel out of place here.
“For most black chefs who are here to explore our culture, history and cuisine, it’s about taking the techniques we learned in the European restaurants we worked in and coupling them with ingredients we have known and loved from childhood into adulthood and still love,” he says. “So, how does it feel to do it in L.A.? To me, it feels natural.”
Lucia is located in 351 N. Fairfax Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90036, and is open Wednesday through Sunday from 6 p.m. to midnight.
