Chef Tunde Wey's work focuses on racial inequity, but it didn’t always. He’s a co-owner of (revolver) in Hamtramck, Michigan, a community table restaurant where a revolving lineup of chefs serve prix fixe, locally sourced, communal menus in the style of traditional French guesthouses. One day, Wey decided it wasn’t enough. Currently based in New Orleans, he doesn’t only cook and serve food—he also asks diners to engage with inequality in the United States.

In 2016, Wey started the Blackness in America Dinner Series, which offered a chance for people to come together in 14 cities across the country to discuss how blackness intersects with their work and lives. His next project, 1882, was a dinner series that explored anti-immigrant attitudes in the United States, starting with the Chinese Exclusion Act. And last year’s 4:44 considered racial wealth disparities and their impact on food systems.

USA. Louisiana, New Orleans. Chef Tunde Wey. USA. Louisiana, New Orleans. Chef Tunde Wey.

His latest project popped up this past February in New Orleans, via a limited edition lunch counter called Saartj, after Saartjie Baartman, a South African woman who was brought to Europe in the 19th century and paraded as an attraction due to the shape of her body. Wey sees Baartman’s story as a way to “highlight the views and perspectives of erstwhile marginalized people and positions and to bring those to light.” He is interested in “interrogating and critiquing systems that are exploitative.” For him, food—itself often an exploitative system—is a way to do that.

On the phone, Wey doesn’t lose any opportunity to make a joke, inserting lightness into what otherwise could be seen as heavy topics. He’s deliberate with his words, an intentionality that is also seen in his work. Hopefully one day, this innovative and challenging work he’s doing will no longer be necessary. But until that day, I’m excited to see what he does next.

GQ: So you opened a pop-up lunch counter in New Orleans last month, but it's a little different than the standard pop-up. Can you tell me more about the format?

Tunde Wey: Yeah, so the idea behind the stall was to give a practical example of what racial wage disparity in New Orleans looks like. So everyday I was open, I served a boxed lunch for $12. I asked folks who identified as white to pay a suggested price of $30 and the difference—the $18 difference—was a 2.5x difference, which mimics the racial income disparity in New Orleans.

Where did the idea come from?

From my brain. That’s really where it came from. [laughs] No, it was an evolution of the work that I was already doing. Part of my work includes hosting dinners and conversations around issues of race and exploitative power. The last dinner that I had was in October and it was inspired, in part, by an essay critiquing Jay-Z’s latest album and its themes of wealth and capitalism as a tool for liberation in black and other communities of color, so this was sort of a continuation of that work, examining wealth and disparities as related to race in America.

Why food as a way into this?

I’m a cook and I’m a writer, so my work is at the intersection of food and critical discourse and I think that for a long time, we have made food spaces—at least dining spaces—exempt from critical conversations. Food spaces embody the sort of structural inequalities that exist in the larger community and they also contribute to those inequities as well, so it’s incumbent on folks, on all of us, to address the injustices that we see in all the spaces that they exist. I use food because food is what I do, but I also use food to comment on larger social questions because there shouldn’t be any spaces that don’t contribute to the conversation. What we do when we ignore inequity is in fact promoting it and reifying these structures, you know?

USA. Louisiana, New Orleans. Chef Tunde Wey. USA. Louisiana, New Orleans. Chef Tunde Wey.

Yeah. As a chef, did you always consider racial disparity in relation to food?

Not always. But my food work has always been political. It first started as a critique of food culture and its Eurocentrism because the food that I cook is African, specifically West African. Nigerian. And so my food was sort of oppositional and antagonal to popular food culture, but then the more I did my work, the more it became important not just to criticize food culture, but to understand the connection between how we consume and abstract food and what the larger societal structures are that have created this more circumscribed food culture. And so, there was a conscious shift in my work in 2016 inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement to begin to look at food more critically outside of the context of just food culture.