It’s this feeling that I most want to convey when asked about Harlem now. Business isn’t just about food and drink, it’s about restoring and sustaining a community that is changing quickly. In the local bars, like Paris Blues, my favorite jazz haunt, there are often crockpots of free food set up in the corner for anyone who’s hungry. At Just Lorraine’s Place on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, near 132nd Street, under a dusty portrait of Thelonious Monk, a poster announces the celebration of a woman’s birthday, with well wishes scrawled in marker next to her portrait. When I stopped by A Touch of Dee on Lenox Avenue at 143rd Street last November, a sign let me know that Corinne was serving that night and a poster announced that Mrs. Dee herself would host a free Thanksgiving dinner. At Showmans Jazz Club, there’s never a cover to hear incredible jazz and R&B, and appetizers and snacks are often free at the bar. These are the places I go to relax, where I can leave my busy life at the door and speak to my neighbors for a while.

RIGHT now, Harlem is on the verge. Since 2010, there’s been a restaurant boom. Dick Parsons has opened The Cecil in the ground floor of the old Cecil Hotel. The Grange on Amsterdam Avenue at 141st Street features signature cocktails and seasonal local produce on its menu. Bier International, a beer garden with a brilliantly curated range of brews, and the speakeasy 67 Orange have become popular nightspots.

To a community with 19 percent unemployment, these places bring hundreds of jobs that can’t be outsourced. They don’t just offer cooking and serving positions, but jobs for artists and musicians, lighting and sound engineers, handymen and electricians. Now people are coming uptown for a night out.

I travel all over the world for work and I am constantly asked to define Harlem. What’s it like, people ask. Is it cool? Is it safe? When I go to places like the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to speak among celebrated thinkers and leaders, I’m often asked: Is Harlem good now? I always have to pause before answering. Good compared with what? To when? These questions all miss the mark. Is Harlem good now? That is a question loaded with long-held ideas about race and class, one that dismisses the complex, vital history of this neighborhood and its people, their contributions to civil rights and art, under one word: “bad.”

Good or bad doesn’t begin to describe this neighborhood I love. The beauty of Harlem is that it isn’t definable as one thing or another. It has always been a place for the strivers: immigrants of all races and nationalities, artists and musicians and entrepreneurs. People have sought refuge here and have felt the need to seek refuge from here. It’s been brought to its knees by poverty and drugs and unemployment and has been pulled up by its art, its music, its food and its people.

After talking to Crab Man Mike that day on the street, I invited him to host a summer crab fest as guest chef at Red Rooster. Like any great chef, he brought his own equipment — his magic pot — and he cooked up delicious fresh crabs and clams from the Hunts Point Market, seasoned with his secret spice blend. It was one of the most memorable nights we’ve had at the Rooster. Living and working here and walking these streets, I have learned a new sense of hospitality from Harlem. It’s the feeling that lets me know I’m home.