Mawa McQueen, millionaire chef at the head of a culinary empire in the United States, looks back on a brilliant career made of hard work, perseverance and limitless ambition.
The United States, Mawa McQueen spent ten years dreaming about it before being able to get there. He will need 15 more to found a real gastronomic empire. She tells the story of her American-style “success story” at the microphone of Géraldine Mayr.
“All I wanted was to go to the United States”
“I had no plan at all: all I wanted was to go to the United States. I wanted to leave because there were lots of successful black people there” : Mawa McQueen was born into a poor family in Abidjan in Ivory Coast. She grew up in France, in Trappes, in the Paris suburbs. At the age of twenty, she left everything to live her American dream in the upscale resort of Aspen, in the state of Colorado.
In “C’est la vie”, she looks back on her arrival in the United States but also emphasizes the days of hard work to build what she has built today. Motivation inseparable from a positive and ambitious state of mind: “Believing in your dreams is essential, having a dream and knowing that you are worthy of achieving it is essential, she insists. The problem is that people give up very quickly.”
Part of Mawa McQueen’s success lies in a very special culinary invention, which vacationers are snapping up in Aspen: the caviar crepe, sold for 180 dollars (around 165 euros)!
Today, the fifty-year-old is at the head of four restaurants serving Afro-Mediterranean cuisine and a home catering service. Mawa is not ready to stop there: “It took me 15 years to thrive as a chef, entrepreneur and restaurateur. And I’m nowhere near the level of success I aspire to. Be patient with yourself”she writes in her autobiography, Limitless ambition.
