Pierre Thiam is a renowned chef, restaurant owner, cookbook author, and co-founder of Yolélé – a company working to introduce the world to fonio, an ancient West African grain built for climate change.
But it hasn’t been all sunshine and good harvests for Pierre. In fact, he was robbed just days after he first arrived in New York City from Senegal.
It was 1989, and he had just traveled to the U.S. to study chemistry and physics. This chance incident, however, set Pierre’s life on an entirely different course.