For the 2025 Met Gala, the food needed to be just as fine as the fashion itself—which is why Vogue asked James Beard Award–winning chef Kwame Onwuachi to create this year’s menu.
“I was inspired by Black dandyism and the Black experience in fashion—it’s pulled from so many different avenues and routes of the diaspora,” says Onwuachi, whose critically acclaimed restaurant Tatiana was named the best in New York City by The New York Times. “I wanted to encapsulate all of that, from the hors d’oeuvres to plated dinner at the gala.”
Most importantly, though, it needed to be delicious. “We can be poetic as we want, but it has to be good at the end of the day,” Onwuachi says. At cocktail hour, waiters passed around elevated soul food on silver trays: Think hoecakes with crispy chicken, mini chopped cheeses, cornbread topped with caviar, and curry chicken patties. (The latter is a twist on Tatiana’s famous curried goat patties.)
Just after 8 p.m., dinner began in the Temple of Dendur with a first course of papaya piri-piri salad—a celebration of the famous South African spice—alongside cucumbers doused in a Caribbean green-seasoning marinade. For dinner, waiters served Creole roasted chicken with lemon emulsion, rice and peas, and a fresh hot sauce. Meanwhile, BBQ collard greens with bacon and cornbread with honey-curry butter were offered as sides. Then came the sweet final touch: a Bodega Special Cosmic Brownie with a powdered-sugar-donut mousse as well as a golden cake with honey sweet cream and blistered gooseberry. “All throughout the meal, there are different aspects of Blackness throughout the world represented at the highest level,” he says.
Guests like Pharrell Williams and Janelle Monáe enjoyed it all while sitting next to The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Temple of Dendur. A painting by Cy Gavin—“Untitled (Sky)”—was projected in the grand room. All of this was surrounded by a set made to look like the elaborate cabinetry one would see at a London suit shop, complete with sconces from Ysaac de la Puente at Lionsgate Antiques NY. “The idea was to really create a very sophisticated English tailor,” the Met Gala’s event planner, Raúl Àvila, tells Vogue. (The concept is a nod to the origin of Black dandyism, which Monica L. Miller, author of Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Identity and guest curator of “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” pinpoints to 18th-century England.) A memorable dinner, indeed.
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