Rapper Blvck Svm Turns the Tasting Menu into a Hip Hop Album

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In late 2023, Chicago-based hip hop artist Ben Glover booked his first-ever tasting menu dinner at Atelier in Lincoln Square, at the urging of a friend. Glover, who raps under the moniker Blvck Svm (pronounced “Black Sam,” an homage to sixteenth-century African samurai Yasuke), wasn’t big on the idea of tasting menus and mainly wondered whether the $250 meal would fill him up.

But over the ensuing two and a half hours, he became absorbed by the intentionality and attention to detail; by the colors that popped on the plate; and the seamless flow of one dish into the next. Each unfamiliar ingredient invigorated him, as much by its novelty as its meticulous preparation. By the end, he was indeed physically full, but he also felt mentally satisfied in a familiar way – as he only does after listening to a great album with no skips.

“I realized I'd just eaten an album,” Glover says, “and I needed to write a full album that is basically a tasting menu for people to listen to.”

michelinman dropped on Nov. 11 – a quietly rich, 13-song debut record in which Glover deploys the fine-dining lexicon as narrative scaffolding, metaphor and seasoning, and samples chefs and sardonically food-centric films. Between writing and recording it, Glover and his small production crew also traveled across the U.S. and Canada, shooting music videos for the songs in the back of the house at such fine-dining restaurants as Cellar Door Provisions, Brasero, and Asador Bastian in Chicago; Vern’s in Charleston, S.C.; Nisei in San Francisco; and The Butchery by Rge Rd in Edmonton, Canada. Through his 15-month fine-dining immersion, Glover didn’t just find inspiration for a wholly original album, but also a lens through which to advance his art.

“I was confronted with an opportunity to really elevate myself in terms of writing and now I had a vehicle to do that with food, especially because nobody had done it like this before,” he says.

For much of Glover’s life, food represented little more than sustenance. “The goal was to eat as much of it for as little money as possible,” he says. He grew up in South Florida and rapped for fun throughout high school. He began performing publicly after he moved to Chicago in 2014 to attend the University of Chicago in Hyde Park. After graduating, Glover worked at a gym to supplement the meager funds he made performing in clubs around the city and releasing EPs and songs on streaming platforms.

When he started to make enough to rap full time in 2021, he went out to eat more and started ordering dishes he’d never heard of.

He recalls dining at Momotaro, Gene Kato’s modern Japanese restaurant in the West Loop, around that time. “It was my first time eating sushi that wasn’t just a vehicle for spicy mayo or wasabi,” he says. “In that moment it occurred to me that there really are levels to food.”

Soon after, he discovered Palm Beach Meats, a restaurant and shop specializing in wagyu beef 10 minutes from his dad’s Florida home. Glover got to know the owners and started buying wagyu steaks to cook. With each food discovery his world opened up a little more, and he wanted to keep expanding it.

He’d written a few songs loosely based on food, but it wasn’t until the meal at Atelier that Glover felt creative inspiration pulse through him like an electric current. After dinner he sat in silent reflection, rehashing every detail as he does when he hears something exceptional. Even the menu, customarily gifted at the end of tasting menu meals, read out like a song prompt.

In rap, food often plays the role of allegory, status symbol or double entendre. Think of Biggie in “Hypnotize” rapping about “real millionaire sh*t: escargots;” Jay-Z comparing ketchup to luxury cars on “Maybach Music 2 (Lost Verse):” "Six-deuce every time, I never had the Heinz / Fifty-seven can't ketchup [catch up] to mines;" and Kelis’ euphemistic chorus on “Milkshake,” bringing “all the boys to the yard.” Indie rapper MFDoom, who is one of Glover’s major creative influences in terms of experimental verbosity, has played with food more than most. He crafted his 2004 album Mm..Food entirely from epicurean samples and lyrical allusions.

Over michelinman’s jazzy strings, tinkling piano, and melodic beats, Blvck Svm’s soft-spoken lyrics flow seamlessly between praising fine dining’s premium larders and meticulous techniques, to sports and literary references, themes of accessibility, and narrative glimpses into Glover’s life and what he consumes. Sometimes food occupies a metaphorical line or two: “Trim the fat and drop it on the heat like a Pat Riley contract,” on “mikealstott.” Other times it creates the framework for whole tracks, like the brief, transitional “stlaurentarmor,” which was inspired by Glover’s life-altering meal – and black currant sorbet palate cleanser – at Rge Rd, which he praises repeatedly, like a mantra: “Feeling like Icarus forcing a compound butter collision / sorbet black currant embedded to bring new life to my palate / I really cherish the balance.” He repeatedly tugs at threads that fine dining shares with other consumer goods. In other words, a there is there, for those who want to unearth it.

“I didn’t feel like I had to push the food angle too hard for this album for the songs to reflect my admiration for chefs, high-end food, and cooking techniques,” says Glover, who worked with executive producer Max He and producers including MIKE SUMMERS, Mike Shabb, Stoic, eeryskies, and Pilotkid. “There’s quality, there’s luxury, there’s sustainability, accessibility, race, class, ethnicity – all these things can be reflected in food and mean something to everybody who eats food regularly.”

Glover got the idea to shoot the “Bvck of House” live performance series when he returned to Atelier for a second meal at the chef’s counter. He spent the whole night after he got home combing Reddit for the best restaurants in cities throughout the U.S. and Canada. He sent out hundreds of Instagram DMs to the restaurants’ accounts with a pre-proposal for the series, though he had yet to release a single song from the album. Finally, the first three yeses arrived, from Vern’s, Nisei, and Nonesuch in Oklahoma City.

“All of last year predicated on those three yeses,” he says. “If I hadn’t gotten those, I don't know if I would’ve had the confidence to pursue this idea and make a full album.”

In the series – shot by videographers Hunter McNeeley (also Glover’s manager), Winston Elston, and Michael Tinley – Blvck Svm raps at a vintage mic suspended from above while chefs flit between tasks all around him, butchering glistening whole fish, seasoning local pork loin, and whipping eggs into billowy sabayon. Performing in the presence of prepping chefs helped shape Glover’s own approach to the album, which he didn’t finish writing until the fall.

“Watching the process around me, everything is concise with no wasted movement,” Glover recalls. “That was a turning point for the way I write. If I’m rapping about food especially, I’m trying to approach it almost microscopically. It made my writing process a bit slower.”

The crew shot the video for “faustian” at Cellar Door Provisions in December, near the end of the project.

“My lexicon is much more than a garnish / stigmas sticking out the crocus need meticulous harvest,” Glover raps, while beside him Cellar Door’s executive chef and owner Ethan Pikas shapes and proofs dough.

“On our end, it required very little of us other than our presence and our kitchen, which was wonderful,” says Pikas. “I felt honored to be included in the list of restaurants that he chose to perform in. I think it’s such a rad project.”

Pikas not only identified with Glover’s character – “quiet and slightly internalized” – but with the familiar scene of a tight-knit crew making art on a shoestring budget.

“There’s some kind of parallel between that and kitchens that are functioning on an equally tight crew and not a lot of financing, necessarily, that, when it works well, results in something that is hard to pin down and maybe a little magical because of the stresses that are placed on it,” he says.

Glover is working on a shorter, sample-heavy project with producer Elijah Who, for which much of Glover’s inspiration is epicurean once more. For now, he hesitates to self-describe as a food rapper, though he’s not sure how much longer that will last.

“Food has a way of pulling you back in its direction; you know, everybody eats,” he says. “Right after I made michelinman, I was chilling and took time off, then in December we went to shoot the last video at Knife Pleat [in Costa Mesa, California]. We had dinner there that night, and as soon as we got back to the hotel, I started writing again.”