W
hen Benjamin Glover visited Chicago’s Atelier at the end of 2023, he didn’t know what to expect. He left a changed man.
Never having experienced a fine dining tasting menu before, Glover figured he would have to get McDonald’s on the way home — there was no way those tiny plates would do the trick. But over the course of the meal, his mind was fully blown, his spirit stimulated alongside his stomach’s satiation. The thoughtful sequencing of dishes conjured to mind music. “It was like eating my way through an album,” Glover says. “I wanted to make an album that sounded like a tasting menu.”
That’s because when Glover is not eating gourmet dinners, he performs as the rapper Blvck Svm. And he really did wind up creating an entire album that’s inspired by fine dining. It’s called michelinman, and it drops on Nov. 11. In keeping with the theme, Glover shot the music videos for the album in upscale kitchens around the country, milling between sauciers and line cooks while he raps into a mic that drapes down from the ceiling.
Given Northern California’s fine-dining bona fides, it should come as no surprise that the project has strong Bay Area connections: Glover himself is based in Chicago, but one of the album’s main producers is from the East Bay. San Francisco fine dining restaurant Nisei gets a name drop on michelinman’s first track, “greymatter,” and its kitchen — and kitchen team — is featured in the music video for the song.
The songs on michelinman weave a concentric circle between high-level rapping and high-level cooking, bouncing between basketball references and tuna belly with ease. Tracks are riddled with samples from cooking shows and chefs pleading with diners to pay attention to their palate. On “irongate” Glover details the camel bone spoon he’ll use for Beluga caviar before comparing his duffel bag to a “Twix sans nougat.” On “mikealstott,” he raps in a near-whisper about how he will “trim the fat and drop it on the heat like a Pat Riley contract” — a reference to how the Miami Heat executive was notorious for monitoring his players’ body fat percentage.