IN THE MINIMALIST dining room of MoSuke, a restaurant on Paris’s Left Bank, a black sauce fills the hollow of a white plate. The ingredient necessary to achieve this depth of color comes from a tree that grows nearly 3,000 miles away in the rainforests of Cameroon: Afrostyrax lepidophyllus, whose every part — trunk, leaves, the round brown seeds called country onions — gives off the scent of garlic, most strongly after rain. The Bassa people, who live in the nation’s south, cut the bark into strips, then burn, crush and press it through a sieve until it’s fine as gunpowder.
This spice is stirred into mbongo tchobi, that velvet-plush sauce, along with alligator pepper, kin to ginger and musky as cardamom; roasted njangsa seeds scooped from fallen fruit, their oil so rich that some advise rubbing it into the skin if seeking voluptuousness; and four-corner, wrinkly pods possessing a sour-sweet tang, known in Twi (a language of Ghana) as prekese, or “soup perfume,” and in Yoruba (a language of Nigeria) as aridan, or “cast no spell,” because it’s believed to ward off evil spirits.
“Bravo,” a commenter responded to a picture of the dish on MoSuke’s Instagram in 2022, marveling at seeing “the ‘black sauce’ of my childhood” on such a stage — a restaurant where reservations must be booked months in advance and the nine-course prix fixe is 195 euros — noting that this kind of food was more likely to be shared “at a granny’s, an auntie’s, even a hair salon in Château Rouge,” the Paris neighborhood known for its concentration of African-run businesses. For although people of African descent have long been present in Europe and the United States, the dishes traditionally eaten on much of the African continent have largely remained on the fringes of the culinary mainstream, in the homes of immigrants and at restaurants built by immigrants for immigrants to feed and assuage the homesickness of their communities.
Historically, immigrant restaurants have drawn curious outsiders or those attracted by the low cost — a kind of “cheap exoticism,” as the American historian Haiming Liu writes in “From Canton Restaurant to Panda Express” (2015) of the Chinese eating halls frequented by non-Chinese diners in 19th-century California. And so the first representations of cuisines from other parts of the world to filter into broader European and American consciousness have generally been the versions served at hole-in-the-walls and on the street, at chop-suey and curry houses, kebab shops, taco stands and halal carts. But today chefs and restaurateurs of West African descent are seeking a radically different entry point. When Mory Sacko, now 32, opened MoSuke in September 2020, it was among the first high-end restaurants in Europe and the United States not only to put West African ingredients and flavors at the fore but to acknowledge them as the equals of their European and American counterparts.
Now at Chishuru, in the onetime bohemian enclave of Fitzrovia in central London, you might sample eko, a Nigerian wobbly cake of fermented corn wallowing in pepper soup, while sipping a martini with a pod of okra speared at the rim — a blend of vodka and ogogoro, a mellow, smoky spirit with grassy contours distilled from palm wine and banned in the early 20th century in Nigeria by British colonial authorities, not in the interest of temperance but to force locals to buy imported British gin instead.
A few blocks away, a meal at Akoko might begin with a whiskey and soda crowned by a lacy gray-black tuile melded from rice powder and egusi, fat white melon seeds, and Ghanaian bofrot, a crackly ball of fried yeasted dough scarlet from pulverized Scotch bonnets. Behind gold-link curtains at Tatiana, inside Manhattan’s David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center, an $86 plate (meant to be shared) of pastrami short-rib suya (similar to Nigerian barbecue) gleams with yaji, a spice blend from the Hausa people, a flame-hued swirl of chile, garlic, ginger and crushed groundnuts. On Magazine Street in New Orleans, the pull-apart bread rolls at Dakar are lush with palm oil and, if you’re lucky, dessert will be thiakry, a millet porridge, thick and tangy with sour cream and yogurt and here incarnated as a pecan pie.
At some of these restaurants, the only option is a tasting menu: to put yourself in the hands of the chef; to submit to a higher power. Adejoké Bakare, the 51-year-old chef of Chishuru, compared it to the bounty of an owambe — a Yoruba term for the over-the-top parties that light up Lagos and the cities of southwestern Nigeria, milestone celebrations with ecstatic music, dancing to make the world shake and plate after plate of everything you’d ever want to eat. The theme is abundance, for the table, for life. You sit back and let it come.
MODERN MAPS OF West Africa, a region of more than three million square miles and 500 languages, encompassing Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Togo and, according to some definitions, Cameroon on the eastern edge and Mauritania to the north, belie a complex underlay of city-states and kingdoms predating British and French colonial interference. (The two most powerful were the Mali empire, which at its height in the 14th century controlled much of the territory and amassed wealth through trade in salt and gold — one of its rulers, Mansa Musa I, may have been the richest person who ever lived — and the Songhai empire, the dominance of which lasted until its defeat by Morocco’s Sa‘di dynasty in 1591.) While there is no one cuisine that unites the hundreds of millions of people who live in West Africa and the tens of millions more in the diaspora today, many culinary traditions are shared, with occasional skirmishes over the origins of a dish or which nation makes it best.
As the American historian Jessica B. Harris documents in “The Africa Cookbook: Tastes of a Continent” (1998), the cooking of the region capitalizes on the ingredients that thrive in its soil and climate, with energy-dense “starchy mashes” made from cereals (fonio, pearl millet, rice, sorghum) and tubers, particularly the yam, which in some cultures took on a mythic aura and even the status of deity. With the Columbian exchange in the 16th century came tomatoes, chiles and cassava, all now essentials, as are later additions like Maggi bouillon cubes, invented in Switzerland and marketed by Nestlé in West Africa in the 1950s, and, in Nigeria, stockfish, unsalted sun- and wind-dried fish from Norway, which was sent in emergency shipments during the late 1960s Nigerian Civil War. Meat and seafood from rivers and the coast, while important, weren’t traditionally central to a meal but instead were added to enrich and boost the flavor of soups and stews and make a smaller amount of food go a long way. Sometimes there is the faintest distinction, a matter of flow, among soup, stew and sauce, any of which may require the pounding of ingredients in a mortar and, in modern times, churning in a blender until the wiring shorts out.
The imprint of West Africa remains in the soul food of the United States, the Creole cuisines of Latin America and the cooking of the Caribbean, all legacies of the enslaved Africans forcibly brought across the Atlantic to plant sugar starting in the 16th century. But these African influences haven’t always been recognized. In the 2021-23 TV documentary series “High on the Hog,” Serigne Mbaye, the 31-year-old chef-owner of Dakar, whose childhood was split between Harlem and Senegal, expresses frustration at New Orleans locals who think of gumbo as a cousin to bouillabaisse, disregarding its African influences. At Dakar, he makes Senegalese soupe kandia, a forerunner to gumbo, and thickens it not with roux but by smothering okra — “gumbo” likely derives from “ki ngombo,” the term for okra in Kimbundu, a Bantu language of Angola — until the vegetable’s majestic cache of slime is wholly unleashed. “I’m trying to make a statement about where I’ve been, where my people have been,” Mbaye says.
The chefs and restaurateurs behind the new West African-inflected restaurants in the United States and Europe are immigrants or, like Mbaye, children of immigrants for whom cultural inheritance is not distant past but living memory. But like Black American chefs and restaurateurs whose roots go back generations — a number of whom have sought in the past decade to spotlight in their menus the culinary gifts of the African diaspora as an act of excavation and reclamation — they have had to grapple with outsiders’ limited notions of what Black food can be. Before Tatiana, the chef Kwame Onwuachi, 34, whose mother is from the American South and whose father was born in St. Louis but came of age in Nigeria, contended with backers at another restaurant who wanted expensive takes on Southern classics, as if that were the only commercially viable genre for a Black chef. “Exactly the sort of stereotype I wanted to destroy,” he recalls in his 2019 memoir, “Notes From a Young Black Chef,” written with Joshua David Stein. (Onwuachi opened a second restaurant, Dogon in Washington, D.C., in September.)
Others struggled to find investors with faith that West African cooking would have upscale appeal. The chef Élis Bond, 31, and his wife, Vanessa, 29, a sommelier, drew on their own savings to open Mi Kwabo (“welcome” in Fon, a language of Benin) in Paris in January 2020. Bakare crowdfunded online in 2023 to move Chishuru, which had been a pop-up in a covered market in Brixton in South London, home to a sizable Caribbean and African population, to its current, posher address. When Ayo Balogun, the 46-year-old chef of Dept of Culture in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant, tried to sign up with a prominent reservations platform in 2022, he was turned away. “ ‘What kind of restaurant?’ they asked,” he recalls. “They wouldn’t take my money.”
“It can’t be done,” Mbaye remembers hearing repeatedly before he opened Dakar in November 2022. Then, in its precarious early days, a dining critic stopped by and told Mbaye that the restaurant would never make it unless he ditched the tasting menu. Defiantly, he got rid of à la carte instead. “I just wanted to make people believe,” he says.
WEST AFRICANS FROM former British and French colonies — which by 1965 had all gained independence — began migrating from the continent in significant numbers during the economic downturn of the 1980s and ’90s, when many African nations registered a negative rate of growth and there was little hope of employment, especially as the International Monetary Fund pressured governments to cut budgets and public jobs. Mbaye’s family was among the wave of Senegalese who settled in Harlem starting in the 1980s and ’90s; in 1989, his mother opened a restaurant, House of Khadim, and brought her sister over from Senegal to help run it. A few years later, the restaurant closed, but his mother continued to serve food out of the family’s apartment and his aunt became a chef at Le Baobab, which still stands (under different management) on a strip of West 116th Street known as Little Senegal.
“The auntie-and-uncle first generation of African restaurants were for friends, families and people at church,” says Akwasi Brenya-Mensa, 42, a London-based interdisciplinary artist of Ghanaian ancestry and the chef of a nomadic pop-up, Tatale. “There didn’t need to be any consideration of, ‘What does this look like from the outside?’” But as the population of West African immigrants in the United States and Europe has grown, so has a desire for greater visibility and recognition. To make food at the high end was a conscious decision for Mbaye: In one of his first restaurant jobs, as a dishwasher, he saw how people treated the chef — how someone cooking food could command so much deference. He decided to go to culinary school, “where I learned about Michelin,” he says, and went on to train at restaurants with Michelin stars (Atelier Crenn in San Francisco, L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon in New York), plotting one day to earn his own. “Fine dining is not a cuisine, it’s simply a concept,” he says. “If I want my food to be respected, I have to cook at a high level.”
Aji Akokomi, the 47-year-old owner of Akoko, was clear from the start about his mission. “I wanted fine dining, I wanted central London, I wanted Londoners traveling there to have an experience,” he says. So here’s a yam croquette exalted on a ceramic pedestal, like an object of worship. It’s dressed in a sauce of ehuru, sometimes called calabash nutmeg, although it’s woodsier than regular nutmeg, with no sweet undertones, and Penja white peppercorn, bright, mineral and biting without a burn, grown in the volcanic soil of Cameroon. Jollof, the West African crowd-pleaser of backyard cauldrons, rice red as the last gasp of sunset from broken-down tomatoes and heavy with smoke, comes in a clay pot with the lid lifted at the table in a cloudy flourish, revealing grains lashed with chicken fat — and, if you like, a side of osetra caviar.
Here artistry and elegance are not a bid for validation but an assertion: This, too, is our food, and this is where it belongs. Early on, some guests at Chishuru arrived with a preconception “that this was ‘ethnic,’ so it had to be overflowing bowls,” Bakare recalls. Instead, she makes near still-lifes, spooning a quenelle of pumpkin seeds blitzed with preserved lemon atop ekuru, a dense cake of black-eyed peas, and stuffing waina, pillowy orbs of fermented rice, with beet purée and giving them a daub of black-garlic paste. Onwuachi remembers the first time he saw a plate with egusi stew and fufu — a doughy companion to soups and stews, made in Nigeria of fermented cassava cooked and pounded until stretchy — heading out to the dining room at his previous restaurant Kith/Kin in Washington, D.C. He wept. “It was on a hundred-dollar plate,” he says. “It looked like Beyoncé to me. It was food I grew up eating, but I’d never seen it like that.”
One of the few precedents for putting African ingredients in a fine-dining setting was the rarefied Ikoyi in London (prix fixe: 350 pounds), opened in 2017 by Iré Hassan-Odukale, who was born in Nigeria, and Jeremy Chan, a chef of Chinese and Canadian descent. But they demur from the label of West African and describe the cuisine as more generally spice-based, since Chan experiments with West African ingredients unmoored from their traditional context. In the 2023 “Ikoyi” cookbook, he writes of “leaving space for association, uncertainty and interpretation” — a phrase that could as easily apply to the work of chefs at these newer restaurants, from the beef tongue speared in folds, calling to mind a ruffled collar, at Akoko, to the crackle-bottomed egusi dumplings at Tatiana, a nod to Onwuachi’s youthful wanderings in New York’s Chinatowns, the dumpling skins’ chewy crimps a textural homage to fufu.
These chefs are finding connections between cultures and cuisines, but also interrogating what’s considered acceptable as food in different contexts, confounding notions of origin. In Paris, Bond (whose Mi Kwabo is temporarily shuttered as he and his wife find a new location) takes mintoumba, fermented cassava kneaded with palm oil, then steams and smokes it in banana leaves before frying, to heighten its funk, akin to that of Parmigiano-Reggiano. Sacko, the son of a house cleaner and a construction worker, draws inspiration from Japan, as well as from the Malian and Senegalese heritage of his parents and his training in classical French cuisine. (His restaurant’s name is a homage to Yasuke, a 16th-century African who traveled to Japan and became a samurai.) To make mafe, a stew (“like boeuf bourguignon, a very domestic dish,” he says), Sacko takes a filet from a breed of cattle that wander the granite hills of the Aubrac plateau in southern France and ages it in shea butter, extracted from the kernels of the seeds of the shea tree, native to the savannas of West and Central Africa.
The steak arrives at the table barely seared — “I can’t make an overcooked filet,” he says with a laugh — under a crush of peanuts from Soustons on the Bay of Biscay, sweet-fleshed because of the sandy soil. There are more peanuts in the accompanying sauce, which is the actual mafe, tangy from tamarind and, unexpectedly, miso, adding another contour of saltiness and umami. For his mother, it’s too refined: “She asked, ‘Where is the rice?’”
EVEN A DECADE ago in New York City, many West African restaurants kept a low profile. Some had curtains drawn and grates half-closed, as if to protect a secret. At times there was a staff of one, the chef emerging from the kitchen to deliver dishes and bus tables. Diners from other backgrounds were anomalies, welcomed graciously, if occasionally with a hint of suspicion or bemused tolerance. Six years ago, at an Ivorian taxi driver haunt in Brooklyn, a server told me, “I had one customer say, ‘Too fatty, too many bones.’” She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, that’s the appeal. That’s the culture.”
Such steadfastness holds today. “I’m going to offer the food exactly the way you get it back home,” says Fatou Ouattara, the 38-year-old Ivorian chef of Akadi in Portland, Ore. “Fish with the head and eyes on it.” Always on her menu is attieke — grated, fermented cassava that, pressed through a sieve and steamed, takes on the fluffiness of couscous, with a sour tang. “It’s not as popular, but that’s my food,” she says. “It’s almost a love letter to myself.”
At the same time, chefs and restaurateurs recognize that they need to guide diners. Although a few casual West African spots have become popular in recent years, including BMK Paris-Bamako in Paris, Chuku’s in London, Suya Joint in Boston, Teranga in Manhattan, ChòpnBlọk in Houston and Hedzole in Washington, D.C. — Sacko has his own street-food outlet, MoSugo, which serves burgers, fried plantains and bissap (hibiscus tea) — knowledge of the cuisine among non-African diners is still limited. At Akoko, Akokomi says that he doesn’t feel quite ready to introduce the truly viscous soups, so thick that “you can lift the whole bowl with your spoon,” he says. Balogun notes that he waited more than two years after opening Dept of Culture before offering guests what he calls “the most Nigerian dish you’ll ever have,” a soup that is seemingly all okra, its gooey innards laid bare, with eba in the depths, made of fermented cassava meal mixed with boiling water until it swells like polenta. The dish is sour, spongy, sticky, a glorious tug of war.
“If I started off cooking how my mom cooks it, they wouldn’t eat it,” Mbaye says. “You have to train them. Look at Noma” — the acclaimed half-restaurant, half-laboratory in Copenhagen — “serving brain and all these exotic things.” (Reindeer brain custard, to be specific.) “They had to build trust. These other cuisines do it all the time and nobody questions them.”
There is a generosity at these restaurants, the sense of a hand outstretched. Bakare has found that a set menu format defuses anxiety by eliminating decisions (which would require knowledge). Bond likes to end a meal by bringing a tray of ingredients in raw form to the table, maybe some innocent-looking little Scotch bonnets, bitter round white eggplants or balls of soumbara (a dark paste of fermented locust beans), so that guests can begin to better understand what they’ve been eating. When Brenya-Mensa makes omo tuo — rice boiled with extra water, then mashed, swirled and rolled into rough orbs — even though it’s meant to be scooped up by hand along with its accompanying groundnut soup, nkatekwan, he gives his diners spoons as backup. “I don’t believe in dumbing things down,” he says. “I do believe in accessibility. I want as many people to try this dish as possible.”
A story can be the golden thread. At Dept of Culture, which occupies a small storefront split between a single communal table that seats around a dozen and a kitchen equipped with little more than two induction burners, a toaster oven and a blender, Balogun often prefaces each dish with a winking monologue — about his exile as a troublemaking teen from the Nigerian city of Ilorin to his grandmother’s house in the countryside, where he learned to grind chiles “old school, with a millstone,” he says, or about how it took nine months for a batch of rice shipped from Nigeria to reach New York, at a cost so high that when he saw a guest had left some on her plate, all he could think was, “That’s 50 cents a grain.”
Not every tale is soothing. Dinners at Dakar may include a bowl that begins with a red shimmer of palm oil and black-eyed peas simmered until they lose sense of their own borders. Hunks of sweet Louisiana blue crab are scattered on top, sweet and tender. When Mbaye presents it, he explains that before opening his restaurant, he traveled to Gorée, an island off the coast of Senegal, to visit the House of Slaves, today a museum and memorial, with its Door of No Return, opening onto the sea, through which enslaved people had to pass to board the ships that would take them across the Atlantic. Their final meal: these same black-eyed peas and palm oil, high in saturated fat, because the slavers wanted to be sure that their assets would survive the treacherous voyage. “I’ve had people cry when they eat it,” Mbaye says.
The ice cream gilding his thiakry pie has a story, too, one hinting at a happier future. It’s suffused with ataya, a brew of green tea, mint and sugar, poured from a height, then back and forth between glasses until it foams. In the Senegalese tea ceremony, which can last for hours, you drink three glasses, with more water and often more mint and sugar added to the tea leaves before each pour, so that the bitterness — of early life struggles, of striving for something out of reach — eases and fades, and the last taste is all sweet.
First image: Set designer’s assistant: Joseph McCagherty. Digital tech: Noemie Reijnen. Photo assistants: Wendell Cole, Brandon Jones
Second image: Production: The Curated. Set designer’s assistant: Georgina Boggia. Lighting director: Emmanuel Robert Owusu-Afram. Digital tech: Noemie Reijnen. Photo assistant: Chloe Burgess
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