Chefs are spotlighting their culinary heritage on tasting menus, at buzzy pop-ups, and at new restaurants across the country.
At Dept of Culture, a soft white cheese called wara comes plated with stew — blended and cooked tomatoes, bell peppers, and onions, spiced like many Nigerians prefer it.
While the combination of Lagos’s high-end and everyday eateries inspired Balogun’s vision for Dept of Culture, it is ultimately, the chef’s north-central state of Kwara that underscores the cuisine at the restaurant, and is at the heart of the food he serves in dishes such as gbegiri soup, made from locust beans, often eaten alongside ewedu soup — a staple among Yoruba ethnic group regardless of region, made with jute leaves as its base — plus eba or àmàlà .
Senegal-born chef and author Pierre Thiam, one of the modern pioneers of global West African fine dining, operated celebrated restaurants in Lagos and Dakar from 2015 and 2018, respectively, before making the leap to his first U.S. restaurant: Teranga, a counter-service spot which. Teranga’s more casual format — and that it took three years to open in the U.S. — speaks to and challenges longstanding reactions to Africa and African food.
This interest from American diners still feels new to Thiam, and it’s not without limits. The stubborn belief that African food may not be sophisticated enough to qualify as fine dining is something Thiam sees as persisting from his days working in Italian and French restaurants in the late ’80s.
Still, the chefs focusing on West African cooking at their U.S. restaurants today are confronting what NOLA-based, Senegal-born chef Serigne Mbaye describes as a lingering expectation that West African dining should be cheap. After moving to New Orleans from Senegal and working in the famous, almost 130-year-old New Orleans restaurant Commander’s Palace,.
Born and raised in New Jersey, chef Nana Wilmot felt a strong connection to Ghanaian food. She spent much of her time after school with her grandmother, who lived with the family until Wilmot was 14 after first arriving in the country to help with raising Wilmot’s brother and cousins who lived nearby. “My mom worked so even though I saw her cook, most of those day-to-day things were with my grandmother,” she says.
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