It is a joke – rooted in truth as if humor is – that many American citizens, questioned about Africa, could say something in the sense: “Oh yeah. I have never been in this country.”
Well, American Myopia received a lesson in personal geography on the western part of the African continent, the plate and the kitchen stove, nothing less.
Writers, chefs and restaurateurs with family ties to countries like Nigeria, Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire cooking or exploit the recipes for food from their line. This West African production mode occurs from Portland to New Orleans and New York.
Some, like Fatou Ouattara, originally from Côte d’Ivoire, use the restaurant’s format to serve dishes such as the beef queue (beef tail stew) and Mafe (peanut stew). Ouattara’s Portland, Oregon, Restaurant, Akadi PDX, “has the convincing and unique menu type you need to try,” said Jenni Moore Portland Mercury. Others use both restaurants and cooking books to circulate the right word on the kitchens of West Africa. Pierre Thiam, born in Senegal, for example, now has two New York locations of his fast Teranga concept and his fourth and more recent cooking book, “Simply West African: easy and joyful recipe for each kitchen”, “ was released in September 2023.
From Lagos to American cuisine
Yewande Komolafe is known in food writing circles as one of the best recipe developers in the industry. No surprise when his first cooking book, “My daily lagos,” is full of attractive recipes that operate reliably in home cooking. The book, however, accomplishes more. According to Publishers Weekly“This sincere and fascinating collection is an exceptional example of a cookbook that is much more than simple recipes.”
Subscribe to Weekly
Escape your echo room. Get the facts behind the news, as well as the analysis of several perspectives.
Subscribe and save
Register for free newsletters of the week
From our morning briefing to a weekly newsletter good news, get the best of the week delivered directly in your reception box.
From our morning briefing to a weekly newsletter good news, get the best of the week delivered directly in your reception box.
After more than 10 years in the United States, Komolafe returned to Lagos and, in so doing, returned to herself. The book documents its re -expression of classic Lagos dishes and catering rituals. There is Eko Tutu, a fermented corn pudding steamed and roasted fish with Ata Lilo (pepper paste). In Mayukh Sen Profile in eaterKomolafe noted that his point of view in his book and in his work as a columnist for the New York Times is hers and his own. “She bristles with the idea of” authenticity “and any dispute”, writes the senator “when she writes on Nigerian cuisine for the newspaper, she works from personal experience, observation, research, and she hopes that her humility is enough.”
Senegal meets New Orleans
Like Komolafe, Seigne Mbaye, the chief-owner of Dakar Nola, employs food as led to his roots. Mbaye was “born in Harlem, but when I was young, my parents sent me to a boarding school in Senegal. This is one of the first places I started learning to cook Senegalese cuisine, ”he said Garden and firearm. His parents came from Senegal, so returning to the West African country was a kind of return.
Mbaye worked in downward kitchens such as Crenn Atelier and Atelier Joel Robuchon, as well as the chef of New Orleans, the beloved of the Cajun Mosquito supper club restaurant. Before and during the pandemic, Mbaye had a pop-up restaurant and a take-out company that served its point of view on classic Senegalese dishes such as Yassa chicken. Then, in November 2022, he opened Dakar Nola.
The menu tasting restaurant teases the threads that bind New Orleans – and by extension, all of the United States – with the enslaved people who were forced through the passage of the middle to Louisiana and other American entrance ports for slave trade. An example of the multi-subject menu: Last meal, a course that pays tribute to pea with black eyes and palm oil used to fatte the slaves before going to the west. As Brett Anderson said about the dish The New York Times“There is a good chance that you are thinking about it a few days later. The last meal is so delicious – and even more disturbing. ”
Do not confuse a meal in Dakar Nola for a Downer, despite his approach open to the eyes of the History of Blacks. The dining room is common, with everyone sitting at the same time. You are looking with your neighbors; You will regret food without peers; You will amaze the charisma of Mbaye while working in the room. It is the intimate West African food, broadcast in the most joyful and personal way.
