Ever since Priscilla Mkenda immigrated to the Bay Area in the late ’90s, she wondered why there wasn’t a single restaurant here that served Tanzanian food — the rich curries and flaky chapati flatbreads of her native country. “I think there is big potential,” she’d tell herself over the home-cooked meals that she prepared for her friends and family.
As was the case for many aspiring food entrepreneurs, 2020’s pandemic shutdown finally prompted Mkenda to do something about it — to start her very own Tanzanian pop-up near Lake Merritt in Oakland, first with friends she met at an African dance class and then by herself. Eventually, she parlayed the business into a food truck. Then, last spring, she took another step and signed the lease on a commercial kitchen and takeout restaurant in West Oakland. She called it Swahili Spot.
It was in this small storefront with Swahili food words (“kuku” for chicken, “mzuzu” for plantain) handwritten on the walls, that I got my first taste of homestyle Tanzanian beef curry over coconut rice and the dense, lightly sweetened rice cakes known as vitumbua.
Mkenda, who grew up in Tanzania and Uganda and moved to the Bay Area for university in 1999, says all of her food is born out of nostalgia. “My menu is a history, actually,” she says. It’s exactly what I grew up eating back home.” Her signature beef and chicken curry bowls are recreations of what she ate at boarding school as a kid — they’re staples of the cuisine that anyone who’s ever visited Tanzania would have eaten.
The beef curry I tried was surprisingly light — “it’s not spicy-hot, it’s spicy with flavor,” as Mkenda puts it. Instead of the heavy bass line of cumin and coriander that you might get with an Indian curry or even a Japanese curry, Swahili Spot’s curry has the brighter, more mellow flavor notes that you get from the addition of cinnamon and cloves. The beef itself was tender and flavorful, but it was almost more of a side dish. The most delicious thing in the bowl was a big pile of savory sautéed kale.
