The Bay’s First African Restaurant Week Celebrates the Whole Continent

The Bay Area is home to decades-old kitfo houses, spirited jollof rivalries and innovative Ghanaian-Ethiopian fine dining mashups. But it has never had an entire week dedicated to celebrating the African continent’s diverse and varied cuisines.

Until now, that is. Today, the first ever Bay Area African Restaurant Week kicks off with a slew of prix-fixe meal deals and pop-up events, mostly spread across the East Bay and San Francisco. Organizers hope the ten-day promotion, which runs from Sept. 12–22, will give a boost to some of the region’s up-and-coming African and Afro-Caribbean food businesses — and that it will be the start of a rich and flavor-packed annual tradition.

Co-organizer Kemi Tijaniqudus of the Nigerian food truck Jollof Kitchen says she first started thinking about organizing some kind of African food festival as early as 2015. Her idea, she says, was to bring greater visibility to cuisines from across the continent — “west, east, north, south” — beyond the handful of African dishes, like jollof rice and the Ethiopian veggie combo, that have already gained mainstream traction.

“People know Ethiopian food and West African food, but you hardly hear people talk about Zimbabwe, South Africa or Rwanda,” she says.

For several years, though, the everyday demands of operating a food truck business didn’t leave Tijaniqudus with enough bandwidth to put together an event on the scale and scope she was imagining. Then she heard about African Restaurant Week, a national organization based in New York that has been hosting weeklong African restaurant promotions in cities across the country since 2013. Why not pool resources with a group that was already doing the work to highlight African food and culture, and had experience with the logistics of putting a large-scale event like this together? So, Tijaniqudus reached out and initiated a collaboration with African Restaurant Week founder Akin Akinsanya.

The resulting Bay Area African Restaurant Week is a cross between a traditional restaurant week promotion and the kind of grand, one-day festival that Tijaniqudus had initially envisioned. As with any other restaurant week, the 25 African restaurants who have currently signed up to participate will offer special discounted meal deals over the course of those ten days. But the event will also be bookended with big, audacious kickoff and closing parties that spotlight food trucks, caterers and other smaller vendors that don’t have a regular brick-and-mortar location. Like other African Restaurant Week events across the country, the Bay Area iteration will also showcase cuisines from across the African diaspora, particularly the Afro-Caribbean islands.

The Sept. 13 kickoff event at Oakland’s Parliament nightclub, for instance, will feature Ghanaian jollof from JayBaba’s Kitchen, Zimbabwean sadza (cornmeal mash) served with sardines or peanut butter chicken from Vumba Mts Kitchen, Gambian food from San Jose-based Tutti Fruti Kitchen and Nigerian food from The Grub Republic — plus music from a lineup of local AfroBeats DJs. Another pop-up, held on Sept. 14 at Oakland’s Zanzi dance club, will focus on Nigeria’s street food–style grilled meats known as suya.

Meanwhile, the Sept. 22 close-out event at For the Culture will be even larger in scale, with restaurants like Swahili Spot (the Bay Area’s only Tanzanian restaurant) and Tijaniqudus’ own jollof championship–winning truck, Jollof Kitchen, joining the festivities, along with a cooking competition for home cooks, a retail marketplace, and an array of cultural performances.

Most of the restaurants participating in the ten-day promotion will offer a 10% discount to customers who mention African Restaurant Week. That includes high-profile spots like Aziza, the upscale Moroccan restaurant in San Francisco’s Outer Richmond neighborhood, as well as relative newcomers like T’Chaka, the Haitian standout in Old Oakland. A few, like Oakland’s Trinidadian hot spot, Cocobreeze, will also offer special combo meals and a prix-fixe deal — $65 for a four-course meal for two. And Golden Safari, a popular Nigerian restaurant in Hayward, will give away hand-crafted commemorative Nigerian plateware as a souvenir.

In many ways, the very existence of Bay Area African Restaurant Week is a testament to how much more mainstream exposure the cuisines of the African diaspora have achieved over the past several years. An event of this scale would have been almost inconceivable in the Bay Area even a decade ago, when very few of these cuisines had received much local recognition or coverage outside of the immigrant communities themselves.

Tijaniqudus says that as much as she has always loved sharing her own Nigerian culture and food, she hopes this restaurant week will help take the Bay Area’s African food scene to the next level.

“People know jollof, jollof, jollof,” she says. “We want people to taste all of the African foods.”

Bay Area African Restaurant Week will run from Sept. 12–22. An updated (and growing) list of participating restaurants is available on the African Restaurant Week website. The kickoff party will be held on Friday, Sept. 13 from 6–10 p.m. at Parliament (811 Washington St., Oakland). The closing festival at For the Culture (701 Clay St., Oakland) will be held on Sunday, Sept. 22 from noon–7 p.m. Tickets for both events are currently free when reserved in advance; food and beverages will be sold a la carte.