African Restaurant Week Wants to Expand the Bay Area’s Palate

On a bright, sun-soaked Sunday afternoon last September, a crowd of 400-plus food lovers gathered in style at an Oakland nightclub to close out the Bay Area’s first ever African Restaurant Week. While the DJ spun AfroBeats, chefs and caterers representing various corners of the African diaspora passed out sizzling suya skewers and big heaping plates of jollof rice and whole grilled fish.

“People loved it,” says Jollof Kitchen’s Kemi Tijaniqudus, who co-organized the event. “I loved that all kinds of people came just to taste the different foods. It wasn’t just Africans.”

The annual celebration of African food returns to the Bay Area this week and will run from Sept. 12–21, kicking off with an opening night party at Parliament in Oakland on Sept. 12.

Similar to a typical restaurant week, Bay Area African Restaurant Week features a lineup of 28 participating restaurants that will offer deals and special menu items over the course of the 10-day promotion. The list of participants is like a who’s who of diasporic African food in the Bay, running the gamut from decades-old neighborhood staples like Red Sea in Oakland and Bissap Baobab in the Mission, to splashy up-and-comers like Old Oakland’s Afro-Caribbean cocktail spot Nosso Bar and Jack London Nigerian newcomer 9jaGrills. Most will give a 10% discount to customers who mention African Restaurant Week.

The promotion launched last year as a collaboration between Tijaniqudus and Akin Akinsanya, founder of a New York–based company that puts on similar African Restaurant Week events all over the country. Tijaniqudus says when she came up with the idea for the event, her explicit goal was to shine a light on the tremendous diversity of African food in the Bay Area, where certain cuisines, like Nigerian food and Ethiopian food, have achieved a certain degree of mainstream popularity. But what about the cuisines of Zimbabwe or Gambia? What about Ghana or Tanzania? Tijanqudus’ dream was that Bay Area food enthusiasts would fall in love with those cuisines as well.

The challenge, Tijanqudus explains, is that most of the Bay Area chefs specializing in those cuisines don’t have restaurants of their own, so they can’t really participate in a traditional restaurant week. The solution was to close out the event with a big African food festival — the aforementioned Oakland courtyard gathering, which has been expanded to two days this year, Sept. 20 and Sept. 21, at For the Culture in Oakland.

Jason Wealth, a Ghanaian American who runs JayBaba’s Kitchen, says he started his pop-up and catering company three years ago as a way to spread his love for Ghanaian cooking and to show how luxurious African food can be. He explains that the cuisine is similar to Nigerian food except a lot less spicy — but still packed with flavor. And despite Ghanaian food’s relatively low visibility in the Bay, Wealth says his stand was the most popular one at last year’s African Restaurant Week closing festival.

“I was the only person who had over 50 people waiting in line to get my food,” he says with evident pride.

One of the biggest hits? His whole tilapia, which he and his team grilled over hot coals right there in the courtyard. At this year’s two-day festival, Wealth will bring the tilapia back, along with his waakye (a rice and bean dish) and Ghanaian-style jollof.

Guests who want to explore the Bay Area’s harder-to-find African cuisines can also check out the Sept. 12 kickoff party at Parliament, where Jollof Kitchen (Nigerian) will be joined by Tuti Fruti’s Bazaar (Gambian) and Vumba Mts Kitchen (Zimbabwean). All three vendors will be selling their food at the closing festival as well.

Both the opening and closing celebrations will be open to guests 21-years-old and up, since the venues are bars and nightclubs.

Tijaniqudus, who first made a name for herself as a two-time winner of the Bay Area Jollof Festival, says what she loves about African Restaurant Week is that there isn’t any sense of competition with the other vendors.

“We just want everybody to come represent,” she says. “This is more of an exhibit, just showing off what you have and introducing our cultures to other people.”

Bay Area African Restaurant Week will run from Sept. 12–21. You can view the current list of participating restaurants on the African Restaurant Week website. The kickoff party will be held on Friday, Sept. 12 from 6–10 p.m. at Parliament (811 Washington St., Oakland). The two-day closing festival will be held at For the Culture (701 Clay St., Oakland) on Saturday, Sept. 20 and Sunday, Sept. 21, from noon–6 p.m. Food and beverages will be sold a la carte. Note: Both the opening and closing events are ages 21+ only.