I remember the first time I had a bowl of gumbo. I took a bite and said to myself, I know this dish. I grew up eating this dish. It tastes the same, smells the same, looks the same, but in my culture it’s called soupou kandja, an okra stew. You start to understand how food has traveled across the world to end up where it is today. People often ask me why I don’t open a Senegalese restaurant. My passion isn’t Senegalese food itself, but how Senegalese food as we know it has evolved over time.
When I first moved to New York and got a job in a restaurant, I remember the vibrancy of people coming in with their families. I grew up in a family of nine. When my mom cooked, there was always a lot of food, and there were always cousins, uncles, and aunts around. The house felt alive. A restaurant was the closest thing to that feeling once I left Senegal. It immediately felt like a place where I belonged, where I felt safe and whole, and I held onto that feeling.
While we were still in New York, chef Aaron Bludorn and I talked for years about traveling to Senegal together. One day, while eating thieboudienne, a dish of jollof rice and fish, he suggested we try serving Senegalese food at Café Boulud. Senegalese food is what I call “ugly delicious,” and I didn’t see how it could fit Michelin-star presentation. But a few months later, we featured Senegalese dishes, and it made the front page of The Wall Street Journal. That experience pushed us toward finally making the trip.
As we prepared to open Bludorn in Houston leading up to 2020, our focus shifted for about a year and a half. When the trip came together, our friends Marty and Michael Bennett joined us. Their ancestry traces back to Senegal, and the journey became more than food or culture. It felt like returning to the beginning of something important.
I planned a simple itinerary focused on what I call my happy places. On the first day, my mom welcomed us with my favorite dishes: nambe, a bean stew; lamb yassa over vermicelli; and tiere, a millet couscous. We gathered around large plates and ate with our hands. While we ate, I asked everyone what home meant to them. Living in the US now with my wife and children, who were born here, it took me a long time to realize Senegal is no longer my home in a physical sense. Home is an idea. It’s something you carry in your heart. That conversation made it clear that we were all home together in Senegal, just as much as we are at home in the United States.
The next day, we visited Gorée Island, where enslaved people were held before being shipped to America. It was an intense and emotional experience for all of us.
Several times, we ate at random street spots. One night, we stopped at a small shack by the ocean serving fresh fish. The woman running it told us about a white man from America who had visited with a journalist, and I realized she was talking about Anthony Bourdain. She cooked fish with white rice and sauce, and we sat by the beach using our phones as flashlights to see what we were eating. It was one of the best meals of the trip.
On our final night, we had dibi, Senegal’s most famous street food. It’s our version of barbecue. The lamb is dry-aged naturally for 48 hours, seasoned with onion and mustard, wrapped in parchment, and grilled slowly by the fire. The meat falls off the bone while everyone gathers, drinks, talks, and enjoys being together.
The entire process is social. When you order food and wait, you talk to people you don’t know. After the meal, you drink tea together. That sense of community is at the heart of food culture in Senegal.
By the time we flew back to the US, our bond had grown into something much deeper. We left as friends, but we returned as brothers.
