Houston’s Thriving West African Food Scene

The other day, at a Nigerian restaurant called Safari, in Houston, Texas, I peeled back the plastic wrap on a ball of fufu, a staple across West Africa. Made from a steamed root vegetable or grain—in this case, yam—that’s been pounded and hydrated until it’s soft and slightly stretchy, reminiscent of rising bread dough, it falls under a pan-African category known as “swallow,” most often served as a starchy accompaniment to soup or stew. This was not my first time eating fufu. With confidence, I tore off a small piece and began to roll it between my palms. Suddenly, I heard a voice behind me. “Unh-unh. Mm-hmm. What are we doing?”

The voice belonged to Kavachi Ukegbu, a Houstonian whose mother, Margaret, a Nigerian immigrant, opened Safari in 1994. After checking, and then checking again, that I was after “traditional traditional” Nigerian dishes, Ukegbu, the co-author of a 2021 book called “The Art of Fufu,” had ordered for me, ferrying plates from the kitchen herself. There was a meaty whorl of land snail, which was draped in sautéed onions and peppers, and required a sharp knife to slice; abacha, shredded cassava tossed with palm oil and hunks of stockfish; and the fufu, which came with a bowl of nsala, a thick, fragrant soup, crowded with offal and various cuts of beef and goat.

Ukegbu shot me a look of amused exasperation before correcting my fufu technique. I should use only one hand, she explained, to tear off a piece, roll it between my fingers, and then flatten it into a scoop to dip into the soup. I followed her instructions, but as I raised my hand to my mouth I could see in her gaze that my tutelage was not over. “Now let me see if you’re going to chew it or to swallow it,” she said. I froze, and gulped. “Swallow,” I realized, was a literal term.

I had arrived in Houston on the day after the election, and driven directly from George Bush Intercontinental Airport to another restaurant, this one brand-new, called ChopnBlok. In some sense, it’s a novelty, being the first West African restaurant in Montrose, a historically gay neighborhood that’s home to a buzzy dining and night-life scene, plus the Rothko Chapel. But ChopnBlok’s arrival there reflects a decades-long development in Houston’s remarkably diverse makeup. Since the nineteen-eighties—in part because local universities recruited students and staff from Nigeria and its neighboring countries—the West African population has grown, slowly for many years and then explosively in the past decade. According to census data, the number of people of Nigerian ancestry living in the Houston metropolitan area more than doubled between 2010 and 2022, from more than twenty thousand to nearly fifty-three thousand. When a Nigerian teen-ager considers college in the U.S., one Houstonian told me, “the question is: Harvard, Stanford, Yale, or U. of H.?”

In the early nineties, opening a Nigerian restaurant made Margaret Ukegbu a pioneer. In the years since, dozens of other businesses have followed, mostly in and around Alief, an area of southwest Houston that borders the city’s Asia Town and encompasses Little Africa. On a brief tour that included the wholesaler Bukky Enterprises, which imports goods from all over West Africa, and Suya Hut—a tiny restaurant specializing in exceptional grilled meat, as perfected by the Hausa people, marinated in a mixture of ground peanuts and spices—Ukegbu emphasized that we were barely scratching the surface. In October, Houston’s city hall mounted an exhibition commemorating “notable Houston Nigerians,” including the rapper Tobe Nwigwe; Seun Adigun, a biomechanist who has competed in both the Summer and the Winter Olympics; and Ope Amosu, ChopnBlok’s thirty-seven-year-old owner and chef.

Amosu, who was born in London and grew up in Houston, opened the first location of ChopnBlok in 2021, as a fast-casual stall at Post, a food hall in a converted mail-sorting facility near Houston’s downtown. Armed with an M.B.A., but little experience in restaurants—save for a six-month stint moonlighting as a line cook at Chipotle, while working full time in oil and gas—he wanted to do for West African food what he’d seen restaurateurs do for countless other cuisines: make it more broadly accessible.

The new, expanded outpost in Montrose approaches this goal with even greater ambition. In the stylish dining room, replete with striking wallpaper, textiles, and art, I met Jailyn Marcel, the restaurant’s publicist, who ordered a full spread from the menu while we waited for Amosu to finish a meeting at the bar. The “chips & dip,” a bowl of silky and savory “Liberian greens” served with plantain chips, were astonishingly delicious, as was the “reimagined” Scotch egg, made with ground turkey and devilled-egg filling. By the time I’d sampled an entrée called the Black Star, featuring grilled shrimp, Ghanaian-style waakye rice (so named for the sweet, nutty dried sorghum leaves that season it), and yassa curry—an homage to a Senegalese marinade made with mustard and caramelized onions—I was fantasizing about moving within walking distance.

Amosu, who has the build and the cheerful demeanor of a cartoon bear—he played football at Truman State University, in Missouri, where his fraternity brothers nicknamed him Chef Homeboy, for his grilling skills—smiled shyly as he pulled out a chair to join us. “I think we’re blessed with good palates,” he said modestly, when I asked if his family had been obsessed with food when he was growing up. Beyond that, he said, the secret to his success was the wisdom of “home cooks,” meaning the cottage industry, in West Africa and across the diaspora, of (mostly) women who specialize in a single dish—jollof rice, egusi soup—and supply it for parties and events. In his spare time, Amosu had embedded with the home cooks of Houston, including one of his cousins, and studied their techniques before developing his own recipes.

The chips & dip were inspired by one of Amosu’s favorite Nigerian dishes, a spinach-based stew called efo riro, which he likes to eat with plantains, and by his travels in Liberia, on the West African coast, which was founded in the early nineteenth century as a haven for people who had been enslaved in America. Amosu’s dish is made with finely chopped kale and collards—which repatriated Africans brought to Liberia—plus peppers, onions, and spices, cooked relatively briefly, to maintain the vivid color of the greens, with a bit of baking soda to tenderize them.

Almost everything on the ChopnBlok menu nods not only to West Africa but also to the Black American South. Amosu’s “smoky jollof jambalaya” is a mashup of the Louisiana staple and its West African forerunner. The elements of the Black Star, each rooted in Old World recipes, come together to resemble Southern-style shrimp and gravy over grits.

In 2023, Amosu organized a food festival called Chopd & Stewd—a reference to the locally born, remix-heavy music genre known as chopped and screwed—in celebration of the many Houstonians who have West African ancestry. “There’s a lot of conversation that comes up within the community about Black heritage,” Marcel, the publicist, whose grandparents moved from Louisiana to Houston before she was born, and who speaks with a slight Texas twang, said. “Like, do Black people really know where they come from? And I’m, like, no, I do know where my ancestors came from. I am the descendent of slaves, and that’s enough. But sometimes, from an American perspective, you can feel a sense of division from people who can trace it back to the African continent, and so it’s cool to see it all come together.”

On my last morning in town, I met Amosu and Marcel at the Breakfast Klub, a restaurant serving daily brunch in Midtown. The “K” in Klub is a reference to Kappa Alpha Psi, the Black fraternity; the owner, Marcus Davis, was a member in college. Since it opened, in 2001, the place has become a nexus of Black culture in Houston, a stop on any politician’s campaign trail, drawing lines down the block, even on weekdays. We were joined by Davis, by two of Amosu’s mentors, the restaurateur Benji Leavitt and Chris Shepherd, a chef and the founder of the Southern Smoke Foundation, an organization that supports food-and-beverage workers, and by Kayla Stewart, a Houston-born food writer.

“I don’t know that I realized how Black the city of Houston was until I left for grad school,” Stewart, who is Black, said, over enormous plates of fried catfish with eggs, grits, and biscuits. “You have the diaspora of West African and Caribbean and Black folks here that sort of naturally merges, and I think that’s why places like Ope’s have been able to thrive.”

Conversation turned to the Michelin guide, which was finally arriving in Texas; the anointed restaurants would be announced the following week. Nobody at the table had been invited to the ceremony, or seemed particularly concerned about who would make the list. It seemed foolish to try to define Houston’s sprawling dining scene so narrowly. Miles of strip malls offer thrilling meals from all over the world: taco shops; dim-sum palaces; Indian and Pakistani banquet halls; Vietnamese restaurants that specialize in banh mi, or pho, or borrow Cajun traditions like crawfish boils. Earlier in my trip, I had eaten succulent grilled lamb over broken vermicelli from a Senegalese food truck, sitting in an old office chair in an otherwise deserted and trash-strewn parking lot.

In the wake of the election, being in Houston was a heady and surprisingly hopeful experience. After decades of living in the U.S., Amosu was in the process of finally getting his citizenship; the day before, he’d gone for his interview. Within a few months, he’d be able to call himself an American—secondary, perhaps, to his identity as a Houstonian. “It’s become a sanctuary for our community,” he said, of his home town. “With more numbers, we’re able to amplify our voice, ingrain ourselves in the fabric of the city.” He added, “And I’m a Nigerian—we know how to make noise.” ♦