Los Angeles offers a diverse culinary landscape, and among its gems are restaurants that showcase the rich flavors of Africa. One such place is Aduke African Cuisine, where Aduke Oluwafunmilayo Oyetibo brings the taste of her Nigerian upbringing to the city.
The rectangular dining room is compact, with 13 tables; the walls vibrate candy-apple red and an emerald shade of green that evoke the flag of Nigeria. Oyetibo prepares dishes she learned growing up in Ilesha, a town in the Osun state of southwest Nigeria.
The Heart of the Menu: Stews and Swallows
Stews and rice dishes make up the core of the menu. Requesting a stew prompts two questions from a server: What kind of meat (usually chicken, fish, beef or goat) would you like and, just as important, what kind of “swallow” to accompany it? Swallow is modern slang for the traditional pounded starches used as edible tools in West African cuisines.
Like all of the swallows, the fufu comes boiling hot, shaped into a ball, wrapped in plastic; I juggle it between my fingers until it cools enough to unwrap. I mirror the way I see other diners eating in the restaurant: With my right hand I swipe off a clump of fufu about the size of a silver dollar, flatten it with my thumb and make an indentation in the center, and then scoop up mouthfuls of stew.
Egusi: A Nigerian Staple
Aduke Oluwafunmilayo Oyetibo’s egusi with goat meat rises from its plate like a jagged hill bathed in sun rays - a terrain of golds and reds and browns threaded with flashes of green. Ground melon seeds form the stew’s terra firma; they swell as they cook until they resemble flecks of scrambled egg. Some versions of egusi are brothy; Oyetibo’s is creamy. She builds a mantle of flavors with tomato, garlic, ginger and iru, an umami blast of fermented locust beans.
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With egusi, the recommendation is fufu - pulverized yam with the buttery smoothness of mashed potatoes. A healthy drizzle of red palm oil encircles the dish with the twilight color of carrot-beet juice. After every bite there’s a soft afterglow of spice: maybe alligator pepper?
Ila alasepo, a silky okra stew, recalls a soup I relish in travels to Charleston and Savannah; it’s a reminder of West Africa’s clear lineage in the cooking of the American South. Order it with goat meat and amala, a swallow made from a variety of dried yam that turns a distinctive coffee-brown as it boils.
How to make Nigerian Egusi Soup for Beginners | like a pro | step by step
Jollof Rice and Other Delights
A similar spinach preparation, served as a side dish, sidles up to Oyetibo’s soothing jollof rice, generously laced with tomato, red peppers and thyme, with a whiff of smokiness. The rice can be ordered on its own; better to opt for the entree variation filled out with spinach, dodo (lobes of soft, deeply caramelized plantains) and an unbattered half-chicken fried to a chewy crispness. Platters of fried rice and steamed white rice are similarly composed, but most everyone wisely goes for the jollof rice.
A leafy tumble called efo riro appears on many tables. In southwestern Nigeria, cooks often make the dish with amaranth greens, smoked fish, beef and sometimes cow tripe; Oyetibo adapts hers using spinach and often couples it with unsmoked white fish. I’m directed toward eba (pounded cassava, delicate in texture and peachy in color) or semo (as in semolina, which is milder and firmer) as matching swallows.
A Community Gathering Place
People of all backgrounds stop by Aduke; the Nigerians and Ghanaians who dine here disappear into their plates with expressions that resemble relief. I learn where they’re from because diners tend to be friendly and chat with one another: Oyetibo is making every plate to order, often by herself, and it can take 45 minutes or so for your food to arrive.
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If your hunger is urgent, ask for moin moin (also known as moi moi), a steamed pudding made from pureed black-eyed peas that sped out of the kitchen during my meals. Its glossy, pleasant sponginess brings to mind ankimo, the steamed monkfish liver dish prized at sushi bars, though of course the flavor of moin moin, seasoned with garlic and red pepper, intones the land rather than the sea.
Otherwise, settle in and sip zobo, a gingery drink dyed deep purple from hibiscus, or effervescent palm wine. Oyetibo’s warm presence and heartening cooking will show in due time. They merit the wait.
Mama D’s African Cuisine: Another Gem in Los Angeles
Claudia Wanki concedes that the name of her 8-month-old restaurant, Mama D’s African Cuisine, reveals the genesis of her cooking only in the broadest sense: 54 nations share the planet’s second largest continent. She says you know that a restaurant specifically serves the food of Cameroon, her home country at a verdant nexus of western and central Africa, when you see two quintessential dishes on the menu: ndolé and eru.
Ndolé and Eru: Cameroonian Specialties
To some eyes ndolé may look like the creamed spinach served alongside New York strips in clubby chophouses, though the similarities end in its soothing swirl of greens and beiges. Ndolé, also called bitter leaf (or Vernonia amygdalina, part of the daisy and sunflower family), is shredded and then simmered with aromatics and ground peanuts until most of the water boils away. A few handfuls of mild waterleaf (or, barring its availability, spinach) eases ndolé’s bitterness; a seasoning of dried crayfish unleashes umami that tastes more of earth than sea.
Beef, chicken or fried tilapia are options to complete the dish, though customers tend to select the fourth choice, shrimp, for their bounce and sweetness - and also, honestly, for their photogenic appeal. If Mama D’s has whizzed by on your social media scroll recently, you’ve likely glimpsed the ndolé.
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Wanki most loves eru, also a stew of greens but with a different, forest-dense richness. Okazi, the leaves of a climbing vine, are cooked down with chopped pieces of beef stew meat, tripe and cow’s foot until the textures are melded and nearly indistinguishable. Palm oil adds nuttiness and carroty sweetness.
You can’t see its telltale red-orange glow in the black takeout container - at least not until you dip in a mound of fufu, molded in your hand and indented with your thumb for better scooping. Then the palm oil bleeds and stains, and the mellow, meaty flavors coalesce, and you understand why it’s Wanki’s favorite.
Other Dishes at Mama D's
Beyond ndolé and eru, there is a goat meat pepper soup that Wanki says “comes straight from my mother’s mouth.” Garlic, ginger, scallions, habanero, cilantro and parsley meld with the goat over 24 hours. By the time you’re spooning its gravy over rice, the meat is tender and perceptibly herbaceous.
Sautéed peppers and onions blanket poisson braisé (gently seasoned, watchfully roasted tilapia); fried plantains alongside lean firmer than the caramelized, black-gold nuggets you might be served in Caribbean restaurants. The dish’s name is a reminder that among dozens (maybe hundreds) of tribal languages, French and English are spoken in Cameroon as a lingering corollary to 19th century colonialism.
Some dishes, like jollof rice, transcend national borders; the Cameroonian version tends to be more roundly savory and less smoky than the Nigerian variation served at a place like Aduke African Cuisine in Inglewood. Mama D’s jollof anchors the Big African plate, a doorstop of a combo platter that includes baked chicken, shrimp or soya (grilled beef, also spelled suya) with black beans and plantains. I like the strips of beef atop the rice, and I apply the pepper sauce liberally.
As an appetizer, there are the ubiquitous West African beignet-like spheres called puff puffs; each bite here trills with nutmeg. Eat them as fast and as hot as you can handle them.
In Cameroon, egusi (dried and ground melon seeds that swell and soften as they cook) is often cooked into a kind of fluffy pudding. As a nod to its steady clientele, the egusi at Mama D’s is prepared closer to Nigerian style, golden with spices and stir-fried to the consistency of a silken tofu scramble. Like the ndolé, the addition of shrimp brings welcome snap and sweet contrast.
