The soupa kanja at Dakar NOLA in New Orleans is a bowl of dark and expansive okra stew structured with the funk of fermented locust beans and the dizzying depth of dried, smoked seafood, crowned with fresh Gulf crab and shrimp.<\/p>\n
This particularly rich version of the Senegalese dish, plated simply and confidently, is fairly impossible to eat without wishing for more. It\u2019s also impossible to eat without seeing a straight line from Dakar to New Orleans, from soupa kanja to gumbo.<\/p>\n
The chef Serigne Mbaye is familiar with the various archetypes of gumbo around New Orleans \u2014 when he first moved to this city, he cooked at Commander\u2019s Palace, one of its most lionized local institutions. But at Dakar, which he started as a roving pop-up and opened on Magazine Street in 2022, Mr. Mbaye uses a tasting menu to exalt the West African roots of Louisiana Creole cuisine.<\/p>\n
Fine dining is always showing the diner what\u2019s most important, what\u2019s most valuable, reinforcing its own hierarchy. The cart is a favorite device, delivering Champagne and caviar, chocolate and cheese. What could be more important than this?<\/p>\n
Mr. Mbaye has some ideas. Servers at Dakar welcome diners with a custom-built wooden cart that holds soap, a pitcher of hot water and towels, and help wash your hands before the meal begins \u2014 formalizing the Senegalese ritual of hand washing into a meaningful service moment.<\/p>\n
Senegal\u2019s food and its culture of hospitality \u2014 called teranga in Wolof \u2014 is deeply established and long predates Michelin. Though it has rarely been codified in luxury dining rooms in this country, Mr. Mbaye is imagining how it might be.<\/p>\n
Local crab, shrimp and fish are a theme, as are the multifaceted pleasures of black-eyed peas and rice, and the sumptuousness of red palm oil. Plenty of seasonal ingredients come into play: A recent salad was built on the tender bite of fonio, a sandy-colored ancient grain, with ripe summer tomatoes slipped whole from their skins and sweetened in the oven, dressed in a smooth and drinkable vinaigrette made with grilled peaches.<\/p>\n
The menu changes often, but starts with attaya. In Senegal, this is a gunpowder green tea service in three acts that might be served as you chat endlessly at a friend\u2019s place, each subsequent boil mellowing out the tea, bringing you from bitterness to sweetness, from intensity to softness.<\/p>\n
But Mr. Mbaye was wary of giving unsuspecting diners a jolt of caffeine (as well as the time commitment; there were tables to turn!). Instead he crafted a dainty shot, bristling with turmeric and ginger, holding a mint-infused coconut cream top that might remind you of a foamy, expertly poured cup. It is fast and refreshing and it makes the point that dinner will not be a formal presentation of traditional Senegalese cooking, but something more whimsical and interpretive.<\/p>\n
Mr. Mbaye was born in Harlem, where his mother ran a Senegalese restaurant in the late \u201980s, but even after it closed, she carried on cooking for people out of her home. Mr. Mbaye went to boarding school in Senegal where he cooked for hundreds of students; when he returned to New York, as a teenager, he relearned English as he finished high school and prepped the classics by his mother\u2019s side.<\/p>\n
Thieboudienne, which translates from Wolof to \u201crice with fish,\u201d might be lovingly reconfigured at Dakar into two dishes that arrive together, the delicate rendition of jollof rice in one bowl and a piece of crisp-skinned redfish with tangy, bright green rof in another.<\/p>\n
It would be easy to turn nambe into a po\u2019 boy, tucking the stewed black-eyed peas into a roll as it might be in Senegal. But for Mr. Mbaye\u2019s nambe, the kitchen steams and breaks down Gulf crabs each day, using the shells to make stock and covering the black-eyed peas with so much of that sweet crab meat, and giving it all a moat of buttery sauce. When you pile this all onto a piece of crisp-edged fried cassava, just thick enough to have some tenderness inside, Mr. Mbaye\u2019s vision comes into focus.<\/p>\n
Mr. Mbaye worked at L\u2019Atelier de Jo\u00ebl Robuchon in New York and at Atelier Crenn in San Francisco (another seafood-focused tasting menu). He also worked briefly for the chef Pierre Thiam \u2014 a relentless ambassador of Senegalese cooking who encouraged the young chef to go back to Senegal for inspiration.<\/p>\n
When he opened Dakar, Mr. Mbaye stopped by each table and talked about that trip, specifically his visit to Gor\u00e9e, an island off the coast where he\u2019d learned that enslaved West Africans often ate black-eyed peas and palm oil before they boarded ships to cross the Atlantic. It had informed a dish he called \u201clast meal,\u201d which still finds its way onto the menu.<\/p>\n
But Mr. Mbaye said he began to feel the weight of carrying that story around every night, to feel the heaviness of it in the dining room, particularly after he became a father, almost a year ago. He wondered what would happen if he let his food tell the story instead.<\/p>\n
Earlier this year, Mr. Mbaye and his business partner, Afua Richardson, moved the restaurant uptown to Leonidas Street into a bigger space facing the Mississippi River levee, where there is room to grow. They built a kitchen with a wood-fire grill and other new equipment, and a tall open pass where you can see cooks plating.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s an outdoor patio where Mr. Mbaye plans to offer an \u00e0 la carte menu soon, though when I visited, it was more of a waiting room for diners until their tables in the main dining room were ready. And without anyone to offer you a drink or a bite of something, the wait felt oddly chilly and unintentional.<\/p>\n
It didn\u2019t align with Dakar\u2019s world-building sense of hospitality and warm service. And over the course of a few meals, I thought timing could be sharpened from various angles to make the tasting menu flow, and that drinks could arrive a bit faster (on one night, it took several courses). But none of this took away from the joy of dining at Dakar.<\/p>\n
These last few years, it might have seemed like Mr. Mbaye was drawing attention to the West African roots of Louisiana Creole cuisine, and he was, but the chef has been doing a whole lot more than annotating the great dishes of New Orleans.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s also been creating something new there, something personal and alive and still very much underway: a modern Senegalese American restaurant, totally inextricable from its place, where the rules of fine dining are his to revise and subvert.<\/p>\n
Tejal Rao, our chief critic based in Los Angeles, writes starred reviews of restaurants nationwide. Ligaya Mishan, our chief critic based in New York City, writes starred reviews of restaurants in New York and beyond. Briefer starred reviews of New York restaurants are written by our contributing critics Mahira Rivers and Ryan Sutton, and first appear weekly in the Where to Eat newsletter (subscribe here).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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