A Night in Dakar
At Chef Serigne Mbaye’s new restaurant, New Orleans’s Senegalese influence gets the spotlight
As the evening begins, Chef Serigne Mbaye greets the patrons in Wolof, and encourages everyone to repeat the phrase aloud: Na nga def. (How are you?)
I am seated at a table with strangers, the mother of one of the cooks, a foodie from New York, and two local distributors who supplied many of the ingredients soon to be served. There is a nervous anticipation in the air—wedding reception vibes. After all, this is perhaps the buzziest restaurant in town. But Mbaye’s greeting diffuses all that anxious energy, a social palate cleanser, priming the room for a few hours of delicious food, cultural exchange, and genuine hospitality.
Having spent much of his youth in Dakar, Senegal, and later returned at various times to absorb the country’s foodways, Mbaye is more than a chef. He’s a cultural ambassador.
From the ice-breaker, he proceeds to a discussion of the ataya tea ceremony, practiced commonly in his adopted second home. When welcoming someone into your home, Mbaye explains, it is customary to invite them for a strong foamy ginger tea. “The moment you say ‘yes,’ they have you in their home for an hour and a half.” Everyone laughs. And here come the teas now. They are served in tall, slender glasses, not unlike those Mexican shot glasses used for tequila. The tea is darker than a chestnut and capped with a half inch of bright green foam. The ginger is incredibly potent, minty, and oh so sweet. The mouth wakes up. Spice lingers on the tongue. It’s going to be an unforgettable night.
After years spent making occasional pop-up appearances around New Orleans, Chef Mbaye opened his own restaurant, Dakar NOLA, in November 2022.
Located at 3814 Magazine Street, the restaurant is spacious but intimate, seating thirty comfortably, emitting an ambiance of modern West Africa chic. The furniture is sleek and in shades of brown. Tropical plants gesture from elegant vases and planters throughout the space. One wall is adorned with an impressive collection of wooden masks, African in origin, flanked at the base by two intricately carved wooden armchairs.
On Wednesdays, Mbaye and his business partner Dr. Effie Richardson offer a three-course meal, a sort of “locals night” that offers a more typical under-two-hours dining experience than the tasting menu presented from Thursdays through Saturdays. Those are something altogether different, and extraordinary: one seating for the night at 7 pm, everyone served at the same time, a well-paced, seven-course meal—an event, really, a performance—that lasts for more than three hours.
At twenty-nine years old, Mbaye doesn’t mind saying he’s achieved his dream. His career is as storied as it is meteoric, exhibiting a mix of hard work, diligent study, and a dash of sheer luck. His interest in cuisine was sparked early, watching his mother cook in their Harlem kitchen. He started cooking himself while at boarding school in Senegal, as part of his chores, and when he returned to Harlem as a teenager he joined his mother and aunt in the kitchen.
After acquiring professional training at the New England Culinary Institute in Vermont, graduating in 2016, he returned to Senegal to reconnect with his roots there, and to study traditional culinary methods. From there, after a chance airport encounter with a New Orleanian food distributor in Dakar, Mbaye landed a spot in the kitchen at Commander’s Palace, where he rose through the ranks, immersed in the world of Creole cooking and training under the storied Tory McPhail. During that time, he started staging pop-ups on the side, offering his takes on Senegalese cuisine. But he wasn’t done exploring, and spent the next few years bouncing from one fine-dining establishment to the next, from San Francisco to Barcelona and beyond, working with some of the best chefs in the world, honing his craft, and developing a name for himself.
In 2020, he responded again to the tug of New Orleans, where he took a job as chef de cuisine at the celebrated Mosquito Supper Club, and officially started serving Senegalese cuisine under the name Dakar NOLA as a pop up at the Southern Food and Beverage Museum.
In 2021, Eater New Orleans named him Chef of the Year. The next year he was named a finalist for the James Beard Emerging Chef Award, and this year, a semifinalist.
“The reason I opened a Senegalese restaurant,” Mbaye tells me, “[was] to highlight how much the Western Africans have influenced when it comes down to Creole/Cajun cooking.”
Most of the enslaved Africans who arrived in New Orleans came from what was then known as Senegambia, and they brought with them unique foodways that were later adopted and tweaked by the European settlers. Jambalaya, for example, was adapted from jollof, a spicy, tomato-based Senegambian rice dish. Gumbo likewise traces its roots to the region. That story of West African influence on Creole food has been explored in recent years, but Senegal’s tradition of one-pot cooking—a feature often noted in Louisiana Creole cuisine—is usually left out of the conversation. Mbaye is determined to set the record straight, and this ambitious goal starts with the restaurant model itself.
“The reason I opened a Senegalese restaurant,” Mbaye tells me, “[was] to highlight how much the Western Africans have influenced when it comes down to Creole/Cajun cooking.”
The menu at Dakar changes often, but a staple, so far, is what Mbaye calls the “Last Meal”: a modest-sized bowl of extremely-rich puréed black-eyed peas, loaded with palm oil and sprinkled with crispy, puffy Louisiana rice. He got the idea from a visit he made to the tiny Gorée Island, off the coast of Senegal, the so-called “Door of No Return,” where enslaved West Africans were brought before the brutal Middle Passage to North America. Before that harrowing journey, they were fed something similar to this dense bowl of food, he tells the guests, in order “to fatten them up.”
It’s a jarring phrase, which he uses without hesitation. This is the idea, to deliver uncomfortable history via delicious food, a gesture akin to adding sugar to help medicine go down. Guests can sit with the thought for as long as they need.
Apart from this brief narrative, though, Mbaye’s presentation focuses primarily on the food, nearly all of it sourced locally. Next comes a gorgeous “fonio” salad, made of greens, oranges, slices of beets, and sprinkled with West African millet, followed by Gulf-caught shrimp atop a tangy tamarind sauce. Eventually, in a cast-iron Dutch oven, jollof comes to the table, the course described as “Dakar meets NOLA,” which is followed by the “fish of the day”—in my case an exquisite flounder dressed with yassa, a mustard-caramelized onion sauce, along with “roff” made of green onion, parsley, and garlic, and a healthy portion of sautéed heirloom carrots. What can I say? It is heavenly, all of it.
“We truly value hospitality,” Mbaye told me at one point. And it shows. The atmosphere at Dakar is professional but never stilted, closer in spirit to an Afro-Caribbean restaurant than a fine-dining place, which is another of its many strengths. When the last course of the evening came out—a delicious dessert consisting of a scoop of “Cafe touba” ice cream, Ponchatoula strawberries, and creamy pound cake—the line cook who made it came to our table to present the food, introduce herself, and hug her mom. A tasting menu, this tasting menu, allows you to spend enough time with strangers that you feel as though you’ve entered their home. You and the other guests have shared a journey. Stuffed yourselves. I’m already ready to go back.