Alexander Smalls Wants to Change How You Think About Food. Let Him.

Over the past 30 years, Alexander Smalls has endeavored to shake up the way Americans think about food. In 1994, after pursuing a career as an opera singer (and winning both a Grammy and a Tony Award along the way, thanks to a Houston Grand Opera production of Porgy and Bess), Smalls pivoted to restaurateuring. First he opened Café Beulah in Manhattan’s Flatiron District. There he introduced New Yorkers to a fine-dining interpretation of Southern cooking—with an emphasis on the Lowcountry cuisine he’d grown up with in South Carolina. “I may’ve created the first deconstructed gumbo plate, which back in those days cost $40,” he recalls. “Can you imagine—thirty some odd years ago in a Black-owned restaurant? People thought I had lost my mind. Maybe I had!”

In the decades that followed, Smalls wrote award-winning cookbooks, opened and closed restaurants, plunged into a passionate journey of culinary scholarship, and steadfastly chipped away at ignorance and indifference. A self-described “food activist,” he focuses his energy on spotlighting how the African diaspora has influenced cuisines around the world, especially in the Americas. One of his past venues, The Cecil in Harlem, offered an entire menu that reflected that very mission. A decade ago, in October of 2014, Esquire’s Joshua Ozersky chose The Cecil as the Best New Restaurant in America.

The Contemporary African Kitchen, the latest book from Alexander Smalls (out now), represents a cultural landmark and a professional milestone. Created in collaboration with writer Nina Oduro, the entrepreneur behind Dine Diaspora, it gathers recipes from chefs throughout the African continent—from Ghana and Uganda, Cameroon and Zambia, Burundi and Ethiopia, Nigeria and Senegal. (Among the notable contributors are Pierre Thiam, Eric Adjepong, Agness Colley, Rōze Traore, Mame Sow, Thabo Phake, and Mohamed Kamal.)

In spite of familiar connections between, say, West African dishes and the Gullah cuisine that Smalls knows well from his South Carolina childhood, not to mention a vibrant Ethiopian restaurant scene in Washington D.C., African cooking remains frustratingly unsung when you survey the landscape of American restaurants. Lately there have been breakthroughs, of course—celebrated new restaurants such as Baobab Fare in Detroit, Dakar NOLA in New Orleans, Dept of Culture in Brooklyn, Teranga in Harlem, and Bintü Atelier in Charleston. But considering the vastness of the African continent, there’s still a long way to go. “Made up of fifty-five countries, over 1.4 billion people, and more than 2,000 languages, it continues to give birth to ingredients and seasonings that dazzle and dance in my head and delight my palate,” Smalls writes in the new book’s introduction.

We recently caught up with Alexander Smalls, who has also created Alkebulan, an African food hall in Dubai, to talk about The Contemporary African Kitchen—“a book,” as he put it, “that I’ve been writing all my life.”

Esquire: In the foreword to this new book, you write that “centuries after the uprooting from Africa, from whence the brutal interruption of our organic lives dragged us and delivered us upon these shores in America, we recognize that we never stopped being African.” Did you feel that connection when you began to travel to the continent?

Alexander Smalls: You know, it’s an interesting thing, going to Africa for the first time, because what you’re met with is a kind of mirror image of yourself and where you come from. And I’m very fortunate because of my Gullah Geechee history and family and that foundation, which was more African than it was African American in so many ways—from the culture to the food to the images and stories. African Americans in particular from the Gullah Geechee part of the world became very, very enlightened storytellers, because, as you know, enslaved people weren’t allowed to read—and therefore did not have the ability to write down experiences and expressions. And so the only way to keep history was to create stories and traditions. Armed with all of that richness from the Gullah Geechee culture, I arrived in Africa not really knowing what to expect or imagine. But I got there and I felt like my grandfather’s old Oldsmobile had just pulled in to Spartanburg, South Carolina, with the moss hanging on the antenna and people running around in bright printed dresses — it was playing out in my mind as it did when I was a child, crab-fishing in South Carolina. I was at home. I understood intuitively who these people were, and I felt this extraordinary emotional connection that caught me off guard. There was no way I could’ve planned for that. And then I remember that the taxi driver sounded like my grandpa with his Gullah Geechee accent. And I was just emotionally a mess — a mess!

South African Braai photographed for The Contemporary African Kitchen.

You sensed that continuum, in spite of a chasm of centuries…

I mean, there had been an American sanitizing. The duality of African Americans has always been the way you act in the streets and the way you act at home. When you’re with your folks, there was a kind of camaraderie and relaxed mannerisms—almost a different language. But in those streets, you had to basically speak better English than any white person you ever met, because we had to do twice as much to get half as much. But what I found in Africa was home. What I found was people who looked like my aunts and uncles and my grandpa. People who talked like Grandpa. I immediately felt embraced.

There have been signs of progress lately, but for a long time, African cuisines seemed to be distressingly underrepresented in the American restaurant scene. Why?

Well, there’s a simple answer and a complex answer. The simple answer is racism. Period. What you have to understand is everything white is good for you and everything Black isn’t, and that’s the way in which the world has lined up. So it’s not just an American problem, it’s anywhere colonialism existed on the planet. My work is really about the representation of the food of the African diaspora—essentially enslaved Africans on five continents and how through slavery Africa changed the global culinary conversation. We were the foundation. We were the foundation of cuisine and agriculture. It’s sort of like we were back-of-the-house, unseen, and by the time it went from back-of-the-house to front-of-the-house it was somebody else’s food. We were invisible, and that was by design.

The Contemporary African Kitchen: Home Cooking Recipes from the Leading Chefs of Africa

How many African countries have you visited?

Oh my God, I never counted them, Jeff. About half of them in West Africa. Of course, South Africa, Mozambique, and then of course East Africa—Rwanda, Ethiopia, Kenya. I don’t know how many. I haven’t been to Egypt but I’ve been to Tunisia and Morocco. I got close to the Congo. That’s one of the ones I haven’t been to.

What would be a specific African dish in the book that has a direct connection to a dish that we might encounter in the United States?

Well, the shrimp stew from Togo, for example. It brought me back to my father’s and mother’s shrimp and crabmeat gravy. And it is considered a holiday dish, a special occasion dish, like my father’s dish was. So I immediately go to that dish and go oh my my my. But there are so many. The interesting thing about this book is that it wrote itself. The biggest thing I did was to come up with the idea, curate it, and then set out to bring in chefs who essentially could tell their story. I didn’t need to tell their story. I didn’t need to coax their story out of them.

American readers of The Contemporary African Kitchen will encounter a lot of dishes that might sound familiar to them, such as candied sweet potato, chocolate cake, deviled eggs, collard greens, grilled and buttered corn, the bean fritters known as akara, and tamarind juice. Then there are recipes for things that might be less widely known—such as chibwantu, a fermented maize drink from Zambia that is made with crushed dried maize and Rhynchosia root, according to chef Mwaka Mwiimbu. I’ve never encountered that. Was it new to you, as well?

Without question there are things I’ve had to encounter for the first time. In many instances I was a virgin. And then there are some of them I had and didn’t know what they were, and once I found out what they were I was wondering if I was going to do it again. [laughs]

Roasted Pumpkin and Sweet Potato Soup. Uganda, Zein Abdallah.

What’s an example of that?

The one you just mentioned. [laughs]

Oh yeah? You didn’t like it?

Well, let’s say I liked it more when I didn’t know what it was. The child in me is still alive, okay? Like, I think the strangest thing is egusi—let’s talk about the melon. It’s a melon that’s sour.

Traditionally you grind up the melon seeds for stews and soups…

And the seeds are even stronger than the melon. You really have to know how to balance that out to create a dish that’s desirable. That’s part of the fun, isn’t it? And these ingredients are actually good for you. That’s the interesting part. A little-known fact about African cooking: Africans for the most part were vegetarians who grew their food. The animals were sacrificed. They were not just killed so you could have chicken tonight. They were sacrificed. And that tradition continued with the enslaved Africans here in America.

There is a rivalry between West African nations regarding who has the best jollof. Do you have a favorite?

My favorite is the one that has been cooked to perfection, let’s put it this way. [laughs]

You’re giving me a diplomatic answer.

That is part of what I’m doing, because, you know, this is a long book tour. It’s sort of like asking the parent, “Which child do you like best?”

In a broad way, what do you want the legacy of this book to be?

Part of who I am is a culinary activist. I’m hoping this book will educate people, first and foremost, and introduce people to a way of cooking and eating and a culture that they may not have experienced. That is my hope. Notice that we reached out to professional chefs who made creative recipes for the home cook. That was key. Because only if that homemaker in Michigan or Chicago or Nebraska can have a dinner party and create these dishes can we start to have a conversation that is expansive—that broadens communication and enlightens people and demystifies the culture. That’s what I want. And I have so much more to say in this space. Africa, as we know, is not a country. It is a continent. This just scratches the surface.