5 Outstanding West African Restaurants To Know In The US

BY KIMBERLY WILSON

West African cooking has shaped American food culture for centuries. The region spans more than a dozen countries, each with a distinct approach to rice, stews, and spice, from Nigeria’s tomato-based jollof to Senegal’s fish-and-rice thieboudienne and Ghana’s smoky, chile-heavy shito. These traditions traveled to the Americas centuries ago through the transatlantic slave trade, which laid the groundwork for some of the country’s favorite dishes, like gumbo and jambalaya.

Chefs have opened a number of West African restaurants around the country in the past several years. Their menus center around the region’s techniques and flavors, much of it rooted in dishes they ate in their youth.

These five restaurants below have picked up Michelin recognition, James Beard honors, and spots on multiple national best-of lists. Here’s what to know.

1. Dōgon by Kwame Onwuachi (Washington, D.C.)

Dōgon, Kwame Onwuachi’s restaurant in Washington, D.C., is named after the Dogon people of Mali. It’s a nod to Benjamin Banneker, the Black surveyor tied to the district’s early history who has Dogon ancestry. That history is baked into the restaurant, which Onwuachi runs inside the Marriott’s Potomac Hotel in D.C.

The Hoe Crab, which pairs Chesapeake crab with plantain hoe cakes, aji verde, and a garlic-shito crisp, is one of the restaurant’s most requested dishes. General Manager Michael Woods says the dish draws on Mid-Atlantic, Creole, and Peruvian influences alongside its West African base of Ghanaian shito. It’s that mix which he credits for the dish’s success. The restaurant has also leaned into the area’s culture in other ways, with events and dishes named after the star constellations the Dogon people were known to study. The bar program, developed with D.C. bartender Derek Brown, highlights spirits from Black-owned producers.

2. ChòpnBlọk (Houston)

Ope Amosu built ChòpnBlọk around his Nigerian heritage, but the menu draws on flavors from across West Africa, from Ghana to Senegal to Liberia, alongside dishes from the wider African diaspora. The Trad combines jollof rice, chicken, plantains, and a spiced vegetable mix seasoned with yaji, a Nigerian pepper spice blend, while the Motherland pairs coconut curry, rice, and plantains with a protein of your choice.

Amosu holds an MBA and was twice named a James Beard Award semifinalist. He started the concept in a food hall in 2021 before he opened the restaurant in Houston’s Montrose neighborhood in October 2024. He’s described the restaurant as a way to make West African food feel familiar to a broad audience. The space has regularly hosted events tied to the concept, like the Chopd & Stewd Festival, a celebration of West African food and culture timed to Nigerian Independence Day. ChòpnBlọk holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand and was the only Houston restaurant included on The New York Times’ 2025 list of the best restaurants in America.

3. Dakar NOLA (New Orleans)

Serigne Mbaye built Dakar NOLA around the connection between Senegalese and Louisiana Creole cuisines and the food traditions that traveled from West Africa to the American South. Both regions, he says, lean on rice as a base, paired with slow-cooked stews built on layers of flavor. He sees gumbo as a distant cousin of the seafood okra soups found across West Africa, and says that jollof rice and jambalaya were built from the same technique.

“The culinary connections have always been there,” says Mbaye. Trained at the New England Culinary Institute, Mbaye opened his fine-dining destination with business partner Effie Richardson in 2022. The seven-course menu traces that link dish by dish. It opens with a warm, sweetened tea course and moves through plates like a recurring pairing of crab and black-eyed peas finished with a spoonful of palm oil. In 2024, the restaurant received the James Beard Award for Best New Restaurant. This year, Mbaye won the James Beard Award for Best Chef: South.

4. Dept. of Culture (Brooklyn, New York)

Ayo Balogun grew up in Nigeria’s Kwara state, and he built Dept. of Culture around its cooking when the restaurant opened in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in 2022. There’s one communal table that seats no more than 10 people at a time, and there’s no takeout offered. You have to be there to experience the magic in person. The four-course menu rotates every couple of weeks, but it tends to include a pepper soup made with fish, a version of suya built around mushrooms instead of the usual beef, and pounded yam with egusi, a Nigerian stew made from ground melon seeds. For dessert, there’s dodo, a caramelized sweet plantain that’s popular as a Nigerian street food, served with vanilla ice cream. The restaurant was a James Beard Award nominee for Best New Restaurant in 2023.

5. Two Hommés (Inglewood, California)

In 2022, after they ran pop-ups together for several years, Marcus Yaw Johnson and Abdoulaye Balde opened Two Hommés in Inglewood, California. Johnson’s family background is Ghanaian, and Balde’s is Senegalese, and both influences show up across the menu. The jollof platter, the restaurant’s most consistent seller, is served alongside ribs or a Senegalese smoked lamb shoulder finished with yassa sauce. Another dish is garlic noodles offered alongside a starter of chicken bites coated in a honey-berbere glaze and a side of Ghanaian shito, for those who want heat. The restaurant’s interior was redesigned to create a more polished dining room in 2024.

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