These Iconic West African Dishes Are the Soul of New Orleans Cuisine

New Orleans restaurant Bennachin’s namesake is one of the West Africa region’s most popular dishes — a plate of fluffy jollof rice, winkingly described on the menu as “African jambalaya.” Accompanied by a buttered roll and jama-jama, a side dish of spinach sauteed to a deep green hue, the plate arrives to the table steaming. The rice bursts with the heat of ginger and red bell pepper, the allium zing of onion and garlic.

Bennachin at 1212 Royal Street has made an indelible mark on New Orleans cuisine by specializing in West African cooking — the culinary ancestor of three iconic Louisiana staples: jambalaya, red beans and rice, and gumbo. The bennachin (from which jambalaya is a descendent), sorso wolengho ni mano (a forebearer of red beans and rice), and nsouki lappa (an ancestor of gumbo), beyond being viscerally satisfying to eat, serve to remind diners that their favorite Southern foods can be traced back to African culinary traditions.

“There’s no question that so many of these dishes that are considered to be iconic Creole dishes have roots in West Africa and the Caribbean,” says Theresa McCulla, author of Insatiable City: Food and Race in New Orleans. However, they haven’t always received recognition. McCulla traces this obscuring of African foodways in New Orleans’s culinary progression back to racial animosity at the end of the American Civil War, when, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, “you really see the line hardening between Black and white,” she says. As a result, authors of local cookbooks and tourist guides omitted the African roots of iconic New Orleans dishes in their pages.

“At that time, you find a really concerted effort among many white New Orleanians for the first time to excise anyone of African descent from being considered a Creole,” McCulla says.

Over the last three decades, Bennachin has paved the way for other restaurants centering African diasporic traditions in New Orleans, such as Senegalese restaurant Dakar NOLA at 3814 Magazine Street, Ethiopian restaurant Addis NOLA at 2514 Bayou Road, and Ethiopian restaurant Cafe Abyssinia at 3511 Magazine Street, to reclaim the dishes and culinary approaches descended from African countries. New Orleans residents and travelers can now pick and choose between a growing list of African diasporic restaurants, but Bennachin counts among the longest-standing, with owner Fanta Tambajang persistent in sharing authentic dishes from her homeland.

Tambajang didn’t originally plan to open a West African restaurant in New Orleans. At age 25, she left Gambia — her eldest son in tow — when her husband moved to Ohio for his education. “Ohio was very cold for me,” says Tambajang, adding that the family’s lack of an established support system in an unfamiliar place also felt destabilizing.

Her cousin, who attended Xavier University of Louisiana at the time, suggested the idea of Tambajang and her budding family relocating to New Orleans. Encouraged by descriptions of the city’s exceedingly warm, subtropical climate, the family moved to the Crescent City — without visiting first. Tambajang felt pleased by New Orleans’s weather, friendly locals, and well-seasoned food, which reminded her of West African cuisine. She soon crossed paths with other African immigrants, bumping into them while she shopped at local stores. “It was much, much better,” says Tambajang. “New Orleans is just like a home to me.”

Africans in New Orleans, who often hailed from West African countries like Senegal, Gambia, and Benin, or formerly French-occupied islands like Haiti, have deeply embedded, but painful roots in the city. Enslaved people were forced to work the lands of the French colony in the 18th century, according to the Louisiana Folklife Program. French colonizers kidnapped 200 people from the Senegambian region in 1719 because of its similarities to the Mississippi Valley, the program reports. They specifically sought Africans who knew how to successfully grow rice, so they could propagate the crop in Louisiana.

By 1721, enslaved people from West Africa made up 30 percent of the city’s population, according to the National Park Service. At the start of the 19th century, more than half of New Orleans’s population consisted of freed and enslaved people of African lineage. Through centuries of forced labor and the brutal injustices that continued in the U.S. after slavery’s end, many in these communities held onto their heritages, influencing New Orleans’s culture in turn. Classic dishes, like gumbo and red beans and rice, can be traced and credited to the tenacity, resilience, and culinary dexterity of Africans.

By the mid-20th century, New Orleans’s economy began to heavily rely on tourism. During this time, Black cooks worked in restaurant kitchens, but couldn’t eat in their dining rooms. Desegregation of local restaurants finally came with a 1963 court decision on a Louisiana-based civil rights case. Tambajang says she and her husband moved their family to New Orleans in the early 1980s. They initially settled in the city’s uptown area, a district dotted with oak trees and shotgun houses. The couple’s daughter, Salimatou, was born in 1985, and another son — the youngest — followed in 1988.

While Tambajang’s husband finished his education, she worked at Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen, cooking and serving the cult-favorite chain’s fried chicken. Then, she landed a job as a cashier at a Time Saver convenience store. Tambajang had already found companionship in her cousin, but began to branch out and make new friends. She met Alyse Ntube — a fellow immigrant, who hailed from Cameroon — through work. The pair fell into the habit of sharing home-cooked West African food with each other. It was Ntube who first proposed the idea of starting Bennachin together. “I thought she was crazy,” says Tambajang. “What? A restaurant in New Orleans?”

But in 1992, the two officially opened Bennachin’s original location in Metairie’s Fat City. Tambajang didn’t initially hire staff, relying instead on help from family members to get the restaurant off the ground. Her daughter, Salimatou, recalls spending weekends with her mother in Bennachin. She fetched ingredients from the fridge, washed dishes, and chopped vegetables — “everything, pretty much,” Salimatou says — throughout her childhood.

As she grew older, Salimatou continued to watch her mother cook. She would stand at her mother’s side to pass her ingredients for yasa, a chicken and cabbage dish with rice that’s similar to the American South’s smothered chicken, Salimatou says. In these years, her own culinary passion bloomed.

Salimatou was raised with her two brothers in the Algiers area on the West Bank. During her college years, she worked at Bennachin, serving customers in the dining room and cooking in the kitchen. She took culinary classes at Delgado Community College, and briefly worked at a fine dining restaurant, Arnaud’s Restaurant, where she’d prepare appetizers and desserts for a steady stream of travelers and locals. Salimatou ultimately graduated from the University of New Orleans with a bachelor’s degree in business, spurred by the hope of carrying on her family’s restaurant legacy. “My mom, she was big on education,” Salimatou says. “Have the good grades first, and then think about work.”

The restaurant relocated to its current space in the French Quarter in 2003. Salimatou eventually took the place of Ntube, who left Bennachin for another job around the time of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Ntube now resides in California. (“Hopefully, maybe, she might want to come back to New Orleans,” Tambajang says of her friend and former business partner.)

Behind the restaurant’s nondescript pair of double-doors, Salimatou, 38, works alongside her mother, managing their five employees and doting on their customers. “She jokes around and calls me her secretary,” Salimatou says. “She’s like, ‘Oh, talk to my daughter.’”

As Salimatou weaves around the restaurant, ordering supplies and handling employee payroll, diners watch afternoon traffic roll by on Royal Street from the window nook while they await plates of sisay singho, a chicken dish with plantains and coconut rice, or domoda, a beef and peanut stew with rice. One large art piece depicts a Ghanaian slave castle, a coastal stone fort where enslaved people were imprisoned before being trafficked around the world — a gift from Tambajang’s late uncle and a visual portal to one origin of New Orleans’s African diasporic community.

Since the early 1800s, travelers have gravitated to New Orleans’s food scene, and their historic writings describe a bounty of diverse food and people, McCulla says. That reputation endures two centuries later as visitors continue to flock to the city to eat and drink — simple pleasures that often act as a veil over the many traumas enslaved people endured in New Orleans’s past. It’s important to note, however, that food also served as a mobilizing agent for Black Americans. “The same people who were being segregated and commodified and stereotyped used food to their own ends to purchase their freedom or the freedom of their family, to build lives for themselves,” says McCulla.

Tambajang started serving the cuisines of her homeland at a time when Americans in New Orleans were less familiar with native African dishes, even as those flavors and preparations manifested in familiar forms as Creole-style gumbo, jambalaya, and red beans and rice. But over the years, she’s watched New Orleanians learn to appreciate West African food. “At the beginning, they were hesitant to try it,” Tambajang says. “Now, people are open-minded to try new things.”

Her experience is part of a nationally recognized phenomenon that extends beyond her restaurant in the Big Easy: a shifting of American dining trends and sensibilities, with social media and Gen Z helping diasporic cuisines grow more mainstream. Tambajang’s dishes reflect Gambian, Cameroonian, and other African influences, with her restaurant’s bennachin and fufu, or pounded cassava, especially popular. Various countries belonging to the region of West Africa claim their own variations of jollof rice, or bennachin — a word derived from the Wolof language meaning “one pot.” Deliberations over which nation prepares it best is a hot topic with no clear winner.

The origins of jollof rice trace back to Senegal’s Jollof Empire, with traders along the Senegal River popularizing it in nearby countries. Enslaved people from the region brought the dish overseas to North America. At Bennachin, the first step to making jollof rice is sauteing beef (or carrots for vegetarians), onion, garlic, ginger, and bay leaf. Next, the cook — often Tambajang or Salimatou — adds rice, tomato paste, and fresh tomatoes before simmering the ingredients in a pot of water on low heat. About one hour later, the bennachin is ready to serve. “It tastes like New Orleans jambalaya, but it tastes better,” Tambajang says. Southern jambalaya is often linked to jollof rice, which both use a tomato base and are cooked in a single pot. Jambalaya is also compared to Spanish paella, and French influences can be found in certain ingredients like andouille sausage.

Sorso wolengho ni mano takes more time to prepare than jollof rice because the red beans need to soak overnight. The next day, the remaining liquid after the soak period is replaced with fresh water. The beans are cooked down with ginger, onion, garlic, salt, pepper, and other seasonings as it thickens. Beef sausage chunks accompany the beans, which are served over rice. Customers compare the dish to “olden-day Creole cooking,” Tambajang says.

For Salimatou, the only discernible difference between sorso wolengho ni mano and red beans and rice is the absence of pork, which they don’t serve at Bennachin. “Honestly, it tastes just the same — no difference,” she says.

A well-known locals’ tradition in New Orleans is the preparation of red beans and rice for Monday dinners, but the meal’s genesis is murky. Enslaved people and Acadians — the French-speaking forefathers of Cajuns — are considered potential sources, according to Louisiana’s travel authority. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, sorso wolengho ni mano counted as the main dish craved by Bennachin’s Monday crowd. But, as COVID outbreaks ravaged the U.S., the restaurant reduced its hours. Now, it remains closed on Mondays and Tuesdays.

Nsouki lappa starts with turkey legs, which are boiled in water. Once soft, they’re set aside to cool, then the meat is separated from the bone. Beef sausage is also sliced and cooked in before more water is poured into the stew. Unlike New Orleans gumbo, it uses an okra base, instead of a roux. Gumbo is not only an amalgamation of different ingredients, but also one of varied cultural influences. Its name comes from “nkombo,” a West African word, and the dish itself resembles a Senegambian parallel: dchebuchin.

Today, New Orleans is home to about 364,000 residents, with 57 percent of the population identifying as Black. However, only 6 percent of the city’s residents claim “foreign-born” (as the U.S. Census calls it) roots like Tambajang. Still, different African diasporic communities are creating spaces to connect: The Ethiopian Community Association in Louisiana has 1,300 followers on Facebook. New Orleans holds the Krewe of West Africa Culture Festival and the Essence Festival of Culture — America’s largest Black music festival — which has hosted Nigeria Day and Ghana Day to celebrate their respective cultures. Segments of the city’s African immigrant community also get together informally every so often, and different households alternate hosting social gatherings. It makes the city “feel like home” for Tambajang, she says.

Bennachin has secured its own chapter in the history of New Orleans cuisine — and for the Tambajang family it’s preserved a love of culture and cookery across generations. Now a mother of three daughters herself, Salimatou says she wants her children to chase their dreams. “But one of my girls, she says — you know, little kids — ‘I want to cook just like you,’” Salimatou says, laughing.