jollibet The New Era of West African Fine Dining

IN THE MINIMALIST dining room of MoSuke, a restaurant on Paris’s Left Bankjollibet, a black sauce fills the hollow of a white plate. The ingredient necessary to achieve this depth of color comes from a tree that grows nearly 3,000 miles away in the rainforests of Cameroon: Afrostyrax lepidophyllus, whose every part — trunk, leaves, the round brown seeds called country onions — gives off the scent of garlic, most strongly after rain. The Bassa people, who live in the nation’s south, cut the bark into strips, then burn, crush and press it through a sieve until it’s fine as gunpowder.

This spice is stirred into mbongo tchobi, that velvet-plush sauce, along with alligator pepper, kin to ginger and musky as cardamom; roasted njangsa seeds scooped from fallen fruit, their oil so rich that some advise rubbing it into the skin if seeking voluptuousness; and four-corner, wrinkly pods possessing a sour-sweet tang, known in Twi (a language of Ghana) as prekese, or “soup perfume,” and in Yoruba (a language of Nigeria) as aridan, or “cast no spell,” because it’s believed to ward off evil spirits.

“Bravo,” a commenter responded to a picture of the dish on MoSuke’s Instagram in 2022, marveling at seeing “the ‘black sauce’ of my childhood” on such a stage — a restaurant where reservations must be booked months in advance and the nine-course prix fixe is 195 euros — noting that this kind of food was more likely to be shared “at a granny’s, an auntie’s, even a hair salon in Château Rouge,” the Paris neighborhood known for its concentration of African-run businesses. For although people of African descent have long been present in Europe and the United States, the dishes traditionally eaten on much of the African continent have largely remained on the fringes of the culinary mainstream, in the homes of immigrants and at restaurants built by immigrants for immigrants to feed and assuage the homesickness of their communities.

Historically, immigrant restaurants have drawn curious outsiders or those attracted by the low cost — a kind of “cheap exoticism,” as the American historian Haiming Liu writes in “From Canton Restaurant to Panda Express” (2015) of the Chinese eating halls frequented by non-Chinese diners in 19th-century California. And so the first representations of cuisines from other parts of the world to filter into broader European and American consciousness have generally been the versions served at hole-in-the-walls and on the street, at chop-suey and curry houses, kebab shops, taco stands and halal carts. But today chefs and restaurateurs of West African descent are seeking a radically different entry point. When Mory Sacko, now 32, opened MoSuke in September 2020, it was among the first high-end restaurants in Europe and the United States not only to put West African ingredients and flavors at the fore but to acknowledge them as the equals of their European and American counterparts.

Now at Chishuru, in the onetime bohemian enclave of Fitzrovia in central London, you might sample eko, a Nigerian wobbly cake of fermented corn wallowing in pepper soup, while sipping a martini with a pod of okra speared at the rim — a blend of vodka and ogogoro, a mellow, smoky spirit with grassy contours distilled from palm wine and banned in the early 20th century in Nigeria by British colonial authorities, not in the interest of temperance but to force locals to buy imported British gin instead.

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Calls for school crackdowns have mounted with reports of cyberbullying among adolescents and studies indicating that smartphones, which offer round-the-clock distraction and social media access, have hindered academic instruction and the mental health of children.

Overall, violent crime fell 3 percent and property crime fell 2.6 percent in 2023, with burglaries down 7.6 percent and larceny down 4.4 percent. Car thefts, thoughjollibet, continue to be an exception, rising more than 12 percent from the year before.