In Seattle, a Taste of Home and a Business Opportunity

By Holly Regan

“Most people know my country by the war, a dangerous country,” Caroline Musitu says. “They have to try another face of Congo—a peace face, a beauty face—through my food.” Photo by Denise Miller for Global to Local.

Beneath the early dawn of Kinshasa, the second-most populous African megacity of over 14 million people, the impending heat of the day infiltrates the morning air. In Caroline Mustitu’s recollection, it also carries the sweet, warm, yeasty aroma of mikate, Congolese beignets, frying gently in large pans over charcoal fires, where people pause on their way to work.

As the hours proceed, the equatorial sun will warm the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) into the 80s. Then, on the way home in the evening, these same workers will gather around other vendors, grabbing brown-paper packets of ntaba: grilled goat seasoned with garlic, onion, cilantro, green pepper, salt, nutmeg, ginger and black pepper, topped with hot pepper powder and paired with hunks of kwanga, a fermented bread made from cassava, served with toothpicks so it’s easy to share.

All food tells a story about place, from the natural environment to the raw ingredients and the people creating and consuming it. For those who have started new lives in another land, food is also the currency of belonging; a tether to a shared space where you are understood in the language beyond words. These aromas now arise in the memories and foods of Musitu, the owner of Taste of Congo, the first Congolese food business in Seattle.

While the recipes are hardy messengers, kitchens such as hers—tucked in a new food hall called Spice Bridge in the Seattle suburb of Tukwila, where every business owner is an immigrant or refugee woman—are slender lifelines in a time of economic trouble and a structurally unequal system. Their cuisines are often overlooked in food media, and there are not enough people or resources within their expatriate communities alone to sustain their businesses over the long haul.

Spice Bridge provides a path to self-empowerment for entrepreneurs: The incubator program behind it offers heavily subsidized rentals for commercial kitchen and retail space; step-by-step guidance on opening a food business; and assistance securing a permanent space after the program’s completion. This demonstrates the need for systemic help that goes beyond U.S. market economics to share these stories of home.

“Food is an important bridge to understanding each other, especially the conversation around immigrants,” says Yorm Ackuaku, host of African food podcast Item 13 and a member of the advisory board for the Food Innovation Network (FIN; the engine behind the incubator program). For the FIN entrepreneurs, this dialogue begins in childhood, dictated by familial elders and transcribed in memory and repetition, a living Iliad for both diasporic communities and the broader society.

Musitu recalls New Year’s Eve celebrations where her extended family, even the kids, would spend the whole day cooking and eating together, everyone gathered around a communal platter. And there were her college years in Kinshasa, where long study sessions were fueled by chicken mayo: chicken marinated in garlic, pepper, paprika and bouillon or Maggi cubes, topped with mayonnaise and finished in the oven.

It’s still her favorite dish and among the most popular on the menu. She serves it with celery and fried plantains. She also offers beignets, ntamba, kwanga and occasionally chicken stew, also known as mossaka or poulet a la moamba. The national dish of the DRC, it is a rich roast chicken cooked in a thick, palm nut sauce with onion, garlic, tomato, and chili.

My first meal from Taste of Congo greets me with the deep, woody, spicy aroma of nutmeg, curry, chili powder and white pepper, which wafts from a pillow of sunny, citron-hued rice, studded with green peas and carrots and topped with tangles of fried onion. Nestled atop this is a rich, savory slab of horse mackerel, smoky-charred from the grill and laced with pungent garlic, savory-sweet onion, sharp ginger, bright cilantro and earthy “secret” spice. The hearty, smoky fish is perfectly balanced by the savory, warm spices of the pilaf, like a warm blanket on this cold, rainy day.

“Most people know my country by the war, a dangerous country,” Musitu tells me. “They have to try another face of Congo—a peace face, a beauty face—through my food.”

***

The movement of people from Africa to the United States has been dramatic in the last decade. The number of immigrants from that vast and varied continent has increased more than 50 percent just since 2010, making this the fastest-rising foreign-born population in America. Three-quarters of African migrants to the U.S. arrived after 1990; in Seattle, this wave included the prominent Somali chef Hawa Hassan.

The foreign-born population in King County, where Seattle is located, jumped 64% between 2000 and 2014—more than five times faster than the native-born population. Still, King County represents a small enclave of just over 39,000 African immigrants, and Washington state’s population comprises a paltry 3% of the national tally. It’s nearly half that of the leader: Harris County, Texas, which envelops Houston.

Despite being a sanctuary city known for welcoming the foreign-born, Ackuaku says, the African immigrant community is fractured in Seattle, defined largely by socioeconomic status and geographic area. In other American cities, connection is as simple as walking into your local African restaurant or grocery store. In Seattle, she laments, people often connect through What’s App and Facebook groups—nearly invisible networks that you must be invited to join—rather than centralized public spaces.

This makes the need for a hub like Spice Bridge imperative: “In places like Seattle, where you have to work extra hard to find it, food is a true connection to home,” Ackuaku says. “It’s a part of keeping your culture alive in you.”

Many refugees and immigrants settle in South King County, where the food hall is located, due to comparatively lower rents and more resources for the newly arrived. However, even here, prices are inflating and resettlement agencies say affordable housing is increasingly hard to find. When they first moved to Seattle, Ackuaku says, they lived near the Amazon campus in South Lake Union, where her husband works: an affluent, centralized area where immigrant populations are comparatively low.

“When I discovered Columbia City, I was like, ‘This is where we have to live,’” Ackuaku says, referring to the burgeoning South Seattle neighborhood where they have since relocated. “It's incredibly diverse. I can get Kenyan food or Ethiopian food or Gambian options, for example. And by virtue of just regularly going to some of these places, you get to know the owners.”

But this diversity doesn’t extend far beyond her neighborhood, and “it's actually one of the reasons why I don't see Seattle as a long-term place to stay,” Ackuaku confides, a palpable longing in her voice. “I want to be able to say that I'm looking for jollof rice, and if someone wasn't necessarily a part of the African community, there would so much of it around them that they’d at least be familiar with what that means.”

 Even in food and restaurant circles where distinctions are drawn between the nuanced variations in other regional cuisines, experiences are often grossly generalized across the African continent. This reflects the broader Western narrative of “a homogenous Africa,” per Naa Baalo Ako-Adjei’s Spring 2015 Gastronomica piece, “How Not to Write About African Food,” a legacy of colonialism used as justification for their arbitrarily drawn borders.

“I see a lot of misconceptions about what Nigerian cuisine is,” says FIN entrepreneur and steering committee member Lilian Ryland, founder of Naija Buka. “I'll say, ‘I'm Nigerian,’ and [people will] say, ‘Oh, I've been to Africa.’ You know, Africa is a continent. Or they’ll say, ‘I’ve been to Kenya on holiday,’ but Nigerian food versus all of those cuisines is night and day… We all have our versions of stuff like jollof rice, but ultimately, they are totally different.”

***

At Moyo Kitchen, urojo, a Zanzibari soup, is served with kebabs. Photo by Denise Miller for Global to Local.

Always cook extra, because you never know who’s going to walk in the door, and when someone visits, you offer them food and drink.

Achuaku says this dictate of Ghanaian culinary tradition is something shared in many African countries, informing a common trajectory for the continent’s food entrepreneurs. They begin cooking for their families at an early age, serving anyone else who drops by, and become the go-to cooks for “huge gatherings, wedding or funerals, so it’s not necessarily ‘catering,’ but ... they have experience cooking for large groups of people just by virtue of cultural background.”

In their cultures, the entrepreneurs say, the lack of standardization is a standard practice. While there are dishes that are regional staples, their preparations vary by country and even by the individual making them. Without uniform, written recipes, these cuisines are living, breathing things, taking new form, function and flavor in the hands of each cook.

“I learned to cook from my mom, [and] seeing her mix food together, it was amazing,” says Batulo Nuh, a Somali raised in Kenya who co-owns another Spice Bridge business, Moyo Kitchen, with Mwana Moyo, from Tanzania, of. “I would say, ‘Hey, slow down, how do you do this?’ She could make food for 500 people without measuring.”  

Moyo’s uncle owned a local cake shop, and she fell in love with food by watching with curious wonder as he decorated his confections. From him, she learned the trade, recalling that “at first it was only cake, but then I started to cook food, and I learned from watching my mom.”

“In Africa, no one does the measurements,” affirms Musitu, adding that even today, if she needs to learn a dish, she will watch her mother prepare the dish over video chat. Musitu teaches her own daughter in the same way, chuckling as she recalls the exchange: “She will ask me, ‘how many cups?’ And I say, ‘not how many cups, you just see by your eyes.’”

This sort of generational knowledge-sharing is important for Ryland, who grew up in Nigeria. In Seattle, she started her business by catering and selling at farmers’ markets. She contacted the FIN when she decided to pivot to packaged goods. Today, the Naija Buka product line is sold through her website and at PCC Community Markets, a popular natural and organic grocery chain in the Seattle area.

“Now people can buy the products that I have and make it with their kids, because some of them have told me, ‘I keep telling my daughter about Nigeria,’” Ryland says. “‘We haven't been, [but] I kept telling her about the food; about the people. So now I can make her jollof rice. I can make her egusi soup.’” Ryland also teaches Nigerian cooking classes at PCC aimed at “demystifying Nigerian cooking,” she says, particularly for millennials who have lost this culinary knowledge.

“They grow up eating all this food, hearing stories, but that's the only connection they have,” says Ackuaku. “This is why it's important to continue to find ways to connect people to this food in the cities where they live.”

The stories of these culinary traditions passed down, keeping the people and places that make a past present through food, moved me to my soul. In the course of writing this article, my own grandmother passed away. From my childhood until she moved into a retirement community, she had cooked our family’s holiday meals. Every year, we would watch in amazement as she prepared a multicourse feast from scratch, never letting anyone help. While the feat was incredible, I can’t help but lament that she never let anyone in on her secrets. All that generational knowledge is lost, those meals mere fixtures of memory now.

I may not have my grandmother’s recipes for pie, but like Ackuaku, I now keep Ryland’s products constantly stocked in my pantry. Every time I mix her jollof sauce into my rice, I remember her story, connecting to family kitchens across the globe and learning from grandmothers I never had. After all, Ackuaku says, “food is the universal language.”

***

Sisters Adama Jammeh and Oumie Sallah own Afella Jollof Catering, where they serve Senegambian food, the cuisine of a culture divided in two. Photo by Denise Miller for Global to Local.

Just a few steps down the hall and you have arrived in The Gambia and its surrounding coastal neighbor, Senegal, on the warm shores of the Atlantic Ocean. Together, sisters Adama Jammeh and Oumie Sallah own Afella Jollof Catering, where they serve Senegambian food, the cuisine of a culture divided in two. They grew up in Bakau, a town in The Gambia near the capital of Banjul.

“We first discovered our love of food at a really early age…and we have a passion for it as well,” Jammeh says.

They lived across from the beach, surrounded by blue water and tan sand against a verdant backdrop of palms and botanical gardens. Their uncles were fishermen who owned four boats, and “everybody in that town knew about us,” Sallah says. Smiling warmly, she recalls how their uncles would lavish the sisters with more fresh-caught fish than they could cook, which they would take to their aunties to put on the grill, their bounty flashing silver in the sun.

The scene comes to vivid life in a dish of grilled tilapia, its white flesh delicately flaking on my fork under a crisped layer of skin, marinated in a bold, earthy seasoning that includes onion, garlic, mustard and lemon. It is accompanied by boiled and fermented cassava, meaty and satisfying.

According to Jammeh, the cuisines and cultures of Senegal and The Gambia differ little apart from national language (English in The Gambia, a former British colony, and French in Senegal), reflected in the “Senegambian” moniker used throughout the region. The very concept of unified, national cuisines is a colonial legacy, says Igor Cusack in his 2000 piece, “African Cuisines: Recipes for Nation-Building,” for the Journal of African Cultural Studies; cuisine belongs to cultures that extend beyond borders. Thus, some of the most popular dishes in Senegal and The Gambia are variations on similar themes, such as the spicy okra and Scotch-bonnet stew called superkanja, supa kanja, kanjadaa or supakanja in The Gambia and soupakanja or soupoukandia in Senegal.

Afella Jollof serves other Senegambian staples, such as beef pastell—beef, peppers, onions, bell peppers, and cilantro baked in a savory pie crust—and yassa, a Senegalese dish popular throughout West Africa. It features grilled chicken, fish or lamb slathered in a tangy sauce dripping with loads of soft, savory-sweet onions caramelized in lemon and mustard and, sometimes, lime or vinegar. Everything is served with jollof rice, a one-pot rice dish, cooked with spices and stewed in onion and tomatoes, whose origins and preparations are fervently contested across the continent.

The sisters make everything from scratch, even the spices, Jammeh says—a practice that is central to their operating principle of “authentic food, made creatively.” Their passion and curiosity for food and connecting with others through cuisine bubbles forth in conversation.

“I love cooking,” Sallah says, adding, “it’s probably my favorite thing to do.”

And “I like eating,” Jammeh smiles, “so I want to explore everything.”

***

Upon arriving in Seattle, the entrepreneurs followed a similar path: After assuming the role of de facto community caterers, they were encouraged to start their own businesses, connected by another member to the FIN. While their diasporic communities don’t have the resources to sustain these businesses on their own, Nuh and Jammeh tell me, these human connections build a ladder to the next level.

When Jammeh and Sallah got to the Emerald City, their kitchen became the community’s, as they experimented with different dishes and invited people over to eat. These informal “gathering parties” soon gave way to catered community events, Jammeh says, “because we are considered to be [some] of the best cooks.” The sisters worked for free, charging only to cover expenses, until one of their nieces told them, “‘You need to go bigger than this.’”

The niece then introduced the sisters to Njambi Gishuru, cultural outreach specialist at the FIN. A Kenyan immigrant, Gishuru recruited every entrepreneur herself, drawing from a robust network built in South King County community outreach (though she is quick to credit her team with the program’s success).

“She kept hearing [about] people not being able to access not just food, but cultural foods, foods that really are sustaining to them,” says Kara Martin, program director at Global to Local, the FIN’s 501c(3) parent organization. “But [Gishuru] also was hearing about a lot of folks from many different cultural groups wanting to start food businesses, and some doing it informally, in their apartment kitchens, selling to their neighbors and in their community.”

Many immigrant and refugee chefs don’t realize they are crossing a line when they shift from serving community gatherings to selling their food. For years, Ryland has advocated for legislation authorizing home kitchens for commercial use; this has gained traction in some states with the onset of the pandemic, but has not yet passed in Washington. As a result, Ackuaku says, “a lot of immigrant entrepreneurs are locked out of the food economy, because they cannot afford the commercial kitchens that are required.”

And there are other barriers: Musitu fled armed conflict in the DRC; Jammeh and Sallah came to Seattle after escaping abusive marriages. All of the vendors have children and work other jobs in addition to Spice Bridge. Starting over was “really hard,” says Moyo, a single mother of two; Jammeh is a single mother of five. Both women had to put their education on hold when the pandemic struck to manage their kids’ remote learning. Many also struggle to make sense of the Byzantine web of regulations that govern food businesses in America, says Gishuru, which is dizzying even to the initiated.

The incubator program started as a subleased commercial kitchen that entrepreneurs used for catering and farmers market events. With the opening of Spice Bridge, the program expanded to include dedicated retail space and an expanded commercial kitchen; vendors can choose from rental plans that are at least one-fifth the market rate, subsidized through donations and grant funding. Program graduates can continue to rent kitchen space at closer to market rate, though current members get priority.

Most importantly, while they receive discounts, training, and guidance, the businesses vendors establish are independent entities. Gishuru and other staff walk vendors through every aspect of starting and running a food business, from applying for permits to obtaining insurance and following health and safety standards.

The program also helps vendors establish social media profiles and virtual storefronts for online ordering, all while building credit to secure their own lease down the road, explains Martin. While new program members are rotated into the stalls every two years, “we provide guidance for graduates in finding a space and negotiating a lease,” Miller adds, such as at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport's newly approved Food & Beverage Kiosk Program.

With a little help, Ackuaku says, these are “entrepreneurial ventures they can take on with confidence.” 

***

My second visit to Spice Bridge takes place on a cold, bright November afternoon, and I sit outside tearing luscious, buttery chunks of golden pompano fish from the bone, the thick seasoning coating my fingers. It is topped with chopped red onion and slices of green bell pepper and served with a container of fragrant, warmly spiced pilau rice. I raise a forkful to my nose and deeply inhale the toasty and earthy aroma, flecked with dark specks of cinnamon, clove, black pepper and cumin. Sun on my back, I am enjoying a meal from Moyo Kitchen, transported in a full-sensory experience to the shores of Tanzania, Kenya and Somalia.

As in Senegambia, there is crossover between these cultures, Nuh tells me: Kenyans and Tanzanians speak the same language, Swahili; their food uses the same spices. The legacy of Indian, Persian and Arabic traders as well as British, French and Italian colonists is reflected in both countries’ cuisines, where Italian pasta meets warm, earthy flavors and streetside vendors sell samosa or sambusa (its Somali name).

I dredge my pilau in kale stew, known in Kenya as sukuma wiki—translated as “stretch the week”—which is a fixture of Kenyan households and Moyo Kitchen’s menu. Rich and succulent, stewed with onions and tomatoes and bursting with savory flavor and a bitter brightness, the greens are plumped, toothsome and almost meaty in these juices, punctuated with notes of ginger and citrus. Goat stew is another staple, and either dish is served with ugali to sop up the thick, deeply seasoned juices.

Nuh, Somali by birth, grew up in Easteigh, Nairobi. There her family “lived in a lower-class neighborhood where food and essentials were scarce,” she recollects. She never got a chance to cook, for her days were spent in public and religious school, Islamic madrasa. She emigrated to the U.S. with her family as a teenager, and “when we moved here and had a sizable kitchen, I was able to see my mother cook, and this piqued my interest in cooking.”

Moyo grew up in Zanzibar, an island in a semi-autonomous region of Tanzania, where white-sand beach is punctuated by ancient coral-stone buildings with intricately decorated doorways, towering mosques and winding roads. Market stalls are stacked day and night with just-caught seafood, surrounded by sizzling skewers, lightly browning crepes and piles of freshly ground, local spices: bright, ruby- and orange-hued saffron; auburn sticks of cinnamon; fawn-colored nutmeg; pale green cardamom pods; deep brown daggers of clove.

Here, spice is intricately interwoven with all aspects of life, from the economy to the cuisine. After all, Zanzibar is referred to locally as the “spice island,” a nod to the Indonesian Maluku Islands of the same moniker. Moyo Kitchen imports most of their spices directly from Zanzibar, and the entrepreneurs are gauging customer interest in curated packs instead of those from, say, a local Indian store.

“I like to use my country’s spices,” Moyo adds. “I want people to come and taste, eat what I cook, and know where I come from.”

***

Establishing food sovereignty and entrepreneurship involves addressing the entire ecosystem, from consumers to chefs and their suppliers. From June to October, the Tukwila Village Farmers Market operates from the lot next door to the food hall. The market, also a project of the FIN, is staffed by immigrant and refugee growers who sell the specific produce their diasporic communities need. Vendors have sourced from these farmers in the warmer months, and in post-pandemic incarnations, they will serve prepared food on-site, as well.

Inside the food hall, eight businesses rotate through four cook stations and four customer-facing retail stalls in three-day shifts; five additional businesses use the kitchen for pop-ups, catering and packaged food. The space will eventually accommodate up to 20 businesses, once social distancing measures are no longer needed. Entrepreneurs hail from all corners of the globe, not just from the African continent.

In addition to opening their own restaurants, many entrepreneurs want to follow in Ryland’s stead. Musitu as well as Jammah and Sallah envision their own lines of frozen food, with the latter also aspiring to packaged dry spices, juices and seasoned meats.

As Gishuru says, “there is cultural and social wealth in food”—but for businesses such as these to survive, they need capital, space and support that extends beyond their neighborhood. The free-market model has failed the restaurant industry and underrepresented communities alike, but collective solutions can model a better way—provided they take their cues from the communities they purport to serve.

When I visit the final time, it is the day after Washington Governor Jay Inslee’s reinstatement of spring-era restrictions on dining and gathering, but while businesses that had barely reopened shutter anew and the streets regain their ghostly calm, Spice Bridge is full of life. Tantalizing aromas and the pleasant chatter of the vendors wafts in the air; they talk like old friends despite only knowing each other for a few short months, occasionally drifting back into the kitchen to stir a pot, prep a garnish or rotate a pan.

“We have a very good team at Spice Bridge,” says Jammeh. “Even our meals, though we do it [with] social distancing, we call it a ‘community meal,’” she adds, describing how each day at the food hall, one of them asks, “‘What are we eating today?’ And we all bring our food together.”

“We trust each other; we have fun; we're definitely there to support each other,” Nuh affirms. Support, is “as simple as just turning off the oven or putting something in the oven,” letting one another know when their food is ready, or offering a cup of tea to another vendor after a long day working alone.

Spice Bridge is drawing food tourists from across the Pacific Northwest, along with Americanborn customers who previously lived abroad in these countries. But most importantly, it is a beacon for diaspora members from South King County. Musitu describes the joy of Congolese patrons rediscovering their home cuisine. And Sallah recalls a football coach who came in every night after the food hall opened to purchase their bright, invigorating ginger tonic and deep, magenta-hued hibiscus juice.

“I'm happy to see our people, and that's making us increase our menu to more of the local dishes that we didn't have before,” Jammeh says, mentioning fufu, the Senegambian equivalent of ugali, and plasas, a spinach stew.

“For quite a long time, some of them haven’t eaten the food,” Sallah adds. “But now, they are telling me, they don’t miss home anymore.”