Category: Africa

Eclectic Instapot of Flavors

Food is so ingrained into the culture of Cameroon that even the West African country’s name, camarão, means shrimp in Portuguese. Throw in some 250 ethnic groups and the influences of colonization by Germany, France and the United Kingdom. Add the Portuguese explorers who named the country after a crustacean and you get an eclectic Instapot of flavors.Flavors served up in African Chop, as far as I can tell the only sub-Saharan African food truck in Los Angeles, California.

"African food was not represented…”

African Chop is part of what has become a fleet of an estimated 400 food trucks in LA. The culturally diverse meals on wheels include the trailblazing Kogi truck which started selling Korean BBQ tacos back in 2008.

It’s only been just over a year since African Chop started cooking, but Hector Tantoh, one of the owners of the food truck, says they are still culinary pathfinders. "African food was not represented in the food truck space in Los Angeles. We are happy to be one of the pioneers,” says Tantoh.

African Chop’s menu features chicken legs, mackerel, beef and even a vegan dish, The to-go meals are all served with a side of  what’s known as jollof rice (more about that later) and puff puff, a savory version of a beignet. It’s a taste of home for Tantoh.

From Young Street Vendor to Food Truck Owner

He grew up in Doula, the biggest seaport in Cameroon. The city is also the country’s financial center. Tantoh compares his birthplace to New York City. "I grew up around street food and street vendors—people selling puff puff and other food on the street,” he says.

His family even got into the act.

"My mom had us selling food on the street too. The values--the hard work I learned in Cameroon have added to the food truck.” He brought those values to the United States where he earned an MBA before landing in Los Angeles. It’s here where he joined forces with fellow Cameroonian Opportune Akendeu, his African Chop partner. It was easy for the two come up with the name for the truck. Back in their homeland “chop" stands for food.

"Easy" Transition to Food Truck

"I never saw a food truck before coming to the US, but it's easy for me to see how it would catch on. I buy food from street vendors all the time. For me it was an easy transition to sell food on the street,” says Tantoh. He and Akendeu take turns when it comes to running the truck. During my visits Tantoh was in the driver’s seat at spots two regular spots. One is near city hall and the other is in front of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, better known as LACMA.

The customers he welcomes are as varied as the city’s food trucks.That includes Whitney Butler, a transplant from Arkansas. She walked passed food trucks in front of LACMA offering fragrant falafel, bulgogi beef and tempting tacos in order to stand in line at African Chop. She’s a regular who always orders the chicken plate. "Once I moved here I tried all kinds of food and I fell in love with African Chop’s chicken,” Butler says.

Actor Kwesi Boakye needed no introduction to African Chop’s fare. Though he’s American-born, his immigrant family is from Ghana. He is very accustomed to the items on the food truck’s menu. A particular favorite of Boakye is jollof.  The tomato, onion and pepper-flavored rice is a side dish at African Chop. But throughout western and central Africa jollof is smack dab in the middle of one of the biggest cuisine conflicts in all of Africa.

The Best I Have Ever Had

With that knowledge I prod Boayke, with his Ghanian ancestry and all, to reveal his favorite version of the dish."Is African Chop’s jollof the best jollof you have ever had?” I ask not so innocently.Tantoh listens and laughs, knowing where I am going with my line of questioning. "For sure! I’m from Ghana. This is one of the best I have ever had,” he responds. Tantoh continues laughing before I go all in. “So jollof from Cameroon is better than Ghana’s?” I ask. Them’s fighting words. Tantoh continues to laugh as Boakye stammers his response.  He recants his previous tasty testimony.

“I can’t say that. No. No. No,” he says. "This is the closest thing to the jollof in Ghana.  It’s up there, it’s up there.”

“My jollof brings all the boys to the yard…"

Boayke’s largess may be due to the fact that jollof beef is especially piquant between Ghana and Nigeria. To calculate the popularity of jollof all you have to do is search the internets. You’ll find jollof festivals. There’s a podcast called “Jesus and Jollof.” There are multitudes of jollof love songs. My favorite lyric from the jollof jam “Ghana Jollof" is “My jollof brings all the boys to the yard…”

Many of African Chop’s customers, like regular Whitney Butler from Arkansas, don’t have a clue about the origins of the rice that’s served along with every African Chop plate. She did not know anything about jollof until I asked her about it. And I’ll admit that I didn’t have a clue about jollof until doing this story. My family heritage traces to the south eastern nation of Malawi where we like our rice plain and uncontroversial.

Schooling Diners

Tantoh says schooling his diners is part of his charge. "In LA where people are very open to trying new cuisines there is still a challenge. They’ll say ‘What is West African food? Oh, it’s rice.' People don’t understand the variety and how big Africa is. There is so much variety within the continent,” he says.

An Education Process

"And because people haven’t been eating this for long they don’t know about it. But you can ask an American and they will tell you about Thai food and different kinds of nuances of Thai and they have never been to Asia. But they can tell you because they’ve experienced it around them. I think part of what we’re doing is an education process." says Tantoh.

In addition to educating patrons about African food the food truck also serves up a healthy helping of African culture.  African Chop is like a walking, make that rolling, billboard festooned with posters and leaflets advertising events around Los Angeles featuring the African diaspora. It’s all part of the general mission.

An Insertion Point

“This is an insertion point. So this is how you break into the cuisine is through jollof. If you’re curious you want to try more.” The business-minded Tantoh believes an introduction to jollof and other foods from his native Cameroon will stimulate consumer interest in say a sit down African sit-down restaurant.  And even perhaps to the African Chop food products Tantoh and his partner hope to distribute to supermarkets one day.

African Chop’s owners are happy to share their roadmap with other food trucks from the continent. They do not see them as competition.

“…we want more people in the market."

The current market is sparse. As far as I can figure there are fewer than a dozen sub-Saharan African food trucks in the United States.

“Opportune and I help people. If somebody wants to start an African food truck we are going to help them because we want more people in the market,” says Tantoh. Because that’s just how he rolls in his drive to make jollof and puff puff as popular in the US as hot dogs and hamburgers. But I have a feeling he settle on making those dishes or at least as well-known as pad thai.

African Chop Food Truck

Los Angeles, California
408 429 5458

About the author

Lena Nozizwe is and  visual and verbal storyteller. The Emmy-award winning journalist’s book, “Starring in Your Own Life,” was published by Simon and Schuster. Her work and passion has landed her in fabulous eating spots, from Paris to Portland, and from Dakkar to Detroit. Nozizwe loves them all. Keep up with her via her Instagram account.

I met Chef Gladys at the headquarters of what was described to me by the house staff as “basically, the Grammys of food.” In a beautiful kitchen in the basement of a brownstone building on the lower west side of Manhattan, Gladys Shartou, alongside eight of New York’s most creative and inspired chefs, was preparing one of the six courses for diners at the James Beard Foundation “Odyssey Across Africa” dinner, prepared by African Woman chefs and business owners. As the chef, manager, CEO, COO, and holder of every other position in the company she built and still builds from scratch, Chef Gladys was representing Sambuxa NYC at the table, a catering service (and so much more) serving up a delicious menu of traditional and modern Sudanese dishes. Shartou, born with a skill for the seasonings and an affinity for the flames of the food world, offers a healthy selection of flavors from her homeland at Sambuxa NYC, including the titular sambuxas which I was so lucky to try – but more on that later. Because before Chef Gladys was sought out by the enlightened palates of Manhattan, and before she regularly pitched her tent at the Queens Night Market, she saw the world from the eyes of an immigrant several times over, getting a taste of both ends of the horizon, and in between.

Chef Gladys was born in Khartoum, Sudan’s largest and capital city. She stayed there until she was about 5 years old, and then for the first of many times, left to begin a new life in a new place. She went from Khartoum to Addis Ababa, the capital of neighboring country Ethiopia, and after a few years to Queens, New York, and then a quiet village in Sweden close to the border of Germany. All throughout her young years, no matter where she was, Shartou grew in the cooking traditions and culture of her Sudanese family. “I started cooking around eight,” she tells me. “Before that I was in charge of preparing salads.” She was always in the kitchen with her family, helping to chop vegetables, but when she was eight years old her father asked her to prepare a whole chicken. “I was like, how do you make chicken? He was shocked that his Sudanese daughter didn’t know how to make chicken. So he showed me how, and that gave me the confidence to help cook real food.”

Outside of the kitchen she also faced new challenges, those of adjusting to her new Swedish surroundings. “They were very conservative when we arrived in the 90’s, the girls had to wear skirts, they had their braids, really Christian. Some of the churches didn’t want people to watch TV.” When her family moved there they were doing well financially in Sudan and in New York, so they were very used to modern living. “They were judging us...they were like ‘oh, you’re from Africa you don’t know anything’ but we were in more developed environments than they were... Even now when I go back, people look, and when I get on the train they’re like ‘who’s this?’”

Stepping in to yet another life as an immigrant in a new country, Shartou left from college in Geneva, Switzerland with a degree in International Relations and moved to Bordeaux, France. and for the first time put on the metaphorical chef hat, cooking Sudanese lunch food to make extra money while in school for International Management. “I put it up [on] a craigslist type page, like ‘hey, try a different kind of lunch.” She hung up the apron when she moved back to the states, working for the Swiss mission to the UN, and then for the Democrats in DC until 2017. “But after the election they let a lot of high level people go, [and] so then I came to New York and I’m like, ‘what’s the next best thing I know? baby-sitting.‘ So I baby sat and I decided to start my business.” And thus, was born Sambuxa NYC in 2018.

Fast forward through countless months of vision, business savvy, non-stop cooking and outright hard work and determination, and Chef Gladys is showing me her peanut chicken skewers sizzling over the blue propane flames beneath the world class dining room that will soon be full of flavor seekers of the highest caliber, embarking on a gastronomical odyssey across Africa. We made our way through the buzz of the kitchen, past Liberian plantain cake and tacos from Benin, out to the patio behind the house, sitting on a long bench opposite a black marble bar to have a chat. I had to know, despite cooking in the cultural smorgasborg of New York City, what challenges Shartou faced serving food from another land. ”You have to educate people about the food, you have to always draw similarities to other cuisines.” When I asked why she chose to start cheffing again in New York, she smiled and confidently told me: “I had nothing to lose, my food is amazing.” She had always dreamed of opening a restaurant and being able to introduce Sudanese food and culture to the world, and her company is “a dream come true.” Her business model as modern and adaptable as her cuisine, Sambuxa NYC is a food entity that caters, sets up at various popups, and takes online meal orders, without the heavy costs of a brick-and-mortar restaurant face. “I do want to open a restaurant some day, just as a sort of home base, but I don’t need that right now.” She mentioned to me that she always felt like New York was home, but when I asked if she considered herself more of a New Yorker or Sudanese, she assured me that she will always be Sudanese. “I am going to back soon... my end goal is to actually [create] a business incubator in Khartoum, to encourage young Sudanese to come in and think about what their talents are and get them some grants, and then start growing our economy.” Far more than just a chef, Shartou is a visionary.

Back in the kitchen, Chef Gladys has two items cooking to be served during the multi-course, multi-chef meal. One, the vegetable sambuxa, I am delighted to be trying; the other, a skewered chicken strip with spices and a sprinkling of crushed peanuts, falls outside the margins of my plants-only diet, but please believe my left hand slapped my right away from reaching for the stick end hanging off the grill. And what are the flavors that define Sudanese food? “The first one, specifically, what I learned from my mom is cumin. But we don’t use like two tablespoons, we use a lot, but you would never know the way we cook it down with the onions and everything.” As hard as I tried, I couldn’t get Chef Gladys to disclose many details on the secrets of her rich food culture, but she assured me there was an abundant use of onions, garlic, and bold spices that other cultures have yet to orchestrate in such a way. My questions fizzle out as she pulls a basket out of the deep fryer and places 4 four vegetable sambuxas on a small white plate and hands it to me, and while I wait anxiously for them to cool I am enlightened to the dish in front of me and its history. Sudan, a place of international trade in the Eastern hemisphere, has seen many cultures come through its gates. The sambuxa is a triangle of fried crust wrapped around a filling of spiced beef or vegetables, similar to the Ethiopian sambusa or the Indian samosa. Sambuxa crusts, however, are made with a rice-based flour akin to that used in some Asian cuisines, and so they have a very light and crispy wrap much like that of a Thai spring roll.

The time has come. The four crispy, golden triangles rest on my plate like crown jewels on a satin pillow, the faint glisten of a thin oil coat, corners and creases expertly folded into the dimension where food and art become indiscernible. I bite in to the first one, and everything Chef Gladys promised came to life on my taste buds. The thin crust collapses easily into light, pastry-like flakes and the filling of potatoes, cabbage, onions and peppers is indeed uniquely flavored in comparison to its cousin dumplings in the eastern cuisines. I could write line after line mounting a futile attempt at what can really only be discovered through experience. In retrospect, I should have taken much more time to truly savor the fruits of Shartou’s craft, but as with all delicious food, my crispy quartet was devoured in short order, and maximum self-discipline was exercised in my effort to leave any sambuxas for the diners upstairs.

Aside from the veggie sambuxas I ate and the grilled chicken skewers, Sambuxa NYC offers a range of #foodanese flavors for everyone, including vegan selections such as veggie and sweet potato-spinach sambuxas, peanut butter eggplant salad and vegetable stews, alongside beef and chicken sambuxas, and as many stews, salads, and wraps as you could want at your event. She may not have a restaurant, but if you’re looking to taste the works of Chef Gladys you can contact her for catering at sambuxa.com or find her at any number of events she serves at around New York, frequently posted on her Instagram, Facebook and Twitter under the same name.

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