Ian McNulty: From Africa to Uptown, new restaurant Dakar NOLA sets a different path

Chef Serigne Mbaye used his pop-up Dakar NOLA to give New Orleans a taste of Senegal and his own journey in the culinary world. Now he has a way to take it further and show people how this all feels too.

A pop-up no more, this full-fledged version of Dakar NOLA officially opens next week, Nov. 23, as a modern Senegalese tasting menu restaurant. It’s the evolution of the venture Mbaye first started in borrowed kitchens, and it takes a different approach from the conventional restaurant format.

Mbaye’s cuisine tells an interlacing tale of African diaspora influences set in the broader culinary world. It’s food that draws threads through history, between continents and within communities.

With a new restaurant, the young chef is out to give a more complete experience, and it’s meant to be an immersive one.

The restaurant has one seating per night with dinner beginning for everyone at 7 p.m., with a series of dishes served for the table. That means people who come to Dakar NOLA share an evening together.

“How do I create an experience where it’s more than just you come for a meal and leave?” said Mbaye. “This is a way to tell a story about my food, so when you come for dinner, you’ll learn where it all comes from and how it connects to where we are now.”

Elevating the cuisine

Dakar NOLA reflects Mbaye’s goal of elevating Senegalese cuisine and seeing it celebrated in the same way as French or Italian cooking. It’s working.

The pop-up gained loyal support in New Orleans and gained wide notice beyond. This year, Mbaye was one of six finalists for the James Beard Foundation’s emerging chef award, a national honor. He has collaborated broadly with chefs working in divergent styles, spreading his message further.

In the kitchen, Mbaye starts with the cornerstones of Senegalese cooking — with its prevalent French, Portuguese and regional African elements — and adds facets from the local Creole style, itself a tapestry of influences.

Mbaye sees links to Senegal all around New Orleans, including in gumbo, jambalaya and even beignets. Many Louisiana standards were shaped from the start by enslaved Africans brought to the South.

“Good American cooking is inspired by Southern cooking and good Southern cooking comes from African cooking,” Mbaye said. “In New Orleans it’s Senegal.”

A mother’s influence

Mbaye was born in New York and spent much of his youth in Senegal, where his parents were born and where he developed his love of cooking. Back in the United States, he graduated from culinary school and embarked on a restaurant career, racking up a remarkable résumé in the high-end American dining.

He cooked at the Michelin-starred restaurants L'Atelier de Jo?l Robuchon in New York and Atelier Crenn in San Francisco. In New Orleans, he spent a year and a half cooking at Commander’s Palace, which was when he started Dakar NOLA as a pop-up. Later, he cooked with chef Melissa Martin at Mosquito Supper Club.

“Everything I do here is the influence of everywhere else I’ve been,” Mbaye said. “It makes me realize how much Senegalese food there is across the world and how much I want to show what modern Senegalese food means.”

One of the chef's strongest influences is his mother, Khady Kante. She ran an underground Senegalese restaurant in New York for a few years, and at her home she would host homesick expats for meals.

These gatherings would start with everyone washing their hands together. That’s something Mbaye has worked into Dakar NOLA, where urns and towels are passed around the table to begin.

Next there’s a tea service, inspired by the Senegalese tea ceremony called ataya. The meal then unfolds with bread, finger food-style appetizers, soup (perhaps a black eyed pea soup with crabmeat), fonio salad (made with a couscous-like millet), seafood (like his redfish with caramelized onions), vegetables and jollof (a rice dish akin to jambalaya), then dessert. The particular dishes will change with the seasons and what Mbaye gets from a network of small farmers who supply him.

The approach will remain the same, through seven or more courses over the span of two hours or so. It’s an experience meant to be social and communal, and at a maximum of 30 people per night it's also intimate.

“This restaurant is a homage for the love I have for New Orleans and the amount of support I’ve received here,” Mbaye said. “I want to pay that back by showing what west Africa has to offer and the connections it has to what we have here.”

Collaborating to grow

Mbaye and business partner Effie Richardson developed the restaurant together. Richardson, a local pediatric dentist, met Mbaye at his earlier pop-up dinners; they spoke to her own family roots in Ghana and stirred something in her.

“It was this feeling of community that came through them,” she said. “I realized what I do in medicine wasn’t so different from hospitality. I like a challenge, and this is a new challenge to take on.”

Dakar NOLA’s home is a converted shotgun house that was previously the Vietnamese restaurant Pho Cam Ly, which closed in the pandemic (it later had a short stint as a restaurant called Bienvenue Café). Today, the space is a mix of African art and contemporary design elements, moving from warm, earth-tone colors to regal gold fixtures.

Dinner at Dakar NOLA is $150 per person. It opens with a BYOB policy in place, while the business seeks a liquor license. The restaurant is working with two nearby neighborhood wine shops, Spirit Wine (3500 Magazine St.) and Second Vine Wines (4212 Magazine St.) to select wines that pair with its menu, so people can pick up a bottle on the way to dinner.

Richardson and Mbaye see this as another form of community buildings, by extending the Dakar NOLA experience outside of the restaurant’s four walls. Collaborations with other chefs will also continue at the restaurant. For the first, tentatively scheduled for January, Mbaye will cook with his mother.

“She’s such a big inspiration for this,” he said. “Back then, I saw how it was all about cooking Senegalese food and welcoming people into her home. That’s what I’m doing here.”

Dakar NOLA

3814 Magazine St., (504) 493-9396

Dinner Wed.-Sat.

Reservations at dakarnola.com