Chef Simileoluwa Adebajo, aka Chef Simi, is launching a new culinary and cultural experience that draws on her Nigerian heritage.
EKO Kitchen
Growing up in Lagos, Nigeria, Simileoluwa Adebajo helped her mother and grandmother in the kitchen. But she had never even made a pot of jollof rice on her own when she arrived in the Bay Area in 2016 to earn her master’s degree in international and development economics from the University of San Francisco.
While she achieved professional success as a financial analyst, she experienced a deep longing for home. And the only cure was cooking. “I became deathly homesick because I missed my grandma’s food,” she says. She experimented, called home for advice, and ordered chilies and fermented locust bean paste so she could re-create the flavors from her grandmother’s kitchen with California produce.
Soon, Adebajo — who goes by “Chef Simi” for short — was hosting six-course popup dinners that brought the tastes, sounds and sights of the Nigerian capital to San Francisco, in an experience she dubbed Eko Kitchen. (Eko is the original Nigerian name for Lagos; the latter was bestowed by Portuguese colonizers.) “People were experiencing music that conveyed the tone of each course, and I had Nigerian artists featured on the walls,” she recalls of the immersive meals. In 2018, Adebajo opened Eko Kitchen restaurant in SoMa. At San Francisco’s only authentic Nigerian eatery, cocktails like zobo (hibiscus) margaritas flowed with her modern Nigerian cuisine, including meaty suya (skewers) and spicy vegan efo riro (spinach stew).
Fried plantains alongside jollof rice, a spicy, tomato-based staple of West African cuisine.
Reed Davis Photography
“Nigerian food is bold, flavorful and spicy, just like Nigerian people,” she says. Indeed, Adebajo’s spice and grit sustained her when the pandemic prompted her to shutter the restaurant and shift to a commissary kitchen to offer takeout and delivery. When a July 2020 five-alarm blaze destroyed the commissary kitchen — where she kept restaurant equipment, dry ingredients and spices — she pivoted once more and wrote From Èkó With Love: A Guide to Modern Nigerian Cooking, a self-published cookbook released earlier this year. “Modern Nigerian cooking simply means keeping the authenticity in terms of the flavors or recipes and modernizing the style of the cooking,” Adebajo says. For example, instead of spending hours pounding yams into smooth paste with a mortar and pestle, she uses a food processor.
In the coming weeks, as Nigerian Independence Day approaches, she’ll pull out some special recipes — like her grandmother did. October 1, 1960, is when the British officially handed governance over to native Nigerians. “It’s not a celebration like the Fourth of July in America,” Adebajo says. “Nigeria isn’t truly free yet. So it’s just something we note.” Before leaving in 1960, the British took a vast number of valuable cultural artifacts. Today, much of Nigeria’s means of production and land remain under British control, while 80 percent of Nigerians live in poverty.
Despite this reality, on October 1, Adebajo would enjoy her Yoruba grandmother’s fried doughnut holes, known as puff-puff. “She wanted to mark it with something sweet, so we have a happy memory of the day,” explains Adebajo, who comes from western Nigeria. Puff-puff starts with sweet yeast dough that’s spiced with cinnamon and nutmeg.
These days, Adebajo is also plotting a return to catering private events and popups. Her latest endeavor will deliver a multifaceted culinary and cultural experience of Lagos, a bustling city filled with skyscrapers and entrepreneurs, that — much like London, Las Vegas and New York — never sleeps. She plans to kick off this new phase with a September 30 event focused on Nigerian unity. In addition to the six-course fine-dining menu curated by Adebajo, the Find Your Way Back Dinner Party will include drinks, Afrobeats music and dancing at a waterfront locale. General admission is $200, and tickets for the 6 to 9 p.m. affair are available through Eventbrite.
Although the dishes are still being finalized, Adebajo hopes to present her best-selling jollof rice, suya and other fare that resonates with Nigeria’s 250 tribes. The gathering is billed as an opportunity to “explore the similarities and differences across African food at home and in the diaspora.” According to the chef, “there’s a lot of division amongst my people right now,” she says. “We need to have more conversations, events and spaces where we’re discussing how we can all come together.”
