A new generation is exploring how the city’s celebrated food owes as much to West African and Caribbean cuisines as to French cooking.
These restaurants are partaking in “a new and expanded telling” of the history of New Orleans cuisine, said Jessica B. Harris, whose books have been instrumental in tracing the food’s African roots. (Mr. Mbaye will appear in the next season of “High on the Hog,” the Netflix series based on Dr. Harris’s book of the same name.)
“This is a widening of the lens,” Dr. Harris said.
Filling the local void of African restaurants is why Prince Lobo’s family opened Addis NOLA in 2019. Last year, the Ethiopian restaurant moved to a new location in the Seventh Ward, along a stretch of Black-owned businesses that Mr. Lobo calls “a new Black Wall Street.” (Robert Manos, in the group picture at top, is a manager at the restaurant, in charge of customer experience.)
“All of the history that was left out over the last hundreds of years, we’re having to fill that in now with our storytelling,” said Mr. Lobo, 25.
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