Photo credit, Ilya Shnitser
- Author, Anna Bressan
- Role, BBC World’s Table
Chef Ayo Balogun of the Dept of Culture introduces Americans to north-central Nigerian cuisine. With just one table, this award-winning restaurant is booked months in advance.
When Ayo Balogun was a teenager spending the summer cooking with his grandmother in Kwara State, western Nigeria, his uncle took him for an exciting night in Lagos, the country’s capital, in all manner of restaurants, from speakeasies to upscale clubs.
“It was just one night. And ever since, I’ve been trying to recreate that night. It’s like you’re always looking for that thing,” he said.
Now in Brooklyn, after moving to the United States in 1998, Balogun is the chef of the Dept of Culture, one of New York’s hottest new restaurants.
The restaurant is lauded for its cozy atmosphere, heart-warming dishes, and mission to introduce regional Nigerian cuisine to American palates. Located in a former barbershop, this small restaurant was named one of Eater’s Best New Restaurants of 2022 and was shortlisted for the prestigious James Beard Foundation Awards, the winners of which will be announced in June.
Dept of Culture opened its doors just a year ago in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, not far from the former Civil Service Café where Balogun hosted its first pop-up dinner parties during the pandemic.
Tiny but elegant, Dept of Culture only has a communal table and a counter with four stools. It can only accommodate 16 people per night and is booked months in advance.
The restaurant, which offers a set menu, is a BYOB establishment where customers share a meal and often more than one bottle they brought from home. On a recent evening, the first course was an asaro, a deliciously textured porridge made with two kinds of yam – sweet potato and white yam tuber – and served with smoked shrimp and crayfish to give a little extra spicy overall. Balogun’s father ate it when he was a schoolboy in the 1950s, but Balogun himself didn’t like it when he was a child.
Asaro, a porridge made from two kinds of yam: sweet potato and white yam. (Ilya Shnitser)
“Now I find myself eating it all the time,” he explains. “It reminds me of Agatha Christie and watching TV on the way home from school.
For diners unaccustomed to Nigerian cuisine, this is a dish that manages to be both comforting and familiar, even if you’ve never tasted it before.
The second course, iyán – a pounded yam served with smoked fish, efo (spinach), egusi (fermented melon seeds) and iru (carob) – had a much more elastic texture. unexpected.
“It’s like food for the elderly,” jokes Balogun.
When talking about his cuisine, Balogun not only tells anecdotes about his country, which he says is “the most beautiful in the world”, but he also makes a point of pronouncing the name of the ingredients in Yoruba first.
For example, when he presents his spicy goat meat and pepper soup, while reassuring diners that “you feel the heat, but it goes away”, Balogun spells out the name of the pepper. “It’s rodo. RODO,” he said.
After all, it is the Ministry of Culture.
