Years ago I used to hang with a bunch of artists and musicians in the then-bohemian South of Market neighborhood in San Francisco—American white guys who were very into African pop: Sokous from Zaire, High Life and Juju from Nigeria, Makossa from Cameroon. We listened to Mbilia Bel, Fela Ransome Kuti, King Sunny Ade, I. K. Dairo, and even—because his records had been hugely popular in Nigeria—the American country crooner Jim Reeves. One of the crew was a percussionist who could play the "talking drum," and another was a guitarist who had mastered the clean lines of the African sound.

Riding this wave of Afro-philia, I found a West African cookbook and tried out some of the easier dishes—okra stews, Jollof rice, chicken cooked in palm oil. I loved the cuisine, which is the ancestor of so much deliciousness in the American South, the Caribbean, and Brazil. In those days there were no restaurants in San Francisco where you could taste the real thing, and when I lived in New York I never got around to exploring African-diaspora restaurants—just one of the many things I was too busy and too tired to do in that overstuffed metropolis.

Not Brooklyn, Brooklyn Center

But this is the Twin Cities, with a notable East African (Somali, Ethiopian, Oromo) and West African (Liberian, Nigerian, and more) population—plus a far more humane lifestyle. When I heard about the grand opening, back in late March, of Jambo Africa, an ambitious pan-African restaurant twenty minutes away in Brooklyn Center, I had to go.

Grand opening is a bit of a misnomer. Jambo Africa is actually the revamping of The Global Kitchen, and that's what the sign still says in the mall on Shingle Creek Parkway, across a big parking lot from a Target. But the menu has made the transition: the restaurant has converted from its former schizophrenic combination of African and Mexican—adopted for safety's sake, I suppose—to all Africa, all the time. And judging by my lunch, they made the right move.

I preceded the main dish with two scrumptious samosas--better than any I've had in Indian restaurants here, which I topped with a squeeze of lime--and then had Jollof rice, which is sort of like Spanish rice on savory steroids, plus some perfectly crispy fried chicken.

There are plenty of other West African standbys on the menu, like fufu (the starchy ancestor of grits), okra cooked in palm oil, and cassava in gravy (you order these filling vegetable dishes with either chicken or fish).

The East African menu features delicious-looking combo plates--a beef stew with Kenyan flatbread and curried cabbage and carrots, for example--and you can get imported Kenyan tea with milk and--this sounds good--ginger.

There's a modest wine list that includes some Argentine vintages, and you can order Tusker beer from Kenya along with the standard mass-produced American brews. The place has a serious-looking sound setup and obviously rocks at night--even at lunchtime, I got to hear lively Sokous on the system...which gave me a pleasant buzz of nostalgia.

Jambo Africa (The Global Kitchen)
6000 Shingle Creek Parkway
Brooklyn Center
Open Tuesday-Sunday for lunch and dinner