I Follow The Course Of Slave Routes on 5 Continents, And How The Cooking Techniques Changed Food

Meet Alexander Smalls, the James Beard award-winning Harlem chef, restaurateur and author. He is known for setting up Café Beulah in New York City (it introduced the soul food he grew up on for the palates of fine-dining clientele), Sweet Ophelia’s, Shoebox Café, and the award-winning The Cecil, NYC's first Afro-Asian-American restaurant. Smalls has been in the news lately because of his new venture - the African food hall Alkebulan - which has been set up in Dubai and London, with another one coming up soon in the US. Each Alkebulan food hall will highlight the food and cultures of Africa, as well as its influence in the cities the halls are in. Alkebulan was once the name of the African continent it translates to “mother of mankind”. In Dubai, the hall has 11 stands run by African chefs and restaurateurs, with West African street food, barbecue, dishes inspired by Zanzibar and East African seafood.

Smalls is also a celebrated opera singer and has won a Grammy Award and a Tony. Here he talks about Africa's culinary influences in multiple continents, about following the slave routes, and the course of Africans on five continents, and how their cooking techniques and ingredients changed food, and about the need for more diversity and representation in the F&B sector.

The idea behind Alkebulan...

As founder of Alkebulan I like to say I “gave birth to the idea of Alkebulan” many years before we realized it in full at Expo 2020 Dubai. It was a project I had been working on for many years and it grew out of the need to understand the heritage and history of my African American Kitchen where the food of my ancestral trust came from which lead me on an odyssey of travel throughout African and Asia, culminating in following the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade which became this journey around the world on five continents.

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