Meet Simileoluwa Adebajo, San Francisco’s only Nigerian restaurant chef

In 2020, a five-alarm fire burned chef Simileoluwa Adebajo’s commissary kitchen to the ground.  The only reason she wasn’t in the San Francisco building was because she had slept in for the first time in years.

“As my bus approached the downtown area, I could see this huge plume of smoke,” says Adebajo, chef-owner of Èkó Kitchen, the city’s only Nigerian restaurant and catering company. “As I got closer my brain started to boot and put the location at my kitchen.”

On that hot July day, her equipment and inventory — mostly imported from Nigeria — had been destroyed. But in a short time, amid a pandemic that had shifted the way people eat, Adebajo had evolved her business and fed thousands of people in need with comforting dishes like spicy jollof rice and honey bean porridge. To say she’s been very busy is an understatement.

This month alone, Adebajo is hosting a Feb. 18 pop-up dinner, curating virtual cooking classes for Black History Month and celebrating the release of her self-published cookbook, “From Èkó with Love: A Guide to Modern Nigerian Cooking” (Èkó Kitchen LLC, $50). Did we mention she is 26?

“She has great ambition and energy and is very inspiring to work with,” says Fabien Santos, owner of Merkado, the South Beach restaurant where Èkó Kitchen operates its catering and Saturday take-out. “Her food is something I had never tasted before. The depth of flavor is something you can really taste.”

In 2018, Adebajo quit her job as a financial analyst at Amazon’s Twitch to found Èkó Kitchen after seeing that Nigerian food was nowhere to be found in San Francisco’s otherwise diverse dining scene. (The East Bay, however, has two Nigerian spots: Hayward’s Golden Safari, which opened in 2017, and West Oakland’s newer Jolly-Jolly Coffee & Kitchen.) Adebajo also noticed that few people knew much about her home city of Lagos, Africa’s largest metropolis, beyond its social unrest.

Adebajo, who was born in New York but spent 14 years living in Lagos before moving to San Francisco for graduate school, describes Nigerian food as bold, audacious and spicy.

“It is very much like Nigerian people,” says Adebajo, who likes to steal a glance at diners who are tasting Nigerian food for the first time. “I want to see the emotion on their face, the shock and wonder. I want them to feel transported. Also, I want them to feel comforted. It isn’t the healthiest food, but it is opening their eyes to a whole new world.”

Adebajo puts a modern spin on traditional Nigerian food. Her honey bean porridge is plant-based, with coconut instead of meat or fish, and her jollof rice is made with seven spices, including cameroon, cayenne, ginger, thyme and curry.

“It’s the way you layer them into the dish that makes them stand out,” she says. “It’s aromatic — sweet, spicy and smoky all at the same time.”

Nigerian food is not often in the spotlight, so when a recent TikTok challenge about fufu and egusi soup went viral and very negative, it caught Adebajo’s attention. Egusi soup is a nutty soup thickened with roasted and ground seeds of squash, melon or gourd. It usually has leafy greens — Adebajo puts spinach in hers — and is eaten with pounded yam.

“Some people were trying it and saying, ‘It’s so nasty’ and ‘This is homeless food,’” Adebajo says. “But this dish is such a big part of West African culture. It is nutritious and has high protein content. It’s not pretty, and it’s not familiar, but when I serve it I want to help people understand that just because something is not pretty doesn’t mean it’s not delicious.”

Adebajo started Èkó Kitchen by offering a delivery and catering menu of egusi soup, peppered chicken, puff puff and other authentic dishes out of that Mission District commissary kitchen. Her party-vibe dinners — with bar bites like suya spice-marinated beef skewers and Afrobeats playlists — grew such a fan base that she moved to a larger shared restaurant space in 2019.

But when the pandemic hit and dine-in eateries shuttered, Adebajo was forced to move back to the commissary kitchen. One week later, that massive fire, which took out six structures including the prep spots for at least five other food businesses, destroyed Èkó Kitchen.

Determined to rebuild, Adebajo launched a GoFundMe that caught Santos’ eye. Soon after, she accepted his offer to share the kitchen of his Mexican restaurant in the mornings. This enabled Adebajo to not only keep the eatery going, but to prepare nearly 15,000 meals for first responders and others in need as part of SF New Deal, the initiative that helped restaurants stay afloat by providing free meals for the city’s most vulnerable. Today, she is the youngest board member of the nonprofit.

In September 2020, she told Bon Appetit that she was simply doing what Nigerians have always done when they see their community in need. But Adebajo’s humanitarian work — including a fundraiser that sent food, masks and hand sanitizer to slums in Lagos — came at a time when she was suffering her own crippling losses.