The first time I walked into Badou Senegalese Cuisine in Rogers Park, the eponymous owner Badara “Badou” Diakhate was seated at a table in the empty dining room prepared to dive into a heaping plate of rice, collard greens, and smoked turkey. If you saw it you might think it looked like something you could order at Ruby’s in Garfield Park.
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Diakhate calls this dish “Badou’s Senegalese Soul Food,” and at the time it wasn’t even on his menu—it was just something he was playing around with. But when I returned for it two days later his wife, Paula Jones, told me she’d sold out, which convinced him to offer it full-time. Besides that, Diakhate’s menu lists a number of iconic Senegalese dishes, which we’ll get to in a bit. But his cooking style is improvisational, flexible, and ruled only by whether his customers like it spicy, sour, mild, or sweet. “Basically I go by the taste of the person,” he says.
At the time it was unusual for a boy to hang out in the kitchen with the women, but Diakhate would fetch water, go to the market, and help out when he returned. “My friends used to come and tease me,” he says. “The girls used to tease me. But because of the passion I have for my mom I was always there helping her.” His dedication paid off the year his mother sent him to his grandmother’s farm in the country to help out during summer vacation. He was expected to work in the fields, which required a five-mile predawn walk each morning through hyena territory. “I said, ‘No way. I cannot do this.’ But my grandmother said, ‘You either have to go to the fields and work and help or you stay home and do something else.’ And I said, ‘OK, I’ll stay home and try to see what I can do.’” He quickly parlayed a day’s work for some fishermen into a portion of the catch, and made his grandmother and uncle a meal that convinced them to let him stay home in the kitchen and cook.
Diakhate says he’s bringing in a couple of African cooks to help him execute the full menu more consistently, since he has plenty of irons in the fire. In addition to his day job he also blogs on African politics and plans to return to Senegal in time to run for president in 2022.
2055 W. Howard 773-293-6913badousenegalesecuisine.com
