At the centre of Gourmega, a new restaurant in New York, there’s a single long table, topped with interconnected circles of Nubian alabaster. Guests sit around its unusually contoured edge on walnut chairs that, when placed back-to-back, resemble the arches of The Bronx’s High Bridge.
But Gourmega isn’t in the Bronx. In fact, it’s located in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. The choice was an intentional one: Gourmega sits in what was known more than three centuries ago as Land of the Blacks – the first free African settlement in North America. Later on, it played host to many Black supper clubs.
Such references are at the heart of Gourmega, which was designed by award-winning Niamey, Niger; Zurich and New York-based Nigerien architect Mariam Issoufou for celebrated culinary collective Ghetto Gastro. The restaurant marks Ghetto Gastro’s first permanent, self-operated eatery and is a holistic celebration of both African and African diasporic culture. Every detail, colourway and material – as well as a closely curated seasonal chef’s tasting menu – nods to this rich source of inspiration.
‘One of the reasons I helped start Ghetto Gastro 15 years ago was because I was going to all of these restaurants and they were playing ‘90s hip-hop and I would look at the dining room and the kitchen and there was no representation of the people that created the style,’ says Jon Gray, Ghetto Gastro co-founder and Bronx native. Today, less than five per cent of Greenwich Village’s population identifies as Black. With Gourmega, Gray adds, ‘I wanted to do something to turn this on its head.’
Wallpaper* dines at Gourmega, New York
The mood: New York cool with sacred references
Gray set out to create a space as an immersive in-person experience, not just a social media ‘moment’. He wanted Gourmega to recapture the sense of discovery he felt when he first frequented downtown haunts like La Esquina and The Box two decades ago. He tapped Issoufou, an old friend, for the job.
‘I noticed that in many restaurants, couples and groups of friends sit together and spend much of their time looking at their phones,’ Issoufou says. ‘In my view, placemaking is ultimately about making people feel that they can appropriate the space, that it was made for them, with care.’
One of the main moves was the custom table, which breaks into smaller units for cafe seating during the day. During dinner hours, however, the pieces create a communal table, which allows for impromptu conversations among guests, not just those you came with.
The move is also a subtle rebuke of the ‘hegemony and patriarchy,’ as Gray puts it, of traditional European rectilinear tables and instead evokes the ancestral practice of gathering around a fire. ‘It’s more diplomatic and egalitarian,’ he adds.
Another key feature – a swinging semi-transient, semi-circular, yellow-toned door that separates the kitchen from the main dining space – evokes the sun, a divine force in many African cultures.
The kitchen is shared with Rethink Food, a long-established non-profit taking restaurant food waste throughout New York City and turning it into fine-dining meals delivered to neighbours in need. A similar spirit of resourcefulness informed many of Issoufou’s material choices: cork flooring, engineered wood wall panels limewashed in black. 'When the first African Americans arrived in this area, they too had to make do with whatever materials they could source to build shelter,’ she explains. ‘The contrast with alabaster is not a contradiction but an argument: humble and sacred materials in dialogue, the way communities themselves contain multitudes.’
Issoufou also incorporated bronze wall hangings by Nigerian designer Nifemi Marcus-Bello that evoke the Kingdom of Benin tradition of scarification, the scratching and etching of women’s faces to represent health and nourishment. ‘Because we’re close to King Street, we really wanted to think about the idea of honouring Queens, especially Black Queens throughout the diaspora and from the continent: Nzinga of Ndongo and Matamba; Queen of Sheba and Nefertiti, but also revolutionaries like Nina Simone and Angela Davis. Artworks by Rashid Johnson and Hugh Hayden will soon follow.
The food: an intentional fusion
The dining experience – two nightly services with a maximum of 14 guests who reserve by word-of-mouth by DM-ing Ghetto Gastro on Instagram – is also in fact a carefully sequenced ritual. They enter through an unassuming garage door and are immediately ushered into a side-kitchen where Pot Likka – a collards and unani broth – is served from an altar custom built out of the USM Haller system. They’re then led into the main black-toned dining room and seated around the table where the chef’s tasting menu – right now a careful fusing of receipts and ingredients from Asian, African, and the Americas – continues to unfold. As the dishes arrive – the bluefin with rice and watermelon ‘Roll Play’ and N.O.T.I (Nori Butter Roti) – the Sun Door opens again and again, revealing what’s happening behind the scenes in the kitchen.
Aligned with Issoufou’s intersectional sustainability philosophy, the current menu reflects what Gray calls ‘cultural collusion.’ The first offering focuses on melding Asian and African influences with Americana, ‘not the white supremacy version but the Americas version: Chinese influences in Peru, the Japanese in Brazil, Indian curries throughout the West Indies,’ he explains.
‘I’ve always been a sampler, like a hip-hop producer that takes things that don’t typically go together; All of these ingredients can be used to create a new vernacular,’ Gray continues. ‘That’s what we want to do with food, space and everything else.’
Gourmega is located at 116 West Houston Street NYC 10012, USA