Top Chef features local Pan-African restaurants
It takes courage and resilience to stage a restaurant comeback during a pandemic – but that’s just what Fatou Ouattara has been doing. She closed her West African restaurant, Akadi, in December and took some time to visit her family and homeland, the Ivory Coast, as well as rural villages in Nigeria, Ghana, and South Africa, honing her cooking and collecting new recipe ideas. It already looks like a prescient move, with Bravo series Top Chef featuring the spot in an episode focused on Portland’s Pan-African food scene. Ouattara plans to open, better than ever, later this year.
Ouattara also started selling her specialty Akadi sauces, which can now be purchased from New Seasons, Green Zebra and Wellspent Market. The sauce is especially good with such vegan dishes as shosho (stewed beans in a spiced red sauce), spicy okra spinach stew, veggie yasa (a variety of veggies in a yellow Dijon stew, and fufu (pounded yam).
The Top Chef production spent a total of $5 million locally, including $824,000 in hotel nights and 32 local hires within a crew of 211, and was the sole tenant of Portland Expo Center for duration of filming. The episode featuring Akadi also took the chefs to other Portland-area restaurants and food carts specializing in cuisine with roots in West Africa, Jamaica, Haiti and Guyana, from Haitian-flavored Mathilde’s Kitchen at the Portland Mercado, whose specialty beverages are available at several markets around Portland; to Yaad Style Jamaican in Northeast Portland; to Guyanese food cart Bake on the Run at the Hawthorne Asylum pod.