Philadelphia African Restaurant Week and the Kitchens That Hold the City Together

The smell of jollof rice carries differently than most things you encounter on Woodland Avenue in Southwest Philadelphia. It does not stay at the restaurant. It comes out to the sidewalk and introduces itself, and if you are not already the kind of person who walks into that kitchen on a regular basis, it is a harder thing to ignore than a sign or an advertisement would ever be. I have been walking this stretch for years, past the African grocery stores and the produce stands and the menus painted in the windows listing dishes that trace back to Lagos and Monrovia and Addis Ababa and Accra. These restaurants did not need anyone to discover them. Their regulars found them long ago. But I keep returning to what it means that African Restaurant Week eventually turned to Philadelphia and asked the rest of the city to go find them too.

Where the Idea Came From

Akin Akinsanya started the event in New York in 2013. He was born in Nigeria and was working as a Wall Street consultant when he began what Black Enterprise described as a celebration of African cuisine after work, an event rooted in what he called a sense of culture and pride. He started with around twelve vendors. The format was simple: gather restaurants of African descent under a shared week, build public attention for businesses that were operating with little of it, and repeat. African Restaurant Week was not designed as charity. It was designed as a recurring economic and cultural platform, one that would be worth returning to year after year.

The model grew faster than most people outside of New York noticed. By 2023, when Columbia News Service marked the tenth anniversary of the New York edition, the event had expanded into New Jersey, Maryland, Washington D.C., Atlanta, Chicago, the Bay Area, and beyond the country entirely, with editions in London, Paris, Accra, and Lagos. The mission the organization articulates has stayed consistent across all those cities: celebrate African, African American, and Caribbean cuisine, support the economic development of locally owned food businesses, and build the kind of community ties that survive a single calendar week.

Philadelphia entered the rotation in 2024. Billy Penn’s coverage of the 2025 Philadelphia edition documented about twenty restaurants participating, representing eight countries of origin: Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia, Ethiopia, Cameroon, Senegal, Jamaica, and the Ivory Coast. The 2026 edition drew more than thirty establishments. The trajectory from twelve vendors in New York to over thirty in one American city thirteen years later is not a coincidence. It reflects how many restaurants were already doing the work, and how much attention had been sitting elsewhere.

The Restaurants and What They Represent

The Philadelphia Inquirer’s coverage of the 2024 edition offers the clearest picture of which kitchens were there from the beginning in this city. Eatwell and New Era Cuisine, both rooted in Nigerian cooking, joined in the first Philadelphia year, alongside Gojjo on Baltimore Avenue and Meskerem on Woodland Avenue, which together represent the Ethiopian restaurant presence that has given West Philadelphia’s corridor one of the most serious concentrations of East African food in the region. Food Geez, a Liberian kitchen on Sackett Street, was there. On the Caribbean side, Gou, a Haitian restaurant, and Ackee Tree, Jamaican, each brought a distinct tradition from a different branch of the diaspora. Special menus and pricing ran through the week, and a festival weekend at JFK Plaza gave the event a public face in the middle of Center City rather than confined to the neighborhoods where these restaurants actually operate.

What I notice about this list is not just its length but what it tells you about where the work is happening. West African cooking, East African cooking, Caribbean cooking: these are traditions that have grown from entirely different histories, different ingredients, different techniques for building flavor. The fact that they share a week in Philadelphia is not a simplification of those differences. It is a recognition that the restaurants carrying them have something in common that matters more than the cuisine category. They are all operating in Philadelphia with a customer base that is primarily their own community, in neighborhoods that visitors to the city rarely reach on their own.

Visit Philadelphia’s guide to West African food in the city describes Kilimandjaro on Chestnut Street as the first restaurant in Philadelphia to specialize in Senegalese food. It describes Woodland Avenue as a stretch of Malian, Liberian, Guinean, and Ivorian kitchens that amounts to one of the most distinct dining corridors in the region. None of these are new arrivals. They are anchors.

The Neighborhood That Built These Kitchens

Southwest Philadelphia is home to what the city’s own tourism office now calls Africatown, a designation built around the West African immigrant communities that have settled along Woodland Avenue and the surrounding blocks over several decades. Visit Philadelphia’s Africatown guide describes a neighborhood of murals and country flags on street poles, restaurants and African grocery stores alongside community organizations that have been running since the late 1990s. The African Cultural Alliance of North America formed in Southwest Philadelphia in 1999 and grew into the largest social service, arts, and community development organization run by African immigrants in the region. That organization is now working toward a $23 million community and cultural center in the same neighborhood, a project WHYY has covered as a reflection of how firmly the community has taken root.

The community did not appear recently. The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia’s essay on Liberians in Philadelphia documents how roughly fifteen thousand Liberians had relocated to the Philadelphia area by 2008, driven by two civil wars that dismantled the country’s infrastructure. The largest concentration settled in West and Southwest Philadelphia, where what the encyclopedia calls a Little Monrovia grew along Woodland Avenue around Sixty-Sixth Street. Out of that settlement, a commercial corridor took shape over years of investment by people who had arrived with little and built something anyway. The restaurants that show up on the African Restaurant Week list are not the beginning of that story. They are a chapter well into the middle of it.

What Spending Money There Actually Does

I want to be specific about the economics here because the language around supporting local businesses has been used so many times in so many contexts that it barely lands anymore. The Economy League of Greater Philadelphia’s research on immigration as economic infrastructure puts the scale of what is actually happening in concrete terms: immigrants in Philadelphia contribute $7.4 billion in consumer spending annually and own approximately thirty percent of the city’s small businesses, at an entrepreneurship rate roughly double their share of the overall population. These restaurants are part of that picture.

When money moves through one of these kitchens, it follows a circuit that is different from what happens at a chain or at a restaurant that has no roots in the neighborhood where it operates. Rent gets paid to landlords who often live nearby. Workers who live on the same blocks get paid. Suppliers who are sometimes community members themselves get paid. The money stays in a tighter radius, which is how neighborhood economies actually function when they are working. A restaurant week is not a solution to the structural pressures that independent kitchens face all year. It is a mechanism for directing more of the city’s food spending into that circuit for a defined period, and if even a fraction of the people who show up for the first time during the week become regular customers afterward, the event does something more durable than a single promotion. That is the version of economic development that I think is worth paying attention to.

A Festival at the Center of the City

The festival that closes each Philadelphia edition has taken place at JFK Plaza, the park at 15th Street and JFK Boulevard that most of the city knows as LOVE Park after Robert Indiana’s sculpture at its center. Visit Philadelphia describes LOVE Park as one of the most photographed public spaces in the country, a park that underwent a $26 million renovation and reopened in 2018 with open lawn, trees, a redesigned fountain, and significantly better access from the surrounding streets. Putting a diaspora food festival in that location is a decision that carries its own argument: that the restaurants from Woodland Avenue and Sackett Street and Baltimore Avenue belong to the whole city, not only to the neighborhoods where they have been working for years without much of the city noticing. The food comes downtown. The rest of the city meets it there. That is a small thing to arrange and not a small thing to have done.

Where the Idea Came From

The Restaurants and What They Represent

The Neighborhood That Built These Kitchens

What Spending Money There Actually Does

A Festival at the Center of the City

Sources and references