Milwaukee: African Hut closing doors

nobody@vox.com(Kenya) — Sun, 04 May 2008 10:30:47 -0700

JS Online: African Hut takes a break in business

http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.a...

For 15 years, Yinka and Moji Adedokun have served up peanut stew, Jollof rice and chicken, and sweet yam fries at their downtown Milwaukee restaurant, the African Hut, along with a side dish of education about their homeland.

When I lived in Milwaukee, I always looked for an opportunity to go downtown to African Hut for some joloff rice and peanut stew. It appears that after 15 years African Hut will no longer exist. There was a restaurant African Harvest owned by a Liberian family in Center City that I frequented as well but it closed before I left Milwaukee in 2001. Their spiced tea was especially delicious.

Something that stands out in the article to me is "the restaurant never generated strong support among African-Americans in Milwaukee." I definitely know this to be true. My ex-husband took his entire staff to African Harvest for some sort of celebration and the majority of them (all African Americans) would not eat anything. I remember him not understanding that they would eat all kinds of pig feet and chitterlings but wouldn't eat chicken dishes from this restaurant. The reason they wouldn't eat the food had nothing to do with the food itself but more so with their attitudes toward Africans and "not knowing what they do with the food".

African Hut probably was able to last longer because of its downtown location since the main customers were suburbanites and African Americans not native to Milwaukee. I would guess that African Harvest failed sooner as it, being in the Black part of town, did not get that foot traffic of suburbanites and tourist. It's definitely a sad day.

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Milwaukee: African Hut closing doors