Fatou Ouattara fills a niche, and plates, with the vibrant flavors of home.
Text by Danielle Centoni
Images by Ashton Morgan
Poised amid a sea of concrete on a busy four-lane boulevard in Northeast Portland, Akadi’s lemon-yellow exterior stands out like a beam of sunlight on a cloudy day. Turns out, the food coming out of the kitchen is no different—bright, bold, and unabashedly spicy West African dishes that are unlike anything else in town.
“I couldn’t find any place that had West African food,” says chef and owner Fatou Ouattara, a native of Bouaké, Cote d’Ivoire. “We have a lot of East African food, but I wanted to bring that side of Africa that we didn’t have in Portland.”
Until Ouattara opened Akadi in fall 2017, the chewy injera and buttery stews of the city’s Ethiopian and Eritrean restaurants served as the primary examples of Africa’s wide-ranging cuisines. Now, diners flock to Akadi’s Creamsicle-colored dining room, settle in at kente-cloth-covered tables, and dive into dishes that define a different part of the continent: tomato-rich jolof rice, deep-fried cassava sticks, pillowy balls of fufu, and tender grilled meats steeped in marinades bursting with peppers and spices.
“Everything on the menu is pretty authentic to my mom and grandma,” Ouattara says. “I’ve changed a couple things, and I’ve incorporated some things I learned from other family members and friends, but my philosophy is, if I can’t improve it then I keep it the same.”
The funny thing is, Ouattara never planned to open a restaurant. As a child, she disliked cooking. “My mom wasn’t flexible, so I had to follow everything to a T,” she says. But when she came to the United States in 2010 to study marketing and finance at Portland State University, she missed the taste of home. She started cooking in her dorm, then began selling some of the food.
Now she has earned a dedicated following of people from all walks of life who crave the fiery and complexly spiced dishes she grew up with as much as she does. But in both creating and cornering the market for her native cuisine, she’s run into one major challenge. “It’s hard to find cooks who know what things are supposed to taste like,” she says.
Luckily, as food lovers around the city have learned, there’s no better ambassador for West Africa’s traditional foods than Ouattara. Two more cooks now help her meet the demand. “When I opened, I was worried about people not liking the food, like the fufu. But people love the fufu! I get goose bumps every single time I serve a dish and it comes back clean. It’s been two years and I should get used to it. But every time I’m surprised. It’s like, ‘Wow! They loved it!’ That’s a blessing.”