It is beautiful and tasty. I didn't see any celebrities during my evening at Joloff, but no matter. Even when my favorite Malian singer, Salif Keita, was popped into the CD player, I hunkered down and ate, paying little attention to my surroundings. The real star at Jollof is the food. Jessie Graham lives in Brooklyn.
Food is important in Senegal.
In the village where I worked on a health education program and lived with a family of modest means, meals meant much more than food. For the women, they meant work. Every morning, I woke to the sound of prayer over the loudspeaker in the village mosque and the steady beat of women pounding millet. It isn't easy to be a vegetarian in Senegal, where meat is often linked to social status. Occasionally, they would kill a chicken and they would often have fish for lunch, but for the most part, we were all kept healthy, even during rough times, with a steady diet of millet couscous, rice, cow's milk, and hearty bean and vegetable stews.