This groundbreaking Nigerian taqueria is opening near downtown Sacramento next week

Head five minutes north of Rasheed Amedu’s new restaurant in Mansion Flats, and you’ll be surrounded by some of Sacramento’s best taquerias. Five minutes south gets you to downtown’s bright lights and rapid development.

Land precisely at 628 15th St., though, and you’ll find something unique in the Sacramento region. In fact, Amedu hasn’t found anything like it across the entire United States.

Amedu, 32, will blend his Nigerian roots with Cali-Mex classics when he opens his open-air temporary restaurant Naija Boy Tacos around July 22. The love child of a Lagos street market and Los Angeles taco truck, it will be the grid’s only African restaurant and the teaser for a higher-end concept Amedu plans to eventually open in that space.

“Right now there really aren’t that many Black-owned concepts that are on the grid or downtown,” Amedu said. “The fact that we’re able to be where we are in a super up-and-coming neighborhood … is really big for me.”

A former Urban Roots Brewery & Smokehouse sous chef, Amedu will deploy familiar Mexican dishes like tacos and tostadas as vessels for Nigerian dishes new to many customers.

Instead of serving Nigerian chicken-tomato stew over rice or pounded yam called fufu, he will wrap it in plantain-cassava tortillas as a take on pollo asado tacos.

Chicken milanesa will be coated in a housemade spice mix normally reserved for West African skewered meat called suya — seasonal veggies will get the same treatment, too— and be served alongside a mole verde made not with pepitas but with egusi, a nutty melon seed usually made into a stew by the same name.

Past pop-ups and soft openings already have Sacramento food lovers buzzing about Amedu’s groundbreaking concept, but they’ll need to move relatively quickly once it opens.

Naija Boy — “Naija” is slang for Nigerian — can only be open in its current location for about a year before construction begins on a 26 lease-to-own apartment units. Amedu then plans to open a Cali-Nigerian restaurant called Iya-Mi (Yoruba for “my mother”) on the ground floor, and work on finding a new home for Naija Boy.

“A lot of the dishes and stuff that will go on the tortillas (are) pretty traditional, so we’re getting people introduced with the flavor profiles, that this is specifically Nigerian cooking, and then leading them into the brick-and-mortar,” Amedu said. “We’re getting people introduced so that when we get to the next concept, they already have a point of reference and it’s not that much of a stretch to them.”

Pop-up practice

Amedu was born around Chicago. His parents are Nigerian. Amedu began his culinary career in Kentucky and moved to Sacramento with an ex-partner in 2016. He cooked at Kru Contemporary Japanese Cuisine and The Jungle Bird before taking over as sous chef at TableVine, a New American wine bar and kitchen across from the Capitol.

Amedu and his ex-partner also launched a pop-up called Frankly916, and TableVine gave them a space and platform to host cross-cultural dinners — a seven-course Chinese menu, for example, or a “Taste of the Midwest” featuring regional dishes on which the chef grew up.

Beer dinners with Rancho Cordova’s Fort Rock Brewing followed, but when Amedu and his ex-partner separated shortly thereafter, he had to find a new concept.

Amedu landed at Urban Roots after eight months at Origami Asian Grill, but couldn’t initially muster a passion for the Southside Park restaurant and brewery’s flagship barbecue. He dug into the history of Southern food, though, and discovered just how pervasive slavery’s influence was on the regional cuisine — and how West African natives came to shape dishes such as fried catfish or red beans and rice.

“Southern food is African by its roots, from benne seeds to jambalaya to anything else. Those dishes and products are rooted in West African culture and cuisine,” Amedu said. “Those slaves that came to the U.S. were from Cameroon, Nigeria, Benin, Ghana. If you work backwards, you see the connection.”

Amedu began experimenting with merging traditional West African and contemporary American flavors, first through a pop-up called Lododo Chophouse (Lododo translates to “frankly” in Yoruba) in 2020 and then Naija Boy Tacos.

Customers who stopped by The Snug cocktail lounge, Bottle & Barlow or midtown wine bar Ro Sham Beaux on a Naija Boy day got early tastes of obe ata (Nigerian red pepper sauce) or ewa riro (stewed beans).

Amedu was training himself as well as his audience. Early dishes like breakfast crunch wraps with ewa riro had hints of African influence, but his audience wanted more.

“(When it was) 80% tradition and 20% innovation, I think people were really stoked on that because it (was) something they didn’t know,” Amedu said. “People want more of the authentic stuff. They want stuff where it is completely different and they don’t necessarily know what the flavor profile is, per se.”

Future plans

The debut menu will be split into two categories: shareable plates and tacos. Shareables include Jamaican-style patties, plantain chips with chimichurri and a hybrid bowl somewhere between the Mexican meatball soup albondigas and Nigerian green pepper stew called ayamase.

The four taco options include stewed chicken or beef on those aforementioned plantain-cassava tortillas, as well as a mushroom shawarma with habanero-spiced toum (a Lebanese garlic spread) in a flour-based wrap. Sticky buns inspired by the West African peanut snack kuli-kuli and glazed with a Mexican cane sugar called piloncillo make for the lone opening dessert.

Beer will come from local producers such as Urban Roots or East Sacramento’s Porchlight Brewing, and California wines will be available as well. Amedu hopes to connect with a few West African alcohol producers and pick up inspiration for Iya-Mi’s full bar on a trip to Nigeria this winter, his first since the age of seven or eight.

The casual taco concept will expose non-Africans to new flavors, but Iya-Mi will have “way more Nigerian influence than Naija Boy (has) right now,” Amedu said. There’ll be family-style dishes such as whole fish, and more seasonal menu changes than Naija Boy, which Amedu said is “at heart, a taqueria or taco truck.”

Fusion dishes at Iya-Mi will include a riff on xiaolongbao, or Shanghai-style soup dumplings, filled in this case with clarified West African pepper soup, chives and Southeast Asian catfish called basa. Amedu is planning to coat fried chicken in a honey-suya glaze and serve it on agege bread, a soft, dense loaf similar to Japanese milk bread.

But Amedu also wants to present quintessential Nigerian dishes such as egusi stew or fufu traditionally at Iya-Mi, without influence from other cuisines.

Naija Boy’s space is expressly Nigerian, from the corrugated metal roofing to green-and-white external wall to the Afropop bumping from the speakers. That’s partially the result of intentionally working with Black creators such as Roshaun Davis of Unseen Heroes, an Oak Park-based event management company that oversaw Naija Boy’s design and marketing.

The Sacramento region has slowly added more Black-owned restaurants in the two years since protests over George Floyd’s murder brought heightened awareness to the U.S.’ various racial discrepancies. That movement inspired Naija Boy co-owner John Vignocci, the CEO of local development firm Urban Capital, to seek a Black restaurateur and business partner for the ground-level space below his planned 26-unit apartment building at 15th and G streets.

By all accounts, only one other Sacramento-area restaurant, Palace Food Services in Arden Arcade, consistently lists Nigerian dishes such as jollof rice on a menu that spans the African diaspora. A handful of other African restaurants such as Queen Sheba, Chulla’s Cafe and Abyssinia Ethiopian Restaurant have dishes from across the continent but don’t focus on West African cuisine.

Naija Boy isn’t just a new restaurant, Davis said. It’s a cultural flag-bearer.

“When it comes down to African culture or Black culture, we have so much to offer in the way of food, tradition, design (and) creativity that we want to share. And a lot of times, we’re not given those spaces or able to access those spaces to actually put those things on display,” Davis said. “It’s not just, ‘oh, it’s a cool place.’ It’s actually solving a problem we have in the city (at) a very high level, but in a very grassroots way.”

Naija Boy at 628 15th St. will be open 5-9 p.m. Thursday through Sunday. For information: naijaboytacos.com; ( 916) 296-4526.

This story was originally published July 15, 2022 at 5:00 AM.