Ahmed Obo
⭑ Listen here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify ⭑
Today, I talk to beloved Santa Fe chef Ahmed Obo, owner of Jambo Cafe. His restaurant is a love song to his island home of Lamu off the coast of Kenya, and to the journey he’s been on since leaving Africa. He went from cooking wild-caught fish for tourists in the channels and inlets around the island to apprenticing under some great chefs in New York and New Mexico before finally opening Jambo in 2009.
But there’s more to the story he tells with his food than his own experience. He has an instinctual sense of history and how the flavors in a single bite can represent generations or even millennia of cultural evolution. His menu demonstrates an awareness of where the food he grew up with in Kenya comes from, but also how it has migrated away on the currents of time. Lamu is an ancient Swahili trading hub that welcomed merchants from the Middle East, India, and Asia, and later, became a favorite spot for European colonialists from Portugal and then England. Those same colonialists drove a brutal exodus from the continent, and that diaspora brought those flavors with them to other parts of the world like the Caribbean. Curries, spice blends, animal proteins, and cooking techniques share common ancestry, and chef Ahmed brings them all back together in a harmonious confluence of dishes on his menu at Jambo.
The hard work Ahmed has put in to realize his success has always been about helping others. Beyond working with a number of local nonprofits in Santa Fe, he founded the Jambo Kids Clinic back in Kenya, and uses the proceeds from Jambo Imports, a retail venture he started to partially fund it. If you’d like to help, you can go to jambokids.org/donate to make your show of support and help some families who need it.