Ambition, passion for food on menu
Pandemic-born Keobi offers focus on Nigerian cuisine
Should anyone open the Capital Region’s first exclusively Nigerian restaurant, it surely would be Kelechi Nwagboso. Born in Nigeria and a resident of several regions of the country, she moved to America a decade ago to join her husband, Obinna Nwagboso, a chemical engineer, who seven years earlier had come to the Bronx before settling in Selkirk. When Nwagboso first came to the U.S., opening a Nigerian restaurant never crossed her mind, but she has never hesitated to be the first in line to try something new.
“One thing I like about myself is my confidence,” she said. “I’ve always been out there doing things for the first time, so why not open the first African restaurant?” The result is Keobi, her Nigerian-focused restaurant on Lark Street in Albany. It opened in early April last year, just weeks after the state ordered restaurants to offer only takeout.
Nwagboso said she considers herself a pioneer in many facets of life. She was among the earliest of graduates of the first high school in her hometown in Nigeria and the first in her family to hold positions of influence in her chosen careers. She is her family’s eldest daughter and started cooking for them and assisting her mother, who ran the cafeteria at a local cement factory, when she was 8 years old.
“I was quick to learn, and ... in Nigeria the first daughter has the most responsibility,” she said. After high school, Nwagboso became a nurse before transitioning to a career as flight attendant. Her medical knowledge made her a valuable part of her flight crew, and she became an elite service attendant, working in first class.
“That job exposed me more to the customer service aspect of the (restaurant) business. One of the things that helped me in terms of presentation was my flight attendant job,” Nwagboso said. She was able to travel throughout Africa and into the Middle East for work, sampling local food whenever she could. None of it compared to the complex flavors of Nigeria.
“I always carried my spices in my crew bag,” she said. “Nigerians love their spice.”
Nwagboso went back into nursing when she moved to the U.S. and worked in senior
“Most people don’t take this risk, because it’s the fear of knowing if it’s going to work.”
— Kelechi Nwagboso
living homes in the Capital Region and with individuals with disabilities through Living Resources. She would cook jollof rice, stewed goat, pepper sauces (called “soups”), plantain porridge and other Nigerian and West African specialties for local friends, earning acclaim from enraptured eaters that fostered the idea of sharing her food with paying customers.
“I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I knew if I put my mind to it, I would do well,” Nwagboso said. She and Obinna began looking for a restaurant space in 2018 but had difficulty obtaining financing through a bank, despite having money saved for a down payment on a building. In early 2020, the Nwagbosos decided to lease a space as a starting point for future goals. They signed the contract for the space, at 189 Lark, which formerly housed restaurants including the Slavonian cafe My Dacha. Nwagboso was pregnant at the time with her fourth child, and shortly after taking control of the space, the COVID-19 pandemic jeopardized their hopes of running a restaurant.
“If we back out, then the vision is crashing, so let’s make a bold decision and just push ahead. I’ve gone too far to go back,” Nwagboso said of her mindset in that moment.
Keobi, a portmanteau of the Nwagbosos’ first names, focuses on traditional Nigerian foods like fufu, a soft dough made of hot water and ground legumes, corn flour or rice, which is ripped apart with the fingers and used to sop up sauces and gather pieces of meat and rice, like an edible utensil; and Kos ’n’ Do, a fried platter of golden beans and African yams. Nwagboso strives to merge authentic flavors of her Nigerian Igbo heritage with the visually appealing finesse she learned working for airlines.
Those flavors reflect the meta-ethnicities present in Nigeria, including the Hausa and Yoruba cultures that are also part of Nwagboso's story. Spices including uziza leaves and ehuru, otherwise known as African nutmeg, are shipped from Nigeria. Curry powder is prominent in the recipes and harkens to the long history of British colonialism that introduced flavors into Nigerian cooking from other colonized regions.
Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa, gaining its independence in 1960 after centuries of European rule and slave entrapment. It is estimated that 3.5 million of the 12.5 million enslaved Africans transported to American soil were captured from Nigeria. The legacy of Nigerian culinary practices ripple through Black communities, as food traditionally thought of part of Black culture in America is built on the foundational techniques of West African cooking. Flavors and ideas from Nigeria can be found in the ways a soul food or Caribbean restaurant prepares rice and beans or stewed greens, among other dishes.
Still, while enclaves of West African cuisine in New York City and throughout Georgia and Texas readily embrace unfiltered and explicit Nigerian recipes, Keobi is the first Nigerian-focused restaurant in the Capital Region.
Russell Dymond, who moved to Albany from New York City five years ago, comes to Keobi once a week for peanut butter soup and couscous.
“It’s something different,” he said. “It’s all the different spices. There is so much flavor.” He thinks people are hesitant to try a Nigerian restaurant because it differs from food they have experienced before, but once they have their first sampling, similarities become more obvious and give Nigerian food deep familiarity.
“White people should be open to that, too,” Dymond said.
Nwagboso said that while she has a diverse clientele, “Opening the restaurant made me realize there are a lot of (people from West Africa) out there.”
For some, the moment their lineage traversed the Atlantic by force or by choice goes back generations, while others are like the Nwagboso children: first-generation Americans with feet in two worlds, bridging the gap between assimilation and traditions of their parents’ homeland.
“The funny thing is, my kids don’t even like rice,” Nwagboso said. Rice is a staple of Nigerian cooking, presented simply as a white-rice accouterment to complex cornerstones of West African culinary vernacular, like jollof, a rice dish made with tomatoes, onions and spices, or “party rice,” a vat of rice where browned bits of flavors caramelize and crust on the bottom of the pot for an explosive textural and sensory experience. When the Nwagboso children tell their mother that schoolmates do not understand their Nigerian food, she responds, “How are they going to know it if you don’t tell them?”
Nwagboso applies this same idea to people who walk into her restaurant for the first time. She happily explains the process and ingredients behind each of her recipes. She cooks food intrinsic to her lived experience in Nigeria, but presents it in a way that nods to detail and haute cuisine. She wants to open a Nigerian-focused fine-dining restaurant to showcase the elegance of West African food and to expand the Keobi brand with multiple locations. She hopes to open other businesses as well, including an Afrocentric interior design studio.
The entrepreneurial spirit resonates deep with Nwagboso, and she knows that is a large contributing factor to why her family is the first in the area to venture into specific regional food from continental Africa.
“Most people don’t take this risk, because it’s the fear of knowing if it’s going to work,” she said. It is a risk she is happy to take for her own personal fulfillment, both to promote Nigerian cuisine and to weave moments of connection among the African diaspora in America.