Hidden gem Lilly’s Corner brings Senegalese soul
West African food rarely seen in Hampton Roads
Lilly’s Corner isn’t just a place you’ll blink and miss. There’s a pretty good chance you’ve never even been on its street.
But tucked away on a Military Circle side street at 930 Briar Hill Road, behind a fourpump Citgo station and next to a small convenience store, sits the only Senegalese restaurant for hundreds of miles.
Lilly’s isn’t much more than a counter and a few tables — with tattered decor that doesn’t always invite you to stay — but the food at Lilly and Massamba Ndoye’s tiny restaurant is delicious. The grilled fish and lamb and peanut butter stews, in particular, are the stuff of pure soul.
This shouldn’t be a surprise. While the
North African cuisines of Morocco and Ethiopia tend to turn up much more often in America, the food of West Africa is one of the main fonts of Southern and soul food.
To create a distinctly American food tradition, the flavors and spice (and rice, quite frankly) of West African cooking were mixed in with English fare by slaves who cooked on Southern plantations.
Portsmouth’s Umoja Festival this weekend, running through Sunday at Union Bank & Trust Pavilion, celebrates African heritage in Hampton Roads — and so it made sense to stop by what may be the region’s only restaurant wholly devoted to West African flavors.
(Jamaican restaurant Jam Cafe, at 5347 Lila Lane in Virginia Beach, also serves Liberian dishes such as an intense and bitter cassava rice dish.)
The restaurant sprang simply from the couple’s love of cooking, says Lilly Ndoye. The two came to Norfolk via the U.S. Navy, where Massamba still works as a culinary specialist.
The love shows in the fish yassa, a whole tilapia that must be marinated for two days in lemon juice, vinegar, salt, pepper and spices before hitting the grill. The sauce is garlic rich and onion-based, made with what Ndoye calls “all the peppers”: green and red and habanero.
The result is citric, garlicky, peppery and lightly charred, tender under the fish’s neck and slipping gently off the many, many bones. If one Vietnamese-born taster in our office found it a bit salty for his taste — and there’s certainly some salt there — southern palates found it unendingly delectable, even better with an extra squirt of lime to balance the salt. It’s served with two separate grilled onion sides and simple rice.
“I don’t normally eat tilapia,” said one regular customer during a recent visit. “But I eat it here.”
That same yassa dish is also prepared with grilled chicken, with slightly different spices and a bit less salt, and the result is similar: charred