The Damel brings wide variety of flavors to Oakland taproom
During the final minutes of a semifinal Copa America match between Brazil and Argentina, which Brazil won 20, an informal watch party coalesced at the bar of Oakland’s 25th Street Taproom. Beer and mixed drinks were downed amid plates of empanadas and dibi, an African dish of grilled meat, yassa sauce, rice and plantains.
The taproom at 2507 Broadway has regularly featured food and music with African influences, but it was always more of an afterthought since cocktails and dance parties are its primary moneymakers.
Last month, the business ceded control of its kitchen to The Damel, a restaurant that blends flavors from Brazil, Senegal and Argentina.
The 25th St. Taproom remains in business, but The Damel is essentially a permanent popup sprawled across the interior.
According to The Damel’s chefowner, Oumar Diouf, more than 200 people showed up to the restaurant’s opening lunch and dinner service. The raucous scene was fun, he said, but The Damel’s true spirit is more in line with the soccer game atmosphere: a handful of Oakland residents, many from African and Latin countries, bonding over food and drinks.
“For people that don’t get to travel, that don’t get to go out of the country, I think we give them a taste of the food and culture of those places they want to visit. We just do it right here in Oakland,” said Diouf, a native of Senegal who has lived in South America. “People out here want to know about other cultures, about the history of food. We give them that here.”
The Damel is a standalone restaurant, but it also functions as an extension of Diouf ’s catering company of the same name, which he opened nearly a year and a half ago in Oakland. The catering business was working out of commissary kitchens, so moving into the taproom on Broadway added stability, Diouf said. Plus, he can now tweak his menu that already boasts around 20 varieties of empanadas.
The restaurant has only a fraction of the catering side’s menu, Diouf said, but that could change. For now, it offers the empanadas filled with halal ground beef, lamb, tuna, shrimp, chicken and a house curry. Dibi with grilled lamb or chicken also is on the opening menu.
In the last year or so, Oakland’s Africaninfluenced dining scene has grown.
Marco Senghor, the owner of Bissap Baobab, reopened his Oakland outpost recently. Nigel Jones, the chef behind Jamaican spot Kingston 11, has a new venture in the works that will bring together Persian, Malaysian and Caribbean flavors. Simileoluwa Adebajo, the owner of San Francisco’s only Nigerian restaurant Eko Kitchen, is toying with the idea of an outpost in the East Bay.
“That’s the thing with these kinds of places, we might be similar in some ways but we all have different stories to tell. It isn’t just about the food at our businesses,” Diouf said. “I want to one day be able to bring this type of experience to as many places as I can.”