Our Story
Africa Kine Restaurant is a black-owned business that has been serving the residents and visitors of Harlem over the past years. We take pride in our West African dishes and customer service which puts a smile on all our customers' faces and makes them want to return. We can't wait to serve you.
"The restaurant was once named Africa, as if embracing an entire continent, when in fact the focus was on the cooking of the western coast, mainly Senegal.
Samba Niang and Kine (pronounced kee-nay) Mar, natives of Dakar, opened its doors two decades ago on the northern side of West 116th Street in Harlem — a strip that soon after became known as Le Petit Sénégal, in honor of the immigrants who brought French and billowing boubous (ankle-length tunic-gowns) to the neighborhood.
Eventually, the restaurant acquired the suffix Kine, after Ms. Mar, the chef. The space it occupied was small and humble, but in 2005 it turned grand, moving across the street and sprawling over two stories. Takeout was offered below, through a plexiglass shield that grew amber with the years. A stairway wound past carvings in illuminated niches to a dining room with faux-marble tabletops, booths and drapes swept back from yawning windows."
New York Times
In the Kitchen
Come early for chicken yassa, the meat exuding lemon under onions grown slack and sweating sugar, and lamb mafe, a stew creamy with peanut butter, elsewhere in town often too beholden to peanuts but here leavened by streaks of sweet and sour.
Suppa kandja, a rubble of okra asea in shining palm oil, stays true to okra’s natural texture, which in Western cultures is often obliterated; what others may call sliminess here lends a kind of buoyancy.
New York Times
