In this episode of the Extra Spicy podcast, Simileoluwa Adebajo, owner of Eko Kitchen in San Francisco, talks to presenters Soleil Ho and Justin Phillips just hours after their place to eat burned down in a main fire. She remains convinced that she can rebuild the city’s first place to eat in Nigeria and has introduced a GoFundMe into her business and several others who lost assets in the fire. He also talks about the functionality of black-owned places to eat through whites amid the burgeoning Black Lives Matter movement.
Listen to the episode by clicking on the player above and scroll down to read a transcript of Sun and Justin’s full verbal exchange with Simileoluwa.
Here’s a full transcript of The Sun Ho and Justin Phillip’s interview with Simileoluwa Adebajo, edited and condensed for clarity. The interview was conducted on July 28, 2020.
Sun: Let the big elephant out of the room. Tell us what happened today. Tell us how your day went. So my day started as usual, unless I woke up late this morning, so I rushed to paint because I intended to deliver the food that passes to a homeless place this morning. So I run to my restaurant, or our catering commissioner on 14th Street, and I see smoke coming out of that direction. But I had never expected in my brain that it was the kitchen that came here. So I was walking and I posted this on Twitter, telling other people to be careful because the city center is a little more smoke-filled.
And then I get close enough to see where the smoke is coming from and realize it’s coming from my commissioner.
They had locked the entire perimeter of the block, so they didn’t even need me to move in first, and I had to convince one of the firefighters that, “Okay, my business is there. I just need to make sure everything’s okay. They let me through. That’s when I saw that it was literally burning on the floor.
Sun: Wow. I wouldn’t even know what to do right now. Yes. I was very, very confused. I really sat there for at least an hour, going out to control the flames, but I learned at one point that watching this position burn on the floor wouldn’t improve my intellectual aptitude either, so I left. Justin: One of the hot things you said before you started recording was that your first leadership wasn’t the one you were wasting at the time, was it? The only thing I’m looking to think about is the fact that, although it’s my life, there are billions of other people in the world and their lives matter too. So I came over with thinking, “I just hope no one gets hurt in this situation.” So I’m grateful that’s the case. Sun: I mean, it might be a lot worse, right? Yes, it may be. Justin: Tell us what this area was, because it wasn’t the area where Eko Kitchen opened. What was it for you? Yes, it was 14th Street where my business started. When Eko Kitchen was introduced in the summer of 2018, we were just a delivery company. We were delivering to UberEats and Postmates from this 14th Street location. And that’s where my business was born and we moved to the 11th Street food stand, a year after the company started on 14th Street. This week we were returning to the location of 14th Street because the dining area was not used literally. Because of COVID, no one can just dine there. So I took the commercial resolution that we didn’t have to keep paying rent for this food court because, technically, other people may not stay there.
So this week we had moved the maximum of our stock and dining appliances to this space on 14th Street, so we lost about 80% of our stock of our appliances in the fireplace because of that.
But I don’t think it’s too big an obstacle. I feel like we’re going to go beyond that. Justin: So Simileoluwa, you moved here in 2016, didn’t you? Yes, I moved here in 2016. Justin: So now you work with a nonprofit that serves the city’s needy communities. Yes. Justin: I wonder, have you been surprised by the magnitude of the desires in this city since you’ve been here? I feel like it’s a surprise. It was a surprise to me when I moved here. Yes. So it was a big surprise for me to move to San Francisco and see the kind of poverty that prevailed here. It turns out to me that when you come from a country like Nigeria, it is clear that you have experienced poverty and needs on a giant scale. But there is something in Nigeria where there is a network and therefore other people are never in destitution, if that makes sense.
When I moved to San Francisco and saw other people who are deficient and literally homeless and begrity on the street, I feel like my first two months here, used to give my cash to each and every homeless user I saw, pay attention to each and the story of each, consult to help that user and verify how I can talk to her. And over time, I learned that other people here fit so insensitive to that. Because you’ve lived here for so long, you’re just saying, “Oh, yes, there are other homeless people here.” That’s a component of the problem. People even asked me, “Oh, you’re from Nigeria, but you seem deficient before. Haven’t you noticed? And I say, “Yes.” But I’ve never noticed other people literally helpless about not even having a meal to eat in a day. They don’t have a roof over their head. They’re on the street, hungry. They don’t have a bathroom to use. Public baths are a human right, but one way or another, in San Francisco, we don’t have one for the homeless.
And then I felt that one way or another, being so hooked and aware of the need for netpaintings was also what led me to this opportunity to paint with this nonprofit, because if I wasn’t even mentally aware that it was such a massive problem, I wouldn’t even have known that this nonprofit was going to start or exist. So I guess the conscience went hand in hand with the current scenario of my business. Yes, I think what you’re saying is very attractive because in the United States, I grew up here in New York and our attitude toward other people living in poverty is very bad. We blame them in a giant component for the strait in which they are located. And I’d like to know more about the kind of Nigerian attitude towards the deficient. How do other people act? One thing I will say is that yes, there is definitely poverty in Nigeria. But one of the most productive examples would be that of other people who don’t even have housing, that’s barely seen in Nigeria because they see how those slums are going to build them with wooden boards or bamboo shoots or whatever. Possibly it would be like a 200 square foot design they built and 11 other people live within that design. They prefer to regroup, you know, as an intern of their limited resources and assistance to everyone else you think, that user who sleeps here under the bridge and that user who sleeps in a door. Even among the homeless and the deficient in Nigeria, they see the net paintings, and I don’t know why it’s in america where he sees many other homeless people here.
And there’s the intellectual disease factor, which is not a massive problem, I would say, with poverty in Nigeria, but with San Francisco. That’s the main underlying factor. It also leads us to perceive that the people have to worry in many of these cases, because they cannot leave the stage where they find themselves because they simply do not have the intellectual solidity to do so.
Justin: I knew a fact about the Bay Area before I moved here, and it was that other black people weren’t literally here. And over the years, they had moved, unsubscribed or for any reason. But if you walk through parts of the city, most homeless people will see black. I’m very surprised. And I say it all the time. Most of the time, I feel like the only black woman living in San Francisco. I get on the bus and everyone on the bus avoids the seat next to me. I walk into a store that even looks very expensive and suddenly the attendees stick to you. You have all those conditions and you think, “Okay, there’s really other black people in this town.” And that brings me to some other factor raised through the nonprofit and that I communicate with them all the time. The RFQ-885 is therefore a program of the people of San Francisco that is intended to feed the elderly, so there are many older people who cannot leave the house at the moment because of the coronavirus. But they want food. Now, the qualifications for this program are that you can’t be in any other government-approved food aid program, and the condition at the moment is that you can’t live in a multigenerational home.
Yes. And about: the Black Lives Matter motionArray movement … My opinion with BLM is that I don’t like to communicate too much because I feel that my delight as a Nigerian American is very different from the delight that even an African-American had in America. But also, I will speak to the extent that I am a black woman and every time other people from other backgrounds look at me, other people from other racial teams look at me, they don’t see an American Nigerian. They’re just seeing a black woman. And that’s why I’m also very profiled on that basis. And it’s boring, especially since I grew up and lived most of my adult life in Nigeria. So my identity was a woman before I was black. So going back to America as an adult, all of a sudden, I have to use the “Person of the Black Woman.” And black women have been, you know, stereotyped in this corner of the force. And the black woman is angry and the black woman is such ridiculous stereotypes. Everybody’s another. We’re all other people. And then they put us in that box because of the concepts that the rest of the country has or that other people have about other black people in general.
I who at the beginning of the total BLM movement, around Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, was running alone. It wasn’t long after Ahmad Aubrey was shot and a car stopped next to me while I was running. And I literally like running through the bushes. I was so excited because I’d seen this video and I saw this man.
Maybe that user who prevents me doesn’t hurt me. But I learned that this is how African-Americans literally live every day, feeling like a goal on their backs. And that’s unacceptable.
As a country and as a people, we will have to do more not to stereotype, profile and unwrap just because of the color of our skin. It’s not fair and we don’t deserve it anymore.
Sun: In that sense, I’m curious to know what you think of your company’s visibility as a black-owned company in components in this context. What is this? Or is that component of your marketing right now?
I’d say it’s a component of my marketing. But also infrequently I feel that if I had had another side of my business, I probably would have been more successful. Sun: So like you’re a white kid promoting Nigerian food? Exactly. one hundred percent. I’ve been thinking about that before, too. Like, maybe I can just love, disappear and give the impression that a white man bought my business and see what happens. (laughs) Yes, I’ve been thinking about it. Even when it comes to access to capital, when it comes to business expansion, when it comes to accessing resources and a network of mentors, black and minority-owned companies infrequently don’t get the resources they deserve. even though I feel, yes, maybe having another side of my business would have taken me in another monetary direction, being a black-owned company in this city actually struck me about the fact that there are enough blacks. property through corporations in San Francisco. There is a sense that the black network has been cordoned off in some domains. I recently discovered Bay Shore and Bayview and this massive block of what san Francisco projects are intended to be. And that there are thousands of other black people living in this city, however, they are cordoned off in a domain of the city. And that tells you something about San Francisco and how the city values diversity. But yes, it’s interesting.
And I’m satisfied to be also a bit like a landmark and a beacon of light. Over the past six months, there have been so many African-American women in this city who sent me a message or an email saying, “I saw your place to eat. And he encouraged me to start sharing food with my netpaintings and selling food out of my house. And it’s enough for me for someone to see me and give them enough courage to start with because there are more opportunities and more avenues for minority and black businesses in San Francisco. Justin: What are your next steps to the place to eat and what you have in San Francisco. So, for my next steps with the place to eat is to continue to focus mainly on netpaintings, I will continue to paint with the San Francisco New Deal on this project. I think it is vital that we continue to feed these vulnerable populations because lack of confidence in food was a challenge before the pandemic. But now that the pandemic has hit, there are many more people who need food, so it is vital that we continue our project and that this project is still funded.
Right now, the New Deal in San Francisco is running out of personal budget at first. We had an initial endowment that was granted through some generation CEOs who are clearly interested in donating to the city, and we are running out of budget. And the specific budget was the budget that we can feed to black network paints because government investment has disqualified them based on all obstacles and requirements. So I’m going to continue to paint with them to prepare food and raise money for them so that we can continue to feed the black net paintings and focus more on that, as opposed to my same usual dining activities, because I’m learning that there’s more commercial progress for me anyway.
In addition to this, I will also launch a new outdoor business in San Francisco over the next two months, which also refers to Nigeria and the origins of my home. It will be a biological skin and hair care company for everyone, but with ingredients and things that will come directly from the earth to feed. I’m excited about the future, despite what President Justin says: there’s nothing more daunting than loving Target or anything to buy a particular lotion or hair product for black hair and black skin, and not being able to locate anything. Not because he’s exhausted, but right away because they don’t have it. Yes. Yes. Especially in San Francisco. When I moved here, I found out there was no black hair care store in San Francisco. There is a shop in Fillmore that sells black hair care products, but belongs to an Asian couple. I hope that with this new company, you can bring black hair and skin care to this city in a way that we have our own area for it. Sun: So, do you already have a call for this hair care company for skin care? yes, it’s going to be called Ori. And I prayed in the Yoruba language, which is my local language, means shea yetter. Yes, I’m excited. Sun: I guess the last question would be if there are listeners who need to help their pictures or help you in any way, what do they deserve? Where would you draw them? Therefore, if you would like to help us, please visit the SF New Deal website. You can donate to this organization to help us continue to feed the black community.
We will probably also set up a GoFundMe for my company and the other 3 or 4 companies that have been affected by the fire. And you can donate us to get our stuff back. That would be great.
Justin: Well, great. Yes, it’s fun. Thanks for doing that. Yes, it’s great. I’m glad I did.