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The Bay Area’s First Tanzanian Restaurant Takes Root in West Oakland

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A curry rice bowl topped with beef, greens and beans.
Swahili Spot is bringing traditional Tanzanian curries — like this beef curry bowl — to a small storefront in West Oakland. (Luke Tsai/KQED)

Ever since Priscilla Mkenda immigrated to the Bay Area in the late ’90s, she wondered why there wasn’t a single restaurant here that served Tanzanian food — the rich curries and flaky chapati flatbreads of her native country. “I think there is big potential,” she’d tell herself over the home-cooked meals that she prepared for her friends and family.

As was the case for many aspiring food entrepreneurs, 2020’s pandemic shutdown finally prompted Mkenda to do something about it — to start her very own Tanzanian pop-up near Lake Merritt in Oakland, first with friends she met at an African dance class and then by herself. Eventually, she parlayed the business into a food truck. Then, last spring, she took another step and signed the lease on a commercial kitchen and takeout restaurant in West Oakland. She called it Swahili Spot.

It was in this small storefront with Swahili food words (“kuku” for chicken, “mzuzu” for plantain) handwritten on the walls, that I got my first taste of homestyle Tanzanian beef curry over coconut rice and the dense, lightly sweetened rice cakes known as vitumbua.

Exterior of a restaurant with a sign for "Swahili Spot" in green lettering overhead.
The restaurant opened on Peralta Street in the spring of 2023. (Luke Tsai/KQED)

Mkenda, who grew up in Tanzania and Uganda and moved to the Bay Area for university in 1999, says all of her food is born out of nostalgia. “My menu is a history, actually,” she says. It’s exactly what I grew up eating back home.” Her signature beef and chicken curry bowls are recreations of what she ate at boarding school as a kid — they’re staples of the cuisine that anyone who’s ever visited Tanzania would have eaten.

The beef curry I tried was surprisingly light — “it’s not spicy-hot, it’s spicy with flavor,” as Mkenda puts it. Instead of the heavy bass line of cumin and coriander that you might get with an Indian curry or even a Japanese curry, Swahili Spot’s curry has the brighter, more mellow flavor notes that you get from the addition of cinnamon and cloves. The beef itself was tender and flavorful, but it was almost more of a side dish. The most delicious thing in the bowl was a big pile of savory sautéed kale.

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“My intention is healthy eating,” Mkenda says, noting that the curry bowls consist of about two ounces of meat, two ounces of beans and probably three ounces of greens, plus a couple slices of fried plantain on top as a crowning touch.

A hand holding a well-browned, oval-shaped rice cake against a blue background.
Vitumbua rice cakes are a popular breakfast street food in Tanzania. (Luke Tsai/KQED)

The rest of the menu covers the whole gamut of traditional Tanzanian dishes. There are vitumbua rice pancakes — a popular breakfast street food — which are like dense, chewy balls of slightly gingery rice pudding. There’s chips mayai, or “zege,” which is essentially a French fry omelet, similar to a Spanish tortilla. And, for heartier eaters, Mkenda fries whole fish and serves it with ugali — the traditional Tanzanian cornmeal dough — on the side.

Now is as good a time as any to check Swahili Spot out: As part of this year’s Oakland Restaurant Week promotion, from March 14–24, the restaurant is selling its entire menu of curry bowls and lunch plates for a slightly discounted rate.

Not content to run a single takeout restaurant, Mkenda’s hope is to eventually launch additional branches of Swahili Spot all across California. Her long-term goal? To open a fancy sit-down restaurant that’ll really put Tanzanian food on the map here in the Bay.

“Cooking is my passion. Cooking is my therapy, actually,” Mkenda says. “Whenever I’m idle or bored, that is my go-to place.”

Beef curry bowl loaded with beans and greens.
Another view of the beef curry bowl, which is subtly spiced with cinnamon and cloves. (Luke Tsai/KQED)

Swahili Spot is open Friday to Sunday, 11 a.m.–5 p.m. at 1327 Peralta St. in Oakland.

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