Café Kilimanjaro   

Welcome to Cafe Kilimanjaro, offering a unique experience of cuisines of the African World, including food and music from diverse regions of the African Continent itself, as well as tastes and sounds created by African people in the Caribbean and the United States.

On our logo you see Mount Kilimanjaro, symbolizing the great diversity of environments and peoples which have created the distinctive tastes of Africa over thousands of years. The mountain rises from the tropical plains of Kenya and Tanzania, cradle of the human race itself. Climbing towards its snow-capped peak, the traveler encounters a variety of eco-zones, each of which is represented somewhere in the African World.

Like the mountain, African cooking is rooted in the tropics, with characteristic combinations of cool, sweet fruits and fresh vegetables well-seasoned with pungent aromatic spices. Generations of cooks have created wonderful concoctions featured foods like yams, ginger, cloves, hot peppers, mangos, teff, millets, corn and plantains. But African cooks also practice their art in semi-tropical or even temperate climates, both in the cast Continent itself, and in the Americas.

The cooks of Africa have incorporated foods and cooking techniques from neighbors and those linked to them by commerce, religion, or politics. In East Africa this means Indian influence, including delicious curries; in South Africa it includes Dutch influences baked goods, puddings and roasts. In the North, Arab, Islamic and Mediterranean ties have inspired a rich mix of dishes that feature dates, wheat, lamb and olives. In West Africa, influences from Europe and the Americas have left their mark.

The African-descended cooks of the Americas have created a myriad of different dishes arising from the environments and circumstances of this side of the Atlantic Ocean. In the Caribbean and Latin America, African peppers met native American beans and corn. In the souther United States African black-eyed peas teamed up with rice and pepper to become 'hopping john,' while greens of all kinds were stewed with ends of meat and spices, and okra lent itself to the creole 'gumbos' of Louisiana.

The results are as delicious as they are diverse. So, relax and enjoy a culinary African tour!