When Folake Adewole first moved to San José in 2017 to take a job as a travel nurse, there wasn’t a single Nigerian restaurant in the area. For the past 10 years, whenever she was craving beef suya or jollof rice, she had to drive up to Hayward — or, more likely, just cook it herself.
In March, Adewole finally decided to take things into her own hands: She opened FolaFela, a small Nigerian restaurant tucked into a strip mall in East San José. It’s the South Bay’s first proper brick-and-mortar Nigerian restaurant.
The shop has only a handful of tables, along with a mini African grocery store in the back. But the menu is surprisingly expansive, featuring dishes like gizz dodo (fried gizzards and plantains) and asun coconut rice. The main draw is the assortment of fourteen Nigerian soups, served with starchy dough balls known as swallows or okele. Already, the thick, complex soups have been a hit, drawing flocks of diners from as far away as Santa Cruz.
Adewole didn’t have any restaurant experience before opening FolaFela, but she has been selling Nigerian dishes since her youth. Growing up in the city of Ile-Ifẹ, in Nigeria’s Osun state, Adewole would help her mother prepare and sell ofada rice — a rice dish topped with a crayfish and pepper stew that now serves at the restaurant, using the same recipe. Soon after she settled in San José, she decided to fill the culinary void by making Nigerian plates to share with coworkers and friends from church. By 2021, she was catering for events with as many as 300 guests. So, after much encouragement from her customers, she decided to open the restaurant while still juggling her day job as a registered nurse at the Stanford hospital…