Tomorrow, I’ll Be At The Table: Community and Commensality in Black Foodways and Restaurants

5 hours ago
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Our eyes dominate our immediate experience of the world; the image abounds and captures, flattens into gaze, essentializes (1). But taste and smell dominate our memories, and perhaps our reasoning capacities—we follow our noses, sniffing out clues in imitation of dog detectives, much more than we interpret through signs and symbols. Taste characterizes colonial (and post-colonial) economies and literatures: consumptive desires guide atrocities, extraction, the slave trade, and subsequent hungers and famines the world over (2). Home can be a smell more than a sight; our mothers and grandmothers make recipes that waft over islands, down (a)isles, odorously, gustatorily, and satiatingly calling us back to ourselves. By a similar token our restaurants, when done right, restore us (restaurant: from the French, restorer, to 'provide meat for', or to 'restore to a former state'). Originally a term for a broth dish served in a small establishment founded by Mathurin Roze de Chantoiseau in Paris (3), the popularity of eateries outside of the home changed the term’s significance to refer to where meals were served; the French Revolution accelerated restaurants’ growth (4), bringing proletarian and agrarian denizens into the city and relieving potential chefs and boulangers of both restrictive guild requirements and their posts in castles and palaces, spurring small business ownership and service to the public. This history is not bounded by France’s geography; small eateries abounded in ancient Rome (5), serving patrons who could not cook in small homes lacking kitchens. In China and Japan, too, a boom in urban populations led to cultures around eating out that celebrated place or reminded travelers of dishes from home (6).

It is no coincidence that many of the businesses named across Boston’s working class communities of color as businesses we need and love are restaurants, with many more in the broader food economy, providing patrons with pathways to replenish, remember, and restore. This catalog of economic desire and necessity emerged through participatory processes: neighborhood assemblies (along Blue Hill Avenue, in Fields Corner, Roxbury, and Mattapan) and surveys welcomed voices from often-underrepresented city residents, whose contributions resolutely clarify the importance of restaurants as community anchors. Conversely, food restriction is but one of many technologies of control for our communities. Whether through zoning that limits access to groceries and creates a food apartheid in Black and working-class neighborhoods, or through restricting access to culturally-appropriate or nutrition-sufficient foods to incarcerated communities on the inside (through abhorrent commissary pricing, dehumanizing food service, and refusal of choices), our food sovereignty is threatened. Food businesses, especially Black-owned, face steep challenges; writer Devra First recently published an article in the Boston Globe grieving the closure of restaurants across the city, articulating what Boston residents already know: without our restaurants, we lose the taste of the city itself. “It won’t feel like Boston anymore if we can’t say: Hey, want to meet for dim sum in Chinatown, tacos in East Boston, pho in Fields Corner, Haitian food in Mattapan, Italian food in the North End, cocktails in South Boston, dinner in the South End?”

I am the darker brother

They send me to eat in the kitchen

When company comes,

But I laugh,

And eat well,

And grow strong.

In Black communities and economies, especially, foodways mark/map possibilities: for refusal and replenishment outside of the slavers’ delimitation, for cooperation and business development, and for cultural retention across the Maafa/Middle Passage, across the time and distance of the Great Migration and successive waves of African and Caribbean migration, too. In Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place, author J.T. Roane describes the maintenance of garden plots and un-enclosed, un-accounted-for waterways which underwrote gathering for enslaved peoples alongside metaphorical plotting for freedom, articulating the plot as a fugitive geography. These plots also kept them fed according to their own needs at feasts, away from meals provisioned by masters for mere sustenance (7). Roane extends this analogy and geography to feasts garnered through Black religious socialities like the International Peace Mission Movement, an unorthodox religious movement led by Father Divine but supported materially and spiritually by Black women’s collectivized creative and productive labor throughout the mid-Atlantic seeking to bring “everlasting life on earth, and an end to strife and want.” (8)

The feasts we prepare and provide for one another at parties and backyard gatherings, too, bring an abundance and collectivity that exceed food desertification and reproduction of labor. Seeds sown into braids to survive human trafficking trade found fallow ground, and these seeds now regrow crops from the continent to plate our tables and fill our bellies. Black-led farming and food initiatives, like the Freedom Farming Alliance and Sweet Freedom Farms in New York, the Detroit Black Community Food Sovereignty Network and Detroit People’s Food Co-Op in Michigan, and the Black Farmer Fund, marshall our resources towards abolition of carcerality and establishment of self-determination over our food intake, circulation, and economies.

Commensality, the process and experience of gathering over meals which we have some hand in, begins in growing what we consume; the largest cooperative movement in the United States centered farmers and retaining rights to what they cultivate. The Colored Farmers’ National Alliance and Cooperative Union, founded in the late 19th century in Houston, TX, had an estimated 1.2 million members by 1891 (9), and worked to support Black tenant farmers in achieving educational, political, and land ownership power; Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farms Corporation meant to build paths toward land ownership and cultivation through an agricultural nonprofit that would be collectively owned by its members (10). Hamer shared with Dorothy Height, president of the National Council of Negro Women and a funder for the Corporation, “food is used as a political weapon…But if you have a pig in your backyard, if you have some vegetables in your garden, you can feed yourself and your family, and nobody can push you around… even if we have no jobs, we can eat and we can look after our families.” (11)

Farms in Boston on community-owned or stewarded land (like DSNI’s Our Tierra Livri greenhouses, and Eastie Farm) restore our oft-severed connections to land. Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) Programs allow us as consumers to support these farms, and protect us from the vagaries of an increasingly unregulated national market for produce. Ujima staff member Georgios Costomiris, in response to news of the cyclosporiasis outbreak reaching Massachusetts, shared, “I have only been getting my produce (since July) from a local farm named: The Farm School, in Athol Massachusetts. This was made possible by the CSA program in partnership with the Dorchester Food Co-op. I highly recommend switching to hyper-local using a similar approach, which also supports small businesses and local farms.”

Food businesses hold a particular power to gather us: commensality bears itself in how restaurant-goers and grocery customers convene to break bread. Nubian Markets, a full service grocer on Washington Street just a few blocks away from Nubian Square, hosts conveners like the Boston Ujima Project, The Shaw-Roxbury branch of the Boston Public Library, and the Ihya’ Collaborative every month in their Gathering Room, making use of the well-lit, inviting space to welcome in members and seek joy while keeping ourselves fed. The market’s halal butchery is the only one in New England centering Black and African foodways. Co-founder Ismail Samad shared in an interview with us, in 2024 (12):

People come in to be connected to the vibe and the culture that we're trying to build; a customer can come here and meet a maker, for instance (and we’ve had some Meet the Maker events, some tastings). But community folks and organizations can also just use the space.

In our café, we’ll often highlight different products that are on our shelves in the food we serve; when you book the gathering space, you can order from the cafe, which is buying from local vendors on our shelves like Hapi African Gourmet who we serve chickpea sauce from (a Cameroonian dish made by Paulette) and manufactured in Boston. So we’re building up a circular economy where everybody’s connected to each other; there’s also less than 10 full service grocery stores that are Black-owned in this country [ed. note: this data is from 2018], so when you come here you’re supporting something special. To sustain something so special can be difficult: you have to be more than just a spot, we need to be a space that engenders dignity.

Samad and fellow Nubian Markets co-founder Yussuf Hassin spoke in multiple interviews at the restaurant’s founding about the importance of cross-pollinating local food growers’ and manufacturers’ products in the café to support Black, local food sovereignty.

Recipes, which guide the plot’s growth and gather materials from the grocer, in turn providing the material for our bellies, carry all of this. Cookbooks like The Historical Cookbook of the American Negro, published by the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), tells history through recipes celebrating Emancipation Day, Juneteenth, the return of the 54th Regiment of Black Civil War soldiers to Boston, and Phyllis Wheatley’s literary legend. A copy is currently archived with the Boston Public Library’s Special Collections under the Rare and Modern Books Department, kept with many other community cookbooks celebrating embedded culinary know-how and alimentary traditions. Photos reproduced in the gallery below share just a few outstanding recipes and remembrances. Black Bostonian organizer Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, founder of the Women’s Era Club of Boston and the National Federation of Colored Women, is remembered in a New England Suet Pudding, her favorite dessert; “A Corn-Pancakes And Sausage Breakfast” is dedicated to Black press heroes Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Elijah Lovejoy (“killed while defending the abolitionist paper, Alston (Illinois Observer)” (13)), Robert Abbott (founder of the influential Chicago Defender), and Boston’s own Monroe Trotter, editor of the Boston Guardian.

Writer Erica Fretwell historicizes cookbooks in this tradition in her chapter, “Black Power in the Kitchen,” in The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Food, arguing that, “reclamation of the culinary is thus a reclamation of the base body and historically debased black female body as a tastemaker.” Fretwell evaluates how Black-authored cookbooks in the 19th and 20th centuries move from individual expertise and professionalism in the kitchen toward folk foodways and collective/collected food epistemology — cookbooks as textual reflections on embodied knowledge of recipes and what tastes right to tradition, as in Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor’s Vibration Cooking, or Travels of a Geechee Girl (1970). Ujima Press’s recent release, Plenty, rests in this vein: interviews with Boston’s chefs, grocers, and home cooks place food systems in conversation with the relationships, restaurants and family/cultural history that situate each recipe in its pages. Gardener Michael Thomas remembers working as a line cook at a university library, and how his grandmother would cook him breakfasts that he now serves to his own grandkids; line cook Maria Garcia reflects on her mother cooking cakes for the community in Cape Verde, and how working at Fresh Food Generation helped her go back to school.

Tomorrow,

I’ll be at the table

When company comes.

Nobody’ll dare

Say to me,

“Eat in the kitchen,”

Then.

We remember, too, the voices and sounds that echo across our venues and eateries. Cafes and bars like District 7, on Warren Street in Roxbury, and Wally’s Cafe and Jazz Club, provide venues for musicians rehearsed and versed in (dis)continuity to play back for us jazz standards, neo-soul classics, and new syntheses of their own recordings across genre lines that blend swinging kicks and syncopated horns with breakbeats or synths. At a pre-opening event hosted by Jazz Urbane Cafe, theorist and poet Fred Moten praised spaces like Jazz Urbane where Black study can meet Black rhythm can meet Black people (14). Restaurants also connect us, across communities, around concepts to (re)write our own narrative. Pearl&Law Hospitality’s latest restaurant, Ama at the Atlas, brings motherhood to the foreground in reproducing recipes passed down by matriarchs. Co-founder and Ujima Restaurant Fellow Biplaw Rai shared that the restaurant was conceived while his wife and co-founder Nyacko Perry was pregnant with their son, Justice. According to Rai: “My mother looked out for her wellness and her physical well-being by cooking food for her, and there was a Nepali chicken soup for new mothers that she would make for her. This made a very big impression on Nyacko's life, and on our son Justice; his mother ate the soup while she was pregnant with him, and now he loves that soup; he still eats that soup and rice almost every day.” This menu item, alongside many more, remembers and finds our mothers here and in the afterlife.

Food justice, and food sovereignty, are inherently tied to economic access and self-determination. The oft-lauded lunch counter boycotts at restaurants like Woolworth’s to protest illegal separate-but-equal segregation quickly fed a national strategy of boycotting restaurants, grocers, and food manufacturers who would not employ Black workers. Called Operation Breadbasket (15), this strategy spread through trades and industries to ensure that our dollars were not being spent or invested where we could not reap benefits. Buy Black campaigns soon followed (for better and worse(16)), alongside campaigns for Black collective ownership throughout supply chains (like the aforementioned Freedom Farms Corporation, or the Detroit Black Community Food Sovereignty Network) —especially in food industries. This collective and/or accountable ownership is the crux: our foodways need not rely on businesses who do not serve us, no matter the face in a high place telling us otherwise. Simultaneously, our support for restaurants fostering the conditions for our commensal joy is critical. Devra First suggests that the city of Boston appoint a czar, akin to former positions in food and nightlife, tasked with ensuring the resilience and flourishing of this critical sector of the economy and of cultural life. Biplaw Rai, Ujima’s inaugural Restaurant Fellow, provides technical assistance and support for a litany of businesses, including up-close-and-personal guidance for Jazz Urbane Café, whose much-awaited debut approaches this fall. He also hosts office hours every other Monday, handling questions big and small from restaurant owners and workers, and is launching a restaurant coalition to build power across Black- and brown-owned small businesses, and to share costs and knowledge. Rai reminds us of the importance of fair prices and fair wages for restaurant work, and community support for food businesses in his contribution to Plenty:

I’ll put it back to the community: we want restaurants and businesses that are affordable, while also living up to our standards. But we also need to be invested in supporting these businesses…It’s working-class people, Black and brown immigrants, under the hood that make everything you eat. Our staff puts in a considerable amount of labor hours to do what they need to do. Be appreciative of it, right? In the meantime: tip your servers well. (17)

Besides, They’ll see how beautiful I am

And be ashamed—

I, too, am America.

— Langston Hughes

Endnotes:

John Berger, Ways of Seeing (Penguin, 1972), https://monoskop.org/images/9/9e/Berger_John_Ways_of_Seeing.pdf.
Jonathan Highfield, “15. Postcolonial Foodways in Contemporary African Literature,” in The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Food (Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Rebecca L Spang, The Invention of the Restaurant (2000; Harvard University Press, 2020).
Jean-Robert Pitte, Gastronomie française, histoire et géographie d’une passion (Paris: Fayard, 1991), pp. 161–169
Jason Daley, “Recently Uncovered Thermopolium Reminds Us That Romans Loved Fast Food as Much as We Do,” in Smithsonian (Smithsonian.com, 2019), https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/romans-loved-fast-food-much-we-do-180971845/.
Katie Rawson and Elliott Shore, Dining Out: A Global History of Restaurants (Reaktion Books, 2019).
J.T. Roane, Dark Agoras (NYU Press, 2023), ch. 2 and 3.
Ibid, pp 164-167.
Jessica Gordon Nembhard, Collective Courage : A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014), p. 55
Ibid, p. 178.
Dorothy I. Height, Open Wide the Freedom Gates : A Memoir (Public Affairs, 2005), pg. 188. Quoted in Jessica Gordon Nembhard, Collective Courage : A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014), p. 180.
Alula Hunsen, “Sustenance Sovereignty Edition: Food Sovereignty and Honoring Black Legacies in Nubian Square with Nubian Markets,” Ujima Press WIRE, August 21, 2025, https://www.ujimaboston.com/post/sustenance-sovereignty-edition-food-sovereignty-and-honoring-black-legacies-in-nubian-square-with-n.
Sue Bailey Thurman et al., The Historical Cookbook of The American Negro (1950; Beacon Press, 2000).
Fred Moten, Surfacing, Jazz Urbane Cafe, March 30th, 2026.
Martin L. Deppe, Operation Breadbasket (University of Georgia Press, 2017).
Jared A. Ball, The Myth and Propaganda of Black Buying Power (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).
Boston Ujima Project, Plenty, ed. Alula Hunsen (Ujima Press, 2025), https://www.ujimaboston.com/_files/ugd/e8c487_8f8b35fab4e94bce9a9c3e5344b94c4d.pdf.

Alula Hunsen (he/him) is an essayist, editor, and publisher at the Boston Ujima Project. His specific intrigues lie in Black cultural production and economies that support self-determination; his work has appeared in Technology Review, Boston Art Review, Hobart Pulp, Nonprofit Quarterly, The Bay State Banner, on his website, and in Ujima’s various publications. He has also edited and published small book projects with Ujima Press, including a cookbook project, a reader series, a poetry chapbook, and an annual post-capitalist lifestyle magazine. He holds a Master’s in City Planning and a Bachelor’s in Mathematical Economics from MIT.