New customers flock to metro Atlanta’s West African restaurants
West African restaurant Le Nouveau Maquis has enjoyed a healthy customer base at its Stone Mountain location for years. During busy hours, diners regularly found the 30-seat dining room packed.
But when the restaurant began offering buffet service late last year — allowing customers to eat heaps of jollof rice, grilled meats called suya and the grilled-fish and fermented-cassava dish known as attieke — an even larger turnout made the mother-daughter owners decide it was time to expand.
“For us, it’s more of an evolution,” said Christie Fabiola Agbale, who manages Le Nouveau Maquis with her mother, Fanta Agbodjan. They opened their second location in February in the Northlake Festival Shopping Center in Tucker.
“Going from where people are barely able to sit … now we’re focusing more on being a full-service restaurant,” she said.
Social media has been a large part of their growth strategy; they don’t offer their buffet service on a regular schedule. Customers must follow along on Instagram or TikTok to know when the $55 all-you-can-eat special occurs at their Tucker location.
Le Nouveau Maquis is one of several West African restaurants filling seats across metro Atlanta. Restaurants that were once sustained most by West Africans in search of comfort food from home are seeing interest from customers who didn’t grow up eating West African staples, but are enchanted by the culture, from egusi and fufu, to Afrobeats and the African Cup of Nations.
Nancy Davordzi owns three Jamaican restaurants in the metro area, all called Fireside Jamaican. She’s originally from Ghana, but built her restaurant business cooking the cuisine of her husband’s home country.
She says Atlantans are more familiar with Jamaican food, but has seen the growth in interest for West African dishes. When she recently opened her fourth establishment in the West End, called Tribe and Spice, she designed a Ghanaian-Jamaican fusion menu. It builds on the success of her existing restaurants and adds the Ghanaian dishes she grew up eating, allowing patrons to order jollof rice and jerk chicken all on one plate.
Perhaps no local West African restaurant has seen more expansion than Ike’s Cafe and Grill. The flagship restaurant opened in 2013. In the early days, founders Mike and Kwab Kwarteng said that 90% of the Norcross restaurant’s customers were West African, but their customer base has expanded greatly, and now includes many people from other cultures. Once they learned some diners were driving 30-45 minutes to get to the Norcross location, they knew they needed to expand to other parts of the city.
Growth is well underway now — in Marietta, a 3,200-square-foot dine-in restaurant opened in early May. In 2025, they also opened a takeout-only kitchen in the West End. A fourth location will open this fall on Edgewood Avenue in Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward neighborhood.
“It’s a testament to consistency and the culture expanding across more horizons. Imagine where everybody started from and then now where everybody’s expanding to any of these other areas that aren’t predominantly African,” said founder Mike Kwarteng, whose parents started the business that he helps manage with his siblings.
Some customers have asked the owners to begin offering fusion dishes, such as a West African version of a rice bowl, but for now, their plan is to continue serving their family recipes — grilled red snapper, peanut soup, and grilled lamb, chicken, and beef suya are customer favorites.
Expansion of so many West African restaurants means one thing: “Everybody’s happy for each other, and we’re supportive of everybody,” says founder Kwab Kwarteng. “A win for any African restaurant is a win for the culture.”
