In the kitchen of one of Nigeria’s most successful cross-continental chefs, Tolu Eros, celebrated high-profile personalities from West Africa gather. Seated around a dinner table, they steer their conversation towards the age-old debate of whose country’s jollof rice — Nigeria, Ghana or Senegal — is the best. They include Black Panther star Michael B. Jordan, ESPN analyst and WNBA player Chiney Ogwumike, former NBA player Pops Mensah Bonsu, and producer Sarz, amongst others. And their conversation plays as part of a short film made for the Chase Sapphire Reserve campaign, directed by Oscar-nominated cinematographer Bradford Young, called A Taste of West Africa.
Known professionally as Chef Eros, and fondly as the “Billionaire Chef,” Eros, in the short film, begins to introduce what’s on the menu for the day. He shies away from choosing or defending a side but instead, offers the guests his ultimate response to the jollof wars. It is an ambitious recipe that bridges cultural gaps and combines the different things that make the jollof rice from each country unique, into a dish he calls the “unity jollof.”
“It became underwhelming when we would make jollof rice and people would be like, ‘Whose jollof rice is this?’ So I created the unity jollof rice to bring some sort of West African ‘world peace,’” Eros tells OkayAfrica about the recipe which he developed in 2021. As we talk over Zoom from his restaurant in Los Angeles, he holds an unshifting bright smile, leaving his words with a peppy shine.
“I combined the influences of the three major jollof rice – the Ghanaian with their perfumed rice, the Nigerian with the smoke and spice, and the Senegalese with the use of vegetables.”
How it all started
The smashing success of the recipe earned him a place on The Infatuation’s Best New Dishes in L.A list of 2022, and now a central part in A Taste of West Africa. Eros was born in Nigeria and grew up between the cacophony of Lagos and the culture-steeped city of Benin. As a child, Eros wasn’t particularly interested in food as a practice but remembers his mother and grandmother both being passionate about food, which showed on their family dining table that was rarely without food.
While studying International Business Management at the University of Wolverhampton, in England, Eros began to learn how to cook to reconnect with home. “My mother and my grandmother would call me and I would let them teach me how to make different things that I loved,” he says. “I would argue with them about what [ingredient] to put first or last. So what I learned about that was that recipes are simply a guide. Every single person has their practices and preferences, and your approach to it makes a lot of difference.”
In 2018, after completing his studies, he returned to Lagos to run the family restaurant alongside his mother. “I went home on holiday in December [that year] to write the business plan,” he says. “And I got so passionate about it and decided to stay back and execute it.” It was in this restaurant that he learned how the industry works, picking up lessons and real-life experiences that helped him when he decided to expand to Los Angeles. “I decided that it was time for me to push the culture forward, using food as a medium.” After getting a new visa, he moved to L.A., opened up a private dining room, and started bringing people from different walks of life together.
Eros began by hosting private dinners to pay for his trips, and expanded into a restaurant following the success of these dinners, which he still runs, owing to his love of seeing people dine together at the same table. It was an experience he didn’t get while growing up, because when he got old enough to eat with his siblings at the dinner table, they had all left home.
What the future holds
For Eros, the future of his work involves developing an easy-to-use recipe for making his “unity jollof” rice, and also setting up chains of Ile Eros restaurants across the United States to popularize West African cuisine. “I think that jollof rice can become the most popular rice in the world,” he says.
Eros plans to develop more experimental culinary experiences, combining music and theater with food. “We're working on a project [called] The Taste of Music, which is really transposing music into food and also telling the story of how music influences food and vice versa, and how food influences the music and the musicians.”
Watch A Taste of West Africa below:
- People Express Their Love For West Africa's Most Famous Dish on #WorldJollofRiceDay ›
- The Ten Best Jollof Spots in Nigeria ›
- Jollof Wars: Ghana vs Nigeria, The Official Taste Test ›