For NYC-Born, Senegal-Raised Serigne Mbaye, New Orleans is Home

Once the award-winning chef experienced New Orleans, he knew it was where he fit best

Who gets to decide where home is, or what it means? Is it a birth certificate? An address you’ve used most of your life?

For Serigne Mbaye, chef and owner of Dakar NOLA, it’s neither of those things.

The award-winning chef and I talked about how home doesn’t have to be where you were born or where you grew up; sometimes you just kind of get somewhere and you think, ‘this is where I’m supposed to be.’

“New Orleans is that for me,” he said. “It’s like that for many people.”

Born in Harlem, Mbaye spent his early childhood and, later, his high school years in New York City. But for the chunk of life in between, he grew up largely in Senegal where he went to boarding school. (Mbaye’s parents are both originally from the West African nation.)

On a trip back to Senegal as an adult, after a few years spent jumping from one U.S. city to the next, the young chef met people from Louisiana who suggested he check out New Orleans. So landing in what’s now his home base was, as he put it, an accident.

“[The travelers] told me that, hey, I should look into wanting to work in New Orleans,” Mbaye remembers. “And I’d never been to the South, so I took a chance on myself […] ‘let me go to the South, see what they got to offer.’”

The chef intended on only working at Commander’s Palace, the restaurant he first settled into, for three months, but wound up staying for closer to three years.

“Three months went by, still there. Year went by, still there. And then, you know, I worked with the company for three years,” he said, adding, “Throughout the process, I realized this is the city that I belong.”

Now, Dakar has been named one of the country’s best restaurants, and has been honored, celebrated, and spotlighted by many for its approach to Senegalese cuisine. 

We talked about how finding that place — the one that’s your soul’s home but maybe not a place you’d ever been before — is so magical. 

“Yeah it is,” he agreed; I could hear him marinating on the idea through the phone. “It is very magical. Very. It extremely speaks to you.”

We went on about how much of what makes someplace feel like home has a lot to do with the way it feeds different parts of you.

He called the Southern port city one of America’s greatest, while acknowledging the one he was born into, NYC, has a lot of its own strengths.

“It’s a special place,” he said of New York. “I went to high school in New York. I know the city really well.”

And while Mbaye loves to visit NYC, it’s a lot — “too expensive, too chaos, too much” — for him to live in. For the chef, it’s the South that feels most like home.

“I think New York speaks to my spirit, you know, as far as, like, my youth,” he added. “But the South speaks to my soul.”

When I asked him to tell me how, the chef simply said, “in every way.”

Mbaye says it’s the music, food, and hospitality, the people, culture, and climate that keeps him tethered to New Orleans.

And “oh my gosh, how’d I forget this one? The access to fresh seafood! The bounty of the gulf.”