Rab’s World

New Nigerian Restaurant in New York City. A rare sight indeed!

FESTAC GRILL - 263 Hendrix Street,
East New York, Brooklyn - NY 11207-2623
+1-718-627-5151

Photo by Flickr User -EOS Chaos

While the Senegalese have boldly opened semi-upscale restaurants in Harlem and Clinton Hill, complete with annotated menus, and the Ghanaians have established numerous small groceries and cafés in the Bronx and Queens, and modest Ivory Coast, Malian, Guinean, Liberian, and Sierra Leonean eateries have come and gone in various boroughs, the Nigerians have remained elusive. Sure, there’s Skipper’s in Staten Island, and one or two other joints in obscure corners of Brooklyn and the Bronx, but a full-menu, user-friendly Nigerian restaurant still eludes us, even though Nigerians constitute the second-largest group of West African immigrants in New York, just behind Ghanaians, according to the 2000 census.

That’s why I was so excited when a bicycle-riding friend called to say he’d passed a new African restaurant—recognizable by the tribal mask on the awning—in an industrial part of East New York, Brooklyn, only a block south of Atlantic Avenue. I was soon there with a couple of pals, including Lenny, who’d just returned from a six-month internship at a newspaper in Lagos. We found ourselves at a place called Festac, named after a Lagos zone famous for a 1977 arts festival.

The Village Voice has a sumptuous review of the West African eatery here!

Photo by Flickr User - Rika TYunarTi