🥣 Stirred From the Bottom

Hinga watches the characters bumbling across his screen. The volume is perfect, providing a blend of background noise and a briefing of the day’s sports news. He isn’t sure if the high he’s riding is responsible for his calm. Maybe it’s just plain nostalgic bliss. Either way, he hopes Stevie chats up the local folk at the farmer’s market long enough for him to ascend this cliff and come back down.

The hum of activity from his restaurant had been the soothing source of the sounds he hears from the TV now. Pandemics and people are asynchronous, so he’s recently made friends with the commentators and on-screen personalities. In this state, he’d happily watch paint dry.

His restaurant, Hinges, allowed him to merge food with his yearning for Africa, a place now spatially distant but only a waft of chapati away. Hinga brought authentic East African cuisine to downtown Newark, a crowning achievement. Noting an additional gap in the “food that reminds you of mum’s” market, the savvy entrepreneur expanded his operations to importing spices, flours, and other food items with long shelf lives to various North American regions. This way, his customers could recreate the gustatory pleasures they enjoyed at Hinges in their kitchens. He was democratizing flavorful food, and he couldn’t have been happier.

The clientele streamed in faster than he could tenderize the pilau meat. Americans, he noticed, ached for character in their food. That, good conversation, and the chance to bond with people with shared tastes. Heck, even those without. Hinges offered a snapshot of the archetypal melting pot that is the U.S. The White grandma, mouth filled with dentures, whose favorite menu item was nyama choma, grilled meat she decimated with defiant agility. The boisterous Indian investment banker who first dropped by to see what all the fuss was about and left with a newfound appreciation for spicy chicken tikka. The group of teenagers who seemed content to while their summers away melting into Hinga’s snug chairs while sharing a tilapia and some cigarettes. The after-hours crowd that visited when Hinges put on her little black dress to accommodate those who prefer it when kids aren’t around.

All the culinary honors Hinga received were meaningless against the pure, unrelenting joy he felt for finding his purpose. He realized this was a corny and almost distasteful remark to make during acceptance speeches delivered to other local restaurateurs more experienced and arguably more deserving than him. They’d feign smiles to denote their acceptance of his dominance in a field never carved out for him. Hinga found it easy to ignore the passive, and active, aggression. He had worked hard to disguise how much work had gone into building his dream from nothing.