On the menu at the cafe inside Nubian Markets, an icon shaped like Africa indicates the origins of each dish. Beside injera with ginger beef and red lentils, the subregion of East Africa is colored in. Chickpea peanut stew’s roots are shown in Central Africa. With peri peri chicken, Southern Africa looks like it’s been dipped in a pot of ink. For about half of the dishes, the highlighted area is a landmass off the west coast, as if Madagascar had a mirror image.
This is an island of the imagination, a home for the dispossessed, a place to hold in the mind with pride — as real as any that one might set foot on. “What is that weird blob of a thing? It is the diaspora,” says market cofounder and chef Ismail Samad. “This fictitious island off the main continent, it covers people from the Caribbean, Brazil, African Americans …” Nubian Markets is a celebration of that diaspora, through food, flavors, and ingredients. And it is an exploration of deeper questions: “What it means to be ripped away from the continent, what it means to try to preserve culture after being ripped away from the motherland,” Samad says.
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Samad and cofounder/general manager Yusuf Yassin opened the cafe/grocery store/halal butcher shop last month at the Roxbury mixed-use development Bartlett Place. Formerly an MBTA bus yard, this is fast becoming a place to eat, live, gather, work out, send children to an African-centered Montessori school, and shop for healthy, culturally inclusive groceries. Yassin, who is from Eritrea, also runs Ascia Kitchen + Cafe, located inside the nearby Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center; the two met at the mosque. Samad splits his time between Boston and Cleveland, the hometown he returned to during the pandemic to be near his family. There, with sister Alima, he founded an organization called Loiter, designed to reimagine East Cleveland and other Black communities through retail, agriculture, sports, culture, and more. He has also been involved in projects including Vermont farm-to-table restaurant The Gleanery, local nonprofit grocery Daily Table, food incubator CommonWealth Kitchen, and Boston Area Gleaners, focused on sustainability and food justice.
The cafe is at the center of Nubian Markets, setting the tone for the space. Customers queue in the morning for pastries and espresso drinks, in the afternoon and evening for sandwiches, salads, and bowls, then sit at long wood tables to work and socialize. Out front on a recent visit, a group of men has gathered to enjoy the outdoor seating and local gossip over coffee. It’s a far cry from an abandoned bus yard.
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Showcased behind glass in tantalizing stacks are traditional, French-inspired pastries such as chocolate croissants and pain aux raisins. Beside them are buns filled with the likes of plantains with cardamom caramel or collard greens with cheddar, ingredients drawn from the islands, from soul food. Lattes might be warmed with turmeric or the chai-like Nuba spice blend. “Can we get our flavors, something that normally pops up in our community, because this is predominantly an African-American neighborhood,” Samad says. The buns look and taste a whole lot like croissants — buttery, flaky, super-delicious. Calling them buns is a choice. “We’re just creative disruptors,” says Samad. “Do we want to even call them croissants? We’re not going to be freaking precise. We don’t care that things are ‘perfect,’ that Eurocentric ‘it must be this or you can’t call it this.’ We called them buns on purpose.”
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The disruption continues throughout the menu: for instance, on the burger, served with cheese, Berbere spiced mayonnaise, and the bacon-tomato jam that raises eyebrows with customers here for halal food. It’s beef bacon — “just to get people to shed biases and break outside the box,” Samad says. “Whenever we can be provocative with our food, it creates a better experience.”
All of the sandwiches are served on house-made pita, golden with turmeric and flavored with caraway, honey, and black pepper, a bit of whole wheat flour in the mix for heft. The peri peri chicken is spicy and tangy from the sauce and the jalapeno-lime collards, with burnt orange salsa for brightness and complexity. A vegetarian option, the black-eyed pea fritter sandwich with mustard onions and ginger yam puree, is a falafel-esque creation that pays tribute to African-American and West African culinary traditions through its ingredients.
A crispy chicken and Hoppin’ John plate does something similar, featuring rice, roasted sweet potatoes, black-eyed peas, and fried chicken drizzled in hot honey. It’s one of the cafe’s top sellers. Injera, the tangy flatbread, comes with stewed tomatoes in Berbere spices, lentils, greens, and charred vegetables for a vegan version; meat eaters can add ginger beef. The West African grain fonio serves as a base for fried okra, roasted veggies, ginger yam, collards, and yam vinaigrette (again, add jerk salmon if you like). The menu intentionally keeps some language unspecific — root vegetables, greens, pickles, and so on — so the kitchen can make use of what’s on hand, reducing food waste.
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Fonio can also be found on the shelves of the grocery store, alongside couscous, bulgur, cornmeal, and jasmine rice. Locally grown beans, gluten-free frozen waffles, labneh, tofu, Haitian djon djon, the black mushrooms that go in rice: It’s all here. The shelves feature more than 30 Black-owned brands, marked with signs. The halal butcher shop sells ground beef and fancy steaks, goat heads and lamb chops. The market has a diverse population to serve, from longtime neighborhood residents to newer arrivals, and gentrification is a real concern. So it has to be affordable, accessible, and appealing. Produce is showcased right at the front of the grocery store: Access to fruits and vegetables is a health equity matter in Nubian Square, where residents have an average life expectancy 23 years shorter than those in Back Bay, according to a recent Boston Public Health Commission report.
“We are still trying to establish what it means to be catering to a changing community and a habitually excluded community in the halal scene,” Samad says. It’s a process: “What does the community want? What’s resonating? What’s dope? What [stinks]? And then changing it. That’s it.”
2565 Washington St., Roxbury, 617-608-4940, www.nubianmarkets.com
Devra First can be reached at devra.first@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @devrafirst.