"Chef-owner Bintou N’Daw launched her Line Street spot in a bid to bring the underrepresented cuisine of West Africa to Charleston. The Senegal-born breakout culinary star spent her formative years in France, before working in New York City restaurants, and during the pandemic she relocated to the South, opening here in July 2023. “I wanted to make authentic dishes,” she says, “while tracing the culinary roots of the Gullah Geechee communities back to West Africa.” N’Daw works with local ingredients, such as black-eyed peas, while importing key ingredients (palm oil, the West African grain fonio) to achieve Senegalese-inspired flavors, and she strives to keep prices accessible so the city’s diverse communities can discover her food. (Avoiding the sky-high liquor license fees in favor of a BYOB program certainly helps.) This, along with a a placement on Bon Appétit‘s 2024 list of the 20 best new restaurants in the USA, keeps the place packed."
