All African Cuisines
In Santa Ana, a gas station offers a rare opportunity to order – but not sit down with – West African cuisine
Even though Orange County’s culinary diversity covers much of the globe – and offers plenty of access to various Asian cuisines – African restaurants are far too rare everywhere here: Anaheim’s excellent Beteseb and so-so Abyssinia are OC’s lone Ethiopian outposts, while Lynda’s African Delicacies serves Nigerian food from a shared ghost kitchen in Irvine, with extremely limited seating. Yet compared with those places, the West African/Nigerian business All African Cuisines isn’t exactly a restaurant; operating from a largely unstaffed counter inside an Extra Mile gas station in Santa Ana, it’s so anonymous that we only discovered it by driving by a sign on the Tustin/Santa Ana border, then confirmed on a map that it existed.
When we arrived at the counter, we found a several-page menu split into two similar-looking but different halves, and a button with a handwritten note to press it for service. There were no tables or chairs to sit down and eat a meal; once we pressed the button, someone came out to take our order and – after taking it – told us that the meal would take 45 minutes to prepare from scratch. He then upped that estimate to an hour, and when we returned on time, handed off our meal in take-out containers after 90 minutes. Based on our experience, we’d recommend ordering through Grubhub or by phone, and even then, planning for an extended wait.
Choosing from the menu isn’t easy. We were immediately focused on a page of “main course meals,” including six $25 plates that differ primarily in starch – jollof rice, fried rice, shrimp coconut rice, white rice and tomato stew, white rice and ofada (bean and pepper) stew, or Indomie noodles – while including sliced sweet plantains and your choice of two or three proteins. Another main course page expands that list with additional starches (fufu dough balls paired with your choice of vegetables, nuts, or soups), and a third page lists the proteins: beef, chicken, goat, lamb, cow skin, cow tripe, or oxtail, all cooked in All African Cuisines’ “signature sauce.” We were given the choice of regular or spicy sauces, and chose spicy, which turned out to be a really nice red pepper oil with a mild but noticeable level of heat.
The rub with these plates is that the $25 primarily goes towards gigantic starch portions. Our two styrofoam containers were filled with three-person quantities of lightly spiced garlic-tomato-chili jollof and vegetable-curry fried rices, each quite nice and topped with tender, freshly cooked sweet plantains, but literally only three small pieces of the proteins we selected: beef, tripe, and lamb in one, goat, lamb, and cow skin in the other. While we enjoyed the flavors, the chewy meat portions were anemic, and we wouldn’t order such starch-heavy dishes again.
Our advice would be to focus on the other menu options – found on the appetizers, snacks, and toppings pages – which include entree-sized portions of beef suya or chicken suya ($20), peppered chicken or goat ($20), and beef or chicken sharwarma ($20), plus stockfish cod ($6), meat pies ($25), deep fried puff puffs ($10), chin chin crackers ($5), akara beans ($10), moi moi ($15), plantains ($5), and sweet beans ($10). Another page has peppersoups, which range from $15 (tilapia) to $30 (catfish) with goat, chicken, and oxtail going for $20; a fried or grilled tilapia can be had for $15.
We tried and loved the beef suya, a small but potent portion of medium well-grilled sliced beef fully covered in a yaji spice powder. Powerfully spicy and earthy with hints of peanut and ginger, the suya was strong enough to thrill our resident spice fiend and disarm a budding spice fan, arriving with sliced, uncooked white onions that provide textural and temperature contrasts to the meat.
Other appetizer-ish items were pretty good. Meat pies – promised as 5 for $25 but actually delivered as 7 – were served hot from the oven but fairly plain inside, with small bits of ground meat filling paired with basic pea-and-carrot-ish veggies. The chin chin crackers came out of a fridge buttery and crunchy, like thicker and slightly sweeter versions of the crispy noodles once served as complimentary snacks at Chinese-American restaurants. They’re a nice snack to enjoy while waiting for the rest of the food to be ready.
All African Cuisines also offers a collection of non-alcoholic malt drinks for $3 each – Vita Malt Classic and Ginger, Malta Guinness, and Amstel Malta – as well as Schweppes and Vitamilk soy drinks in bottles. Visitors also have access to the Extra Mile convenience store selection of drinks, ranging from countless sodas and energy drinks to Icees and bottled waters. In retrospect, we wish we’d grabbed a few of the malts to try instead of Icees, but it was a hot day and the frozen drinks were wonderfully large and cheap.
Given the likelihood of an hour-plus wait for food, it’s reasonable to ask whether ordering from All African Cuisines is worth the long wait and inconvenience of needing to find another place to eat your meal from styrofoam and foil containers. Our answer: That depends on you. Having driven up to LA for Nigerian food at Veronica’s Kitchen, and enjoyed many meals at Beteseb over the years despite its sparing dining room and fairly long waits, we’re accustomed to putting up with some issues to have African food here. From that perspective, we’re really glad we found All African Cuisines, and would be quite willing to try more of the menu items (and malt drinks), as almost everything we ordered was tasty – better than anything we’ve tried at Veronica’s Kitchen. But if the atypically long wait times, lack of seating, or pricing don’t sound like a good fit for your needs, this business’s continued local anonymity won’t come as a surprise; with a faster kitchen and an actual dining room, it might have a better shot of drawing local crowds.
Stats
Price: $$
Service: Counter/No Tables
Open Since: November 2023
Address
325 N. Tustin Ave.
Santa Ana, CA 92705
949.556.6748
Instagram: @all_african_stores